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

As Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer writes in the introduction to this massive 500+ page volume, The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks is intended to provide "a critical survey of what is going on and what has already been done in international picturebook research" (5). This collection is divided into five broad and overlapping sections: Concepts and topics; Picturebook categories; Interfaces; Domains; and Adaptations and remediation. The volume includes forty-eight essays on various facets of picturebooks from a range of contributors, including children's literature scholars, psychologists, art historians, linguists, educationalists, film scholars, and media scholars from Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia.

In recent years, Kümmerling-Meibauer has established herself as a prolific editor, or coeditor, of collections of essays dealing with children's literature including Maps and Mapping in Children's Literature (2017), coedited with Nina Goga; Canon Constitution and Canon Change in Children's Literature (2017), coedited with Anja Müller; Children's Literature and the Avant-Garde (2015), coedited with Elina Druker; Learning from Picturebooks (2015), coedited with Jörg Meibauer, et al.; Picturebooks: Representations and Narration (2014); Manga's Cultural Crossroads (2013), coedited with Jaqueline Berndt; New Directions in Picturebook Research (2012), coedited with Teresa Colomer and Cecilia Silva-Díaz; and Beyond Pippi Longstocking (2011), coedited with Astrid Surmatz. Some of the topics and issues addressed in these previous collections of essays are revisited in The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks.

As noted in the introduction, a picturebook may appear to be a simple text on the initial reading but with reflection can be quite complex. Even the definition and spelling of the term are open to debate. Kümmerling-Meibauer notes in the introduction that while English dictionaries recommend the spelling is two words, "picture book," scholars in the field use the term "picturebook" to show the inseparable unit of pictures and text. Nevertheless, a number of scholars separate the term into two words, "picture book," including Perry Nodelman in the groundbreaking study Words about Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children's Picture Books (1988), Ellen Handler Spitz in Inside Picture Books (1999), Jane Doonan's entry of "The Modern Picture Book" in Peter Hunt's International Companion Encyclopedia of Children's Literature (1996), Maria Nikolajeva's entry on "Picture Books" and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer's own entry on "Illustration" in Jack Zipes's The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children's Literature (2006), as well as William Moebius's entry on "Picture Books" in Philip Nel and Lissa Paul's Keywords for Children's Literature (2011). Kümmerling-Meibauer suggests the common agreement of the characteristics of a picturebook are the medium (a book) and the content (pictures) (3). But from there, this concept becomes a bit more ambiguous, since not all picturebooks include a text—Emma Bosch provides the entry on "Wordless picturebooks"—and there is a generally accepted distinction between illustrated books and picturebooks—Elizabeth Bird and Junko Yokota provide the entry on "Picturebooks and illustrated books." Bird and Yokota consider an illustrated book to be any book that contains at least one illustration, and if one were to remove the illustrations, the writing would stand alone. Given the importance of the illustrations to Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), or E. B. White's Charlotte's Web (1952), all of which are illustrated books, this doesn't always seem to be true.

Helma van Lierop-Debrauwer argues in her entry on "Hybridity in picturebooks" that "[s]cholars involved in picturebook research unanimously agree that picturebooks are a unique art form" and that the result of the "synergy between verbal and visual language makes picturebooks a hybrid [form]" (81). While picturebooks may be a unique art form, the most compelling section of this collection is "Interfaces," where contributors examine picturebooks in light of other closely aligned forms, such as Johanna Drucker's entry on "Artists' books and picturebooks," Lara Saguisag's "Picturebooks and comics," and Jane Wattenberg's "Picturebooks...