Reading Contemporary Picturebooks Picturing Text

Reading Contemporary Picturebooks takes a close look at one of the most vibrant and exciting branches of children's literature - the modern picturebook. We have recently seen an enormous increase in the quantity of high quality picturebooks published for children, yet our understanding of what it means to be visually literate and our knowledge of how readers negotiate such composite texts is limited. This book takes a sample of contemporary picturebooks and examines the features that make them unique, suggesting ways of studying and understanding the form. Issues addressed include: the interaction of word and image in picturebooks the ecology of the picturebook the picturebook as process picturebooks at play postmodernism and the picturebook studying and understanding picturebooks Reading Contemporary Picturebooks is both an introduction to a fascinating and innovative branch of children's literature and a detailed examination of how picturebooks work. It resists the temptation to assimilate picturebooks to simpler forms of text and argues that to understand the picturebook we need to see it in context as part of the social practice of reading. This book will be of interest to students, teachers and researchers interested in reading, children's literature and media studies.Lewis, David is the author of 'Reading Contemporary Picturebooks Picturing Text' with ISBN 9780415208871 and ISBN 0415208874.