Reading Contemporary Picturebooks: Picturing Text [Hardcover]

Reading Contemporary Picturebooks takes a look at one of the most vibrant branches of children's literature - the modern picturebook. This exciting new book takes a sample of contemporary picturebooks and closely examines the features that make them distinctive and then suggests a way of characterising the 'interanimation' of words and pictures that is the essence of the form. The reasons for the picturebook's vitality and flexibility are also explored and the close bond between the picturebook and its readers is analyzed. Advances in our understanding of how visual images are organized are examined and the book concludes with an attempt to redescribe the picturebook in such a way that pictures, readers and text may be drawn together. Picturing Text will be of interest to students, teachers and researchers interested in reading, children's literature and media studies.This book analyzes how picture books work - the role of picture books in learning to read, how children make meaning from pictures, and how teachers can make best use of picture books in the classroom.'Described by its author as eclectic and possibly eccentric, Lewis's book is, for the reader, like accompanying a reflective guide on an exploratory tour of a territory that proves to be vaster and much more intriguing than many travellers might have envisaged. It's a real teaching text, with the author's voice coming across clearly: musing, explaining, insisting upon and restating matters, and occasionally sounding mildly critical.' - Jane DoonanIntroduction; Chapter 1 Modern picturebooks; Chapter 2 The interaction of word and image in picturebooks; Chapter 3 The ecology of the picturebook; Chapter 4 The picturebook as process; Chapter 5 Picturebooks at play; Chapter 6 Postmodernism and the picturebook; Chapter 7 A word about pictures; Chapter 8 How do picturebooks come to possess meaning?;David Lewis is one of lsÁ