This paper looks at how postmodernism can be used as a discourse to theorise the picture book, by focusing on the 'self-conscious crossing of boundaries' which in postmodernist fictions 'problematises the truths of fiction and reality' (15). Far from being 'simple' texts, picture books contain two forms of signification (picture and text) and are frequently 'playful and subversive' despite the fact that they are rarely perceived as 'unconventional and exceptional creations' (16). Grieve discusses a large range of children's picture books from the United States, Great Britain and Australia, including the work of Allan Baillie (Drac and the Gremlin), Susanne Ferrier (Ned, a Leg End : A Thoroughly Misleading Account of His Life and Times; Lola : A Doubtful Documentary...) and Libby Gleeson (Where's Mum?). Her examination leads her to conclude that 'there is a growing body of picture books which utilize their complex pluralistic nature and their unique physical qualities to present self-conscious, parodic, intertextual, interrogative texts that can be described as postmodernist' (24).
Bourke analyses Gary Crew's Strange Objects using Michel Foucault's idea of 'history as archive' as a way of effectively 'decentering' subjectivity (42). Bourke suggests that Strange Objects 'does not tell one particular story so much as recreate an archive which contains a number of possible stories' and in which the reader's task is 'to recover the novel's various possible narratives. Describing the novel as 'postmodernist' (42), Bourke discusses the novel's subversive strategies which includes the readers possible interpretations of the various stories, cross-referencing and checking one story against another. While fantasy in novels - like Stange Objects - can be 'a politically conservative mode' (42), Bourke posits that the most subversive element in this novel is 'its use if history as the social ground for subjectivity' (42), which functions as a decentering device, '...dissolving the unitary subject into a collection of documents which together constitute the novel' (48).
