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In The Transformative Potential of LGBTQ+ Children’s Picture Books, Jennifer Miller identifies an archive of over 150 English-language children’s picture books that explicitly represent LGBTQ+ identities, expressions, and issues. This archive is then analyzed to explore the evolution of LGBTQ+ characters and content from the 1970s to the present. Miller describes dominant tropes that emerge in the field to analyze historical shifts in representational practices, which she suggests parallel larger sociocultural shifts in the visibility of LGBTQ+ identities. Additionally, Miller considers material constraints and possibilities affecting the production, distribution, and consumption of LGBTQ+ children’s picture books from the 1970s to the present. This foundational work defines the field of LGBTQ+ children’s picture books thoroughly, yet accessibly. In addition to laying the groundwork for further research, The Transformative Potential of LGBTQ+ Children’s Picture Books presents a reading lens, critical optimism, used to analyze the transformative potential of LGBTQ+ children’s picture books. Many texts remain attached to heteronormative family forms and raced and classed models of success. However, by considering what these books put into the world, as well as problematic aspects of the world reproduced within them, Miller argues that LGBTQ+ children’s picture books are an essential world-making project and seek to usher in a transformed world as well as a significant historical archive that reflects material and representational shifts in dominant and subcultural understandings of gender and sexuality.
This collection offers a thorough treatment of the ways in which the verbal and visual semiotic modes interrelate toward promoting gender equality and social inclusion in children’s picture books. Drawing on cutting-edge theoretical work in multimodality, including multimodal cognitive linguistics, multimodal discourse analysis, and visual social semiotics, the book expands on descriptive-oriented studies to offer a more linguistically driven perspective on children’s picture books. The volume explores the choice afforded to and the lexico-semantic and discursive strategies employed by writers and illustrators in conveying representational, interpersonal, and textual meanings in the verbal and non-verbal components in these narratives in order to challenge gender stereotypes and promote the social inclusion of same-sex parent families. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in multimodality, discourse analysis, social semiotics, and children’s literature. Chapters 1 & 8 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com.
What happens when the assumptions and practices of museum curators and art educators intersect with the assumptions and practices of publishing for children? This study explores how over three hundred children's picture books, most of them published in the last three decades in English, introduce children to art and art museums. It considers how the books emerge from and relate to a range of theories and assumptions about childhood and childhood development, children's literature and culture, illustration, visual art, museology, and art education. As well as examining how these theories and assumptions influence what picture books teach young readers about visiting museums and about how to look at and think about art, it examines which artists and artworks appear most often in picture books and offers a survey of different kinds of art-related picture books: ones that claim to be purely informational, ones that make looking at art a game or a puzzle, ones in which children visit art museums, and many more. Since the books all include reproductions of or allusions to museum artworks, the study also considers the problems illustrators face in depicting museum artworks in illustrations in a different style.
During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, children’s media use increased (Mesce et al. 2021) while a decrease in print-book reading was observed (Nolan et al. 2022). An increase in tablet use suggests that when children were reading, it was mostly online in the form of ePub3 pdf files for illustrated works and prescribed school texts, while smartphone use was linked to apps and games. (Susilowati et al. 2021) For many years now, children’s publishers have experimented with digital picture-book formats but have regarded the genre as not suitable for digitisation. This book documents the findings of a one-year research project engaging the children’s publishing sector for feedback on reading trends and digital publishing in picture-book genres. The research assesses the plight of picture books in the current climate and considers how picture-book publishers cater to diverse readerships and new reading platforms post Covid-19 lockdowns and into the digital age. Written by an academic and editor with over 15 years industry experience, this book offers a nuanced response to children’s picture book publishing and reception for librarians, teachers, publishers and international scholars in the fields of publishing studies, library studies, early childhood studies, early education and childhood psychology.
Facilitate literacy in students in grades PK–1 with Creating Curriculum Using Children's Picture Books. This 96-page book connects basic skills to 18 stories that students already love! Each featured storybook provides connections to language arts, math, social studies, science, art, motor skills, creative dramatics, and social skills. This resource includes information for teaching with favorites, such as Clifford the Big Red Dog, Corduroy, Goodnight Moon, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, and The Polar Express. The book supports National Science Education Standards and NAEYC, NCTE, NCTM, and NCSS standards.
Recommended by writing instructors and award-winning authors. This volume emphasizes an aspect of children's picture books that has not yet been thoroughly investigated: structure. Both concept books and picture storybooks employ very distinctive structures that, once mastered, can be applied to any picture book you wish to write. When so many of the best picture books employ the same structures, it is important to analyze these structures, understand why they work, and learn how to incorporate them into your own writing. This volume helps you do all that. You will see that no matter how carefully you labor over the tone, word choice, plot, character, setting, theme and style of your picture book, you must have a thorough grasp of its structure if you wish your book to succeed. Indeed, you will find that an expert command of structure is the key to writing a successful children's picture book.
Children’s picturebooks are the very first books we encounter and play a major role in introducing us to both art and language. But what does it take to create a successful picturebook for children? This revised edition of a bestselling title carries invaluable insight into a highly productive, dynamic sector of the publishing world. Featuring interviews with leading illustrators and publishers from across the world, it remains essential reading for students and aspiring children’s book illustrators and writers.
This book evaluates the implicit and nuanced meanings embedded in Vietnamese picturebooks and explores the intricate cultural aspects they portray. Through meticulous research, the contributors of this pioneering book unveil the values of contemporary Western analytical frameworks while identifying their limitations. By combining East Asian philosophies with captivating visual texts, this groundbreaking work offers reliable theoretical and practical resources, enabling a profound exploration of Vietnamese culture. This book is more than just a contribution to academia, it’s also a tool for Asia Literacy, enabling intercultural understanding. It also serves as a vital connection to the cultural heritage of Vietnamese children, both at home and abroad. By cultivating positive perceptions of Vietnamese culture among non-Vietnamese children, it aspires to create a society built on harmony, equality, and love.
Offers new insights into the continuing influence of postmodernism on a wide range of international picture books for children published between 1963 and 2008. Its chapters include metafiction; disruption to narrative conventions; interrogation of 'truths'; historiographic metafiction; difference and ex-centricity; globalisation and media.
