MORE WORDS ABOUT PICTURES: CURRENT RESEARCH ON PICTUREBOOKS AND VISUAL/VERBAL TEXTS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE

Preface: Naomi Hamer and Mavis Reimer
Figure Credits
List of Contributors
Introduction: Why We Need More Words Perry Nodelman
Chapter 1: Chewing on Baby Books as a Form of Infant Literacy: Books are for Biting Lian Beveridge
Chapter 2: Six Degrees of Closeness in the Picture Book Experience: Getting Closer William Moebius
Chapter 3: Art, Adaptation, and the Antipodean in Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing
Erica Hateley
Chapter 4: The Design and Development of the Picture Book for Mobile and Interactive Platforms: "You get to BE Harold’s Purple Crayon" Naomi Hamer
Chapter 5: Towards a Connective Ethnography of Children’s Literature and Digital Media: The New Media Encounter Helene Høyrup
Chapter 6: Performing Picture Books as Co-Authorship: Audiences Critically and Semiotically Interact with Professional Authors during Author Visits Kari-Lynn Winters, Candace Figg, Kimberly Lenters, and Dave Potts
Chapter 7: Environmental Picture Books: Cultivating Conservationists Nathalie op de Beeck
Chapter 8: Visual Staging of Virtue in Islamic Children’s Literature: Discipline and Pleasure Torsten Janson
Chapter 9: Between Picture Book and Graphic Novel: Mixed Signals in Kim Fupz Aakeson and Rasmus Bregnhøi’s I love you Danmark
Nina Christensen
Chapter 10: Narrative Space in Sheree Fitch’s Merry-Go-Day and Night Sky Wheel Ride: Picture-Book PoesisAndrea Schwenke Wyile
Chapter 11: Be Kind or Stupid Joseph T. Thomas, Jr.

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. In addition to work by international scholars including William Moebius, Erica Hateley, Nathalie op de Beeck, and Nina Christensen that carries on and challenges the conclusions of Words about Pictures, the collection also includes a wide-ranging reflection by Perry Nodelman on continuities and changes in the current interdisciplinary field of study of visual/verbal texts for young readers. Providing a look back over the history of picture books and the development of picture book scholarship, More Words About Pictures also offers an overview of our current understanding of these intriguing texts.