Picturebooks: Beyond the Borders of Art, Narrative and

Culture ed. by Evelyn Arizpe, Maureen Farrell, and Julie

McAdam, and: Reading Visual Narratives: Image Analysis of
Children’s Picture Books by Clare Painter, J. R. Martin
and Len Unsworth (review)

Karen Coats

Children's Literature, Volume 42, 2014, pp. 305-315 (Review)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/chl.2014.0020

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/546535

Access provided by University of Glasgow Library (2 Aug 2017 15:11 GMT)

Reviews 305

Picturebooks: Beyond the Borders of Art, Narrative and Culture, edited by

Evelyn Arizpe, Maureen Farrell, and Julie McAdam. London: Rout-
ledge, 2013.
Reading Visual Narratives: Image Analysis of Children’s Picture Books, by
Clare Painter, J. R. Martin, and Len Unsworth. Sheffield, UK: Equi-
nox Publishing, 2013.
Reviewed by Karen Coats

Picture books—books intended for young children which com-

municate information or tell stories through a series of many
pictures combined with relatively slight texts or no texts at all—are
unlike any other form of verbal or visual art. Both the pictures
and the texts in these books are different from and communi-
cate differently from pictures and texts in other circumstances.
(Nodelman vii)
With this assertion in his 1988 publication of Words about Pictures, Perry
Nodelman began the first and in many respects still standard work of
literary criticism aimed at the picture book as a distinctive art form.
By that time, the study of children’s literature as something other and
more than an educational tool of dubious literary and cultural interest
and value had enjoyed just over a decade and a half of institutional
recognition (measured by the creation of the Children’s Literature
Association and the launch of its journal in 1973). However, there was
as yet no analytical framework for considering how picture books actu-
ally do their communicative work. The available tools for considering
images were based on the aesthetics of gallery art, not the complex
and varied interactions of words and pictures deployed in the process
of storytelling. Nodelman’s work broke new ground in teaching us
how to see the various elements of picture book art and design, and
opened a dialogue that has grown in critical sophistication and scope
in tandem with the form itself.
Since the appearance of Nodelman’s book, the criticism of picture
books has both deepened with respect to explorations of what consti-
tutes a picture book—including the very terminology we use to desig-
nate the form and its features—and broadened to include insights and
critical apparatus adapted from other areas of inquiry, such as cultural
geography, cognitive studies, visual literacy, philosophy, and semiotics.
This review looks at two books that represent the exciting and dynamic
306 Children’s Literature

state of the evolving critical dialogue of picture book research. The

first, Picturebooks: Beyond the Borders of Art, Narrative and Culture, is part
of a Routledge series of edited collections of essays that include New
Directions in Picturebook Research (2012) and Picturebooks: Representation
and Narration (2013). The essays and articles in these books originated
from conference papers; the ones in the collection under review were
presented at a 2009 conference at the University of Glasgow, Beyond
Borders: Art, Narrative and Culture in Picturebooks, the second in
an ongoing biannual series entitled New Impulses in Picturebook
Research. Subsequent conferences have been held in Turbingen in
2011, and Stockholm in 2013, with edited collections forthcoming
from those conferences as well.1 The present collection also includes
two papers from the early stages of a separate but related international
research project, Visual Journeys, which aims to study immigrant and
nonimmigrant children’s responses to wordless picture books; the book
from that project, Visual Journeys through Wordless Narratives: An interna-
tional inquiry with immigrant children and The Arrival, will be published
in 2014 by Bloomsbury Academic. The three editors, Evelyn Arizpe,
Maureen Farrell, and Julie McAdam, all of the University of Glasgow,
form part of the Visual Journeys research team, which also includes
partners from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, the Australian
Catholic University, and the University of Texas at Austin. The articles
in this collection first appeared in a special issue of the New Review of
Children’s Literature and Librarianship; that Routledge considered it a
profitable venture to reprint them in book form testifies in a material
way to the status of and demand for this type of research, as does the
conference series itself. Unfortunately, the production quality of the
book is variable, with some of the articles printed in such a way that
the last lines on the page are missing entirely, which may force readers
to the original source anyway. However, since individual issues of the
journal are not available for purchase, this volume merits the reprint
for collection purposes.
While Picturebooks represents the range of approaches that have
developed over the years, the second book under review, Reading
Visual Narratives: Image Analysis of Children’s Picture Books, proposes a
genuine innovation with regard to the analysis of picture books as
well as a significant development in the area of functional linguistics.
When one of their students at the University of Sydney presented an
honors thesis that explored two picture books from a systemic func-
tional model of language, linguistics researchers Clare Painter, J. R.
Reviews 307

Martin, and Len Unsworth realized that both picture book research
and systemic-functional linguistics (SFL) would benefit from a sustained
examination of how images worked according to SFL principles, as well
as how images and words work together in picture book narratives. In
weekly meetings over the course of several years, the research team
worked to adapt the visual theory of Gunther Kress and Theo van
Leeuwen and the discourse analysis of SF linguists Michael Halliday
and Christian Matthiessen to better fit the specific context of narrative
picture books. The resulting study represents a complex yet accessible
and usefully innovative model for approaching the social semiotics
of picture books. While I can only provide a bare-bones introduction
to their elaborate model for the purposes of this review, its nuanced
complexity rewards a more patient working through with their actual
text in one hand, a pile of picture books to consult in the other, and,
ideally, a group of committed scholarly friends to discuss and test the
efficacy of their categories.
Picturebooks begins, as such collections do, with some strong claims
for picture book quality and aesthetic innovation that surface in the
questions permeating picture book criticism. The editors go so far as
to define what they mean by the “best picturebooks” as “picturebooks
that challenge readers, that take readers beyond literal meanings, out of
their ‘comfort zone’ and into complex thinking about relationships, the
environment, war, reality, and even death” (Arizpe et al. 1). Like David
Lewis in his introduction to Reading Contemporary Picturebooks: Picturing
Texts, they acknowledge that the kinds of picture books critics favor,
and the kinds of critical approaches we apply to them, “challenge a
confined view of childhood,” and cause some tension in thinking about
whether the books are really for children at all, or “whether they are just
another medium for conducting artistic experiments or communicating
particular ideologies” (2). Lewis stops short at posing the question: “If
we wish to be clearer about the nature of the picturebook should we
attend to what children make of them or will our own close reading of
individual texts be sufficient?” (Lewis xiv). However, Arizpe et al. offer
an unequivocal answer: “What picturebooks offer is just too important
to be left to grownups’ responses, however well-intentioned they may
be” (Arizpe et al. 4). Indeed, unlike other literary critics, the researchers
here don’t shy away from considering the child audience for the books
under study, either through the direct inclusion of actual children’s
responses or, as in Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Jörg Meibauer’s
assessment of certain Pop Art picture books of the 1970s, by applying
308 Children’s Literature

their considerable knowledge of child development to the likely ac-

cessibility of the texts. This approach goes some way, I think, toward
a productive rapprochement in the longstanding schism between the
“book people” and the “child people,” especially considering that both
biological and experience-level differences between adult and child
readers yield fascinating insights that enrich, nuance, and complicate
both ways of seeing. Finally, the editors issue a call to those of us in the
English-speaking world to promote the translation, promoting, and
marketing of books that transcend national and cultural boundaries.
The nine essays that follow the introduction, then, provide a nice
snapshot of the various approaches currently taken up with respect
to picture books. Barbara Kiefer offers a brief but informative history
of the kinds of pictorial storytelling that she believes underwrite the
contemporary picture book, starting with the cave paintings of Lascaux
and Chauvre-Pont-d’Arc and continuing through the Egyptian Book of
the Dead, the Roman codex, the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle
Ages, and the new printing technologies of the subsequent centuries.
While this recitation of history may not be new to established picture
book scholars, it does offer a nicely concise summary for those new to
the field, and Kiefer ties it together by considering the common inten-
tions of the artists despite significant changes in the form over time.
That is, she demonstrates with examples how book artists have always
sought to observe and chronicle their worlds, and asserts that they “are
postmodernists no matter what the era” (16), given that they are self-
referential, playful, and intertextual, and have a tendency to push the
boundaries of convention in their design and depictions.
Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Jörg Meibauer then look more
specifically at five picture books that take convention breaking as their
chief aim. Inspired by Pop Art, these five books from the late 1960s
and ‘70s embrace the weird in subject and style. Kümmerling-Meibauer
and Meibauer’s initial assessments of these books read like reviews in
that they offer descriptions that set the works within their aesthetic
and ideological milieu, but also determine the likelihood of uptake by
their intended audiences. Their mediating discussion, then, focuses
on the concept of what they call “strangeness” as a new category (but
that I might argue is too much akin to the Russian Formalist notion of
estrangement to be genuinely new), elaborating it in cognitive terms
as the necessary reinterpretation of scripts and schemata in order to
accommodate the new experience. They argue that while some of these
Pop Art experiments are likely too strange for such accommodation and
Reviews 309

thus fail in their communicative function with children, they neverthe-

less set the stage for postmodern experimentation with the form and
persist as examples of picture books that appeal to an adult audience.
Another kind of cultural exploration is taken up by Maureen A.
Farrell, who interrogates the role of the picture book in constructing a
national identity through its literature, in this case a particularly Scottish
view of language, life, and customs. She advocates for a broad definition
of what constitutes a distinctly Scottish picture book in a multicultural,
international context, and gives examples of the various types that fit
her definition, which alternates between direct representations of the
nation and those which are more broadly representative of its values.
This essay and the prior two, then, fit broadly into a cultural studies
approach to picture books, situating the form in the history, aesthetic
movements, and cultural identities of its time and place of origin.
Essays coauthored by Teresa Duran and Emma Bosch, and by Maria
Nikolajeva and Liz Taylor focus on more discrete aspects of picture
book design and illustration, with the former developing a typology of
endpapers, and the latter examining the depictions of beds as cultural
signifiers. Both essays have what I call “useful detachability” for students
in that they provide a clear articulation of the theoretical concepts they
draw on and thus enable extension of their methodologies into projects
of a student’s own design. Duran and Bosch, for instance, start with a
discussion of Genette’s definition of paratextual features, but argue
that “in picturebooks ‘everything counts’” (43) as text because every
element of the design acts in the service of the storytelling. They then
acknowledge and extend the typology of endpapers already proposed
by Lawrence Sipe and Caroline McGuire, emphasizing that their “inten-
tion here is not to put the endpapers into different categories [which,
incidentally, is precisely what they do] but to learn how to observe them
carefully . . . and read them as another element of communication”
(61). They ably accomplish this intention, and in so doing provide a
useful model for students to examine and taxonomize other features
formerly considered paratextual as well. Similarly, Nikolajeva and
Taylor begin their discussion by reviewing the salient features of Peir-
cian semiotics and Doreen Massey’s conception of space as a cultural
signifier. They then proceed to interpret the types and significances
of beds in various well-known picture books, noting in particular their
“interpictorial” connections. Their use of this word as an alternative
for “intertextual” highlights the recognition that the picture book
form does indeed require a more nuanced set of critical terms than
310 Children’s Literature

traditional text- or even image-based analysis typically affords.

Jean Webb’s exploration of the German picture book When We Lived
in Uncle’s Hat, by Peter Stamm and Jutta Bauer, exemplifies the kind of
scholarship that challenges conventions on several fronts. The text itself
has crossed several borders: from German to English in translation,
from offbeat picture book to surrealist drama, and from its original
marketing as an estranging postmodern fantasy to a curricularly useful
text that helps transition readers from picture books to chapter books
and provides an opening for discussing homelessness. Webb analyzes
the changes that took place in the translated text; her discontent with
the relative conservatism of UK publishing and her hopes that the play
version doesn’t dampen the surrealist quality of the work; her dismay
at the oversimplification of the text to make it attractive to the school
market; and finally, her own emotional response to the book, which
was at odds with the more conventional publicity surrounding it. Webb
accounts for her disquiet through referral to existential philosophy and
an examination of stylistic patterning. Thus she herself crosses a border
between the personal, the literary, and the philosophical, showing over
the course of the essay the diverse readings made available through a
single well-made picture book.
Yet another philosophical approach is taken up by Janet Evans, who
explores what constitutes a good life through discussing The Short and
Incredibly Happy Life of Riley with a group of ten- and eleven-year-olds.
Her broader question has to do with audience and issues of appro-
priateness for picture books that take up challenging issues, and she
demonstrates specific methods designed to encourage empathy with
characters and to extend their thinking through text-to-life linkages.
Children, as Thomas E. Wartenberg and others remind us, are intuitive
philosophers, often quite willing to engage in the difficult and unset-
tling questions that confront them through their literature, especially
when adults are equally willing to engage in meaningful conversations
with them and provide, as Evans demonstrates, appropriate scaffolding
materials that open up those conversations.
The remaining two essays in the collection emerged out of the early
stages of the Visual Journeys research project. Brenda Bellorin and
María Cecilia Silva-Díaz examine how the mental processes of perceiv-
ing, remembering, thinking, longing, and feeling are depicted through
images alone in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, testing the effectiveness of
those depictions through conversations with immigrant and nonim-
migrant students aged eleven and twelve. Careful analysis of their
Reviews 311

responses revealed the level of the students’ metalinguistic awareness

as well as their understanding that they were, in fact, writing the story
themselves—that is, giving it words. This led to a greater understand-
ing of the differences between verbal and visual expression; as one
student noted, “with illustrations you can see how characters look on
the outside but with letters you can see how they are in the inside” (qtd.
in 139). The final essay used David Wiesner’s Flotsam as a mentor text
for students to reflect on photography before going out to record their
own worlds. Evelyn Arizpe and Julie McAdam stress that photography
affords a measure of control with regard to how children and their
environments are seen by others; by discussing the way photography
works in the book, and then playing with the medium themselves, they
are able to develop crucial critical literacy skills.
The essays in this collection represent some of the many paths picture
book criticism has pursued since Nodelman’s opening salvo. Because
the form and audience for picture books demand it, the criticism has
traversed disciplinary lines, drawing its critical terminology from mul-
tiple areas of inquiry as well as creating its own. The researchers here
draw their methodologies from and extend the conversations opened
by the prominent theorists of picture books: Sipe and Pantaleo, Niko-
lajeva and Scott, Arizpe and Styles, and Moebius. However, while these
essays pursue and elaborate existing strands of criticism, they don’t
propose anything radically new in terms of the analysis of picture book
conventions, nor do they engage with the innovations afforded by the
newer methodologies being developed by theorists of visual culture and
multimodal discourse analysis (MDA). Likewise, theorists in those fields
have tended to overlook the picture book, failing to acknowledge the
form as a key site of apprenticeship for children learning to navigate
the social semiotics of multimodal discourse.
Reading Visual Narratives seeks to bridge that gap from both direc-
tions. It lays claim to a “dual aim: on the one hand to contribute insights
useful for the better understanding of how any individual picture book
makes meaning, and on the other to contribute to MDA by extending
the social semiotic of the visual modality and suggesting how it can
be considered in relation to verbal meaning” (Painter et al. 3). Their
model seeks to take the study of picture books beyond art theory and
reader response, and to provide an enhanced framework for MDA
from which to consider the synergy of art and text, the operations of
images in a sequence, and the ways in which visual materials engender
emotional engagement. As one might imagine, the picture book offers
the ideal nexus for pursuing this line of inquiry.
312 Children’s Literature

It is unfortunately too often the case that academics from outside the
field “discover” children’s literature as if it were uncharted territory;
that is, they fail to take into account the work that has come before
them. Linguists Painter, Martin, and Unsworth, on the other hand,
have done their homework; they know the relevant criticism, and they
understand and acknowledge the important differences between studies
that consider the interactions of readers with picture books and those
which concern themselves with the study of the books as textual and/or
aesthetic objects. Their own study pursues the latter approach, though
they rightfully note that their “more comprehensive visual grammar
and further theorizing on intermodality will also be a useful base for
informing future reader-oriented students and those examining oral/
aural contexts of use” (5). Thus their work here has the potential
to launch any number of ethnographic research projects, but it can
also intervene in questions currently under investigation regarding
more formal analytics, including comics research, children’s media
studies, and the evaluation of engagement in nonfiction. Indeed, my
own thoughts as I read continually turned to how I would work with
and teach this, and how my graduate students needed to know it so
that they could incorporate it into their research and teach it as well.
What the authors are doing here is both useful and refreshingly new
to children’s literature scholars of many stripes, and fortunately, they
seem keenly aware at every point in their text that they are embark-
ing on a teaching mission; as a reader with no background in SFL, I
felt supported throughout with clear explanations, useful summaries,
pointed references, and well-conceived visual models of the concepts
under discussion.
They begin, for instance, with a concise and useful summary of
systemic functional linguistic (SFL) theory, outlining the three “meta-
functions” or types of meaning inherent in every text, and providing a
key to the scholars who have explored these metafunctions in different
media. Kress and van Leeuwen, for instance, have focused their atten-
tion on all image types, while other theorists have looked at language,
Web sites, and fine art. Under an SFL model, texts create three types of
meaning: ideational, which is the representation of content or subject
matter; interpersonal, which refers to both the roles and relationships
between and among actors and the environment established within the
text as well as between text and reader or hearer; and textual, which
includes the organization of the elements within a text with regard to
relevant intertexts, co-texts, and contexts. They further explain that
Reviews 313

discourse analysts are concerned with the working of individual in-

stances of language use rather than systems; discourse analysis with an
SFL perspective focuses on the individual choices made in a given text
or language situation, exploring those choices against the possibilities
the particular semiotic system, in this case the visual semiotic system,
makes available. The authors proceed to build models that show various
possibilities within each metafunction in order to facilitate tight analysis
of the images in each picture book, always taking care to interpret their
findings in light of the meanings made available through the pictorial
choices. They devote a chapter to breaking down each metafunction
into its component parts, before ending this discussion with a chapter
demonstrating how the metafunctions merge and flow across the verbal
and visual semiotics of the text. While they acknowledge the conceptual
overlap between metafunctions, their initial isolation of the functions
in separate chapters serves their pedagogical ends, and they have a
canny knack for pointing out carry-over and connections at the exact
moment in the reading when I thought something like, “Hey, isn’t this
ideational meaning related to how that interpersonal pattern worked?,”
making this eager Padawan feel smart—and who doesn’t like that?
It does help, however, to have read Kress and van Leeuwen’s Read-
ing Images: The Grammar of Visual Design first, as Painter, Martin, and
Unworth take that text as their starting place. However, they review
Kress and van Leeuwen’s categories with enough detail even for read-
ers who aren’t familiar with the latters’ work, and while integrating
those categories into their own model as they think best, don’t hesitate
to critique or point out any limitations. In general, they object to the
imprecise borrowing of linguistic terminology to describe visual fea-
tures. For instance, in their discussion of interpersonal meaning, they
consider Kress and van Leeuwen’s notion of contact with regard to
a character’s gaze, which suggests that the direct gaze of a character
constitutes a demand while an indirect gaze implies an offer of infor-
mation. But Painter et al. argue persuasively that the direct mapping
of the linguistic terms “demand” and “offer” onto the visual field does
not serve in this context. An image is not dialogic the way a verbal ut-
terance is. Even a verbal offer of information requires a response or
acknowledgement of some kind, while a visual offer does not. Similarly,
the direct gaze of a visual image at a viewer is only simulated eye contact;
it does not have the force of a demand in that it doesn’t necessitate
a behavioral response. Hence they propose their own terminology of
focalization as an interpretation and elaboration of Kress and van
314 Children’s Literature

Leeuwen’s contact and shift their terms to the more apt contact and
observe to characterize the various interpersonal meanings afforded
by the character’s gaze. While they openly acknowledge their indebted-
ness to their scholarly forbear in SFL, they offer convincing arguments
whenever challenging them, a practice that has the added benefit of
apprenticing new researchers into respectful scholarly discourse as
handily as the picture books they claim apprentice children into new
ways of navigating the visual field.
Throughout their discussions of the metafunctions, the authors
start with simple tree diagrams that schematize the possible relations
an image might depict. As the categories become more fine-grained,
the tree diagrams grow. For instance, Pathos and Affect, which af-
fect the interpersonal meaning of text by playing to reader alignment,
can be best elicited by styles of character depiction. The options for
Pathos, then, begin with either alienating or engaging readers through
the choice of style. Alienating character depictions are most often
caricatures. If the text enacts the option of engaging with regard to
pathos, there are further possibilities, such as appreciative, empathic,
or personalizing. Each of these qualities is associated with a particular
style of character depiction, which is also often associated with certain
types of stories. Minimalist character depictions, for instance, tend to
fall into the appreciative category, in that readers are not called on to
closely identity with such depicted characters, but to maintain a bit of
distance. Because of this affective dimension, this type of illustration
style is most often found in stories that take social commentary as
their theme. The smartly conceived tree diagrams provide one type
of graphic organizer for the categories, but each element is also sup-
ported by black-and-white reproductions of images from picture books,
and given verbal descriptions of how the elements are realized in an
image. Finally, each chapter provides an extensive multipage chart
that analyzes how each page opening of a book realizes the particular
qualities under discussion. Thus there are category names and relation-
ships, generic descriptions of realizations, and actual examples to study.
These pedagogical features are invaluable and subtly demonstrate one
of the key assumptions of the book: that visual and verbal information
communicate differently, and in this case serve to reinforce and clarify
each other.
The amount of careful detail and fine-grained categorical distinc-
tions mean that this is not a book for reading once and putting on a
shelf. Rather, it is a kind of workbook that will reward multiple readings
Reviews 315

and follow-up consultations to test and enact the kinds of readings it

demonstrates on other texts. My first response was to get my hands on
the books it uses for its close readings: Raymond Briggs’s The Tin Pot
Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman; Mem Fox’s Possum Magic; Libby
Hathorn and Gregory Rogers’s Way Home; and Gary Crew and Gregory
Rogers’s Lucy’s Bay. My second response was to get out my own favorite
picture books, particularly the ones that affect me emotionally, and
work through the elements of interpersonal, ideational, and textual
meanings in order to see how this model of multimodal discourse
analysis sharpens my ways of reading and gives me new ways of think-
ing about how picture books work to create their effects. But because
the authors continually refer their painstaking analytical techniques
back to larger meanings, this text goes beyond the geeky joy of clever
close readings, so my third response will certainly be dissemination with
evangelical zeal—to both my undergraduate and graduate students. I
suspect I will also pursue extension of this model; my reading notes are
peppered with possibilities: How might this be extended to the study
of image analysis and interpersonal meaning in nonfiction? Might the
sound images of poetry benefit from reading them through SFL? In
what ways can I bring this theoretical paradigm into conversation with
Scott McCloud’s work when I teach graphic novels to my adolescent
literature students? Who needs to read this for their dissertation?
Painter, Martin, and Unsworth have not only elaborated a productive
cross-disciplinary approach to picture books here; they have effectively
introduced a fascinating new development in social semiotics that I
predict will have an energizing effect on all who take the time to work
through their system.

Note
1
Additionally, the conference attendees, cognizant of the prohibitive expense of
international travel and the high degree of interest in the subject, have set up an online
JISCMail group called New Directions in Picturebook Research: <https://www.jiscmail.
ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=PICTUREBOOKRESEARCH>.

Works Cited

Lewis, David. Reading Contemporary Picturebooks: Picturing Text. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Nodelman, Perry. Words About Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children’s Picture Books. Athens:
U of Georgia P, 1988.