The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks ed. by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer (review)

The publication of The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks, a collection of nearly fifty articles in a volume of over five hundred pages, is a clear indication that picturebook research has considerably improved over the last years and the picturebook has gained a prominent place within children's literature. The Companion is a panorama of international picturebook research and analysis, and it includes chapters that investigate a huge variety of issues concerning current research. As the collection addresses nearly every issue concerning picturebooks, it becomes the ultimate guide to this genre.

Articles focus on key issues of picturebook research, such as paratexts (Sylvia Pantaleo) and emotions (Maria Nikolajeva), as well as a broad spectrum of different genres, like crossover picturebooks (Sandra Beckett) and informational picturebooks (Nikola von Merveldt), addressed to audiences ranging from babies (Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Jörg Meibauer) to adults (Åse Marie Ommundsen). The collection also investigates the impact of the arts, like cinema (Tobias Kurwinkel) or photography (Jane Wattenberg), on picturebooks, and examines how different theoretical frameworks, such as literary studies (Evelyn Arizpe et al.), influence current picturebook research. In addition, topics regarding the translation of picturebooks (Riitta Oittinem) and adaptation of picturebooks into other media (Marlen Zöhrer) are presented.

The Companion is divided into five parts: fourteen chapters are devoted to fundamental concepts and topics of picturebook research, which range from canonicity to hybridity and from metafiction to the presentation of gender. The second part offers twelve chapters on picturebook categories, extending from ABC books to multilingual and digital picturebooks. Five chapters in section 3 cover themes of interfaces with related forms, like artists' books and photobooks. In the fourth part, an array of thirteen studies scrutinizes the domains that enrich picturebook research, such as developmental psychology, multimodality, and narratology. The fifth and last part includes four chapters on adaptation, remediation, and the merchandising industry.

The collection combines topics already well researched, such as the picture-text relationship (Nathalie op de Beck) and picturebooks as adaptations of fairy tales (Vanessa Joosen), with comparatively new ones, such as seriality in picturebooks (Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer) and materiality (Ilgim Veryeri Alaca). Some topics can also be found in Picturebooks: Representation and Narration (2014), another very interesting book edited by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer. However, regardless of the novelty of the theme, all the chapters make a considerable contribution to the flourishing research of picturebooks that nowadays is proving to be among the most dynamic fields of literary criticism.

Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, a professor in the German Department at the University of Tübingen, Germany, who is an expert on picture-books and an international editor of research volumes on picturebook theory, managed to bring together a wide range of contributors from different backgrounds, such as children's literature scholars, artists, linguists, and media researchers. Besides the experience of the editor, the high quality of the Companion was guaranteed by authors who have been making important contributions to the field; see, for example, "Picturebook and Ideology" by John Stephens, "Research in Picturebooks: The Wider Path" by William Moebius, or "Picturebooks and Media Studies" by Margaret Mackey.

In more than five hundred pages, the Companion manages to accomplish the ambitious task of covering a vast proportion of the more interesting topics concerning picture-books. Even topics that seem to be lacking, since there is no separate chapter on them, are in fact not entirely absent. For example, historical reviews of specific genres, such as ABC books and pop-ups, are also made within the relevant chapters, although the collection on the whole deals exclusively with contemporary picture-books and not with the history of the genre.

Since a deeper understanding of the picture-book and how it works requires the study of a broad corpus of books published not only in one country but worldwide, the Companion gives an overview of the European and non-European picturebook market. While some chapters focus on examples...