'This volume represents the current state of research on picture books and other adjacent hybrid forms of visual/verbal texts such as comics, graphic novels, and book apps, with a particular focus on texts produced for and about young people. When Perry Nodelman’s Words about Pictures: the Narrative Art of Children’s Picture Books was published almost three decades ago, it was greeted as an important contribution to studies in children’s picture books and illustration internationally; and based substantially on it, Nodelman has recently been named the 2015 recipient of the International Grimm Award for children’s literature criticism. In the years since Words About Pictures appeared, scholars have built on Nodelman’s groundbreaking text and have developed a range of other approaches, both to picture books and to newer forms of visual/verbal texts that have entered the marketplace and become popular with young people. The essays in this book offer 'more words' about established and emerging forms of picture books, providing an overview of the current state of studies in visual/verbal texts and gathering in one place the work being produced at various locations and across disciplines. Essays exploring areas such as semiological and structural aspects of conventional picture books, graphic narratives and new media forms, and the material and performative cultures of picture books represent current work not only from literary studies but also media studies, art history, ecology, Middle Eastern Studies, library and information studies, and educational research.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Contents indexed selectively.
'Shaun Tan is an eminent figure of Australian children's literature in the twenty-first century. Tan's international success has been marked commercially by the proliferation of international editions and translations of his picture books and critically by the proliferation of awards, including an Academy Award for the animated short film adaptation of The Lost Thing, and in 2011 the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, which is given for sustained aesthetic and humanist achievement in children's literature. In 1959, a figurative expressionist group calling themselves The Antipodeans held an exhibition in Melbourne, the catalogue for which saw the first publication of "The Antipodean Manifesto". This section of the Manifesto was contributed by John Brack, and Brack's identity as a figurative expressionist and as an artist of adaptation mark his work in particular as significant for a full understanding of The Lost Thing.'