What are we reading? Toward a definition of the Children’s picturebook

Abstract

The paper analyzes the evolution of the notion “children’s picturebook” over the 20 th and 21 th centuries. Since the second half of the 19th century this notion was coined in the English literature, it has been radically changing its meaning. Lewis Carroll called his two books about Alice’s adventures “a picture book”, whereas contemporary scholars would refrain from relating these stories to this notion. Artistic experimentation in picturebook form and content throughout the entire 20th century blurs the boundaries of graphic literature genres that fuels the discussions about picturebook’s belonging to literature or visual art, and about its definition as a particular art. In the first place picturebook develops as a literary genre with distinctive features: polysystemic unity of illustration and text, a specific layout of text and image, age peculiarities of readers, structural distinctions of illustration, and some others. However, works of graphic literature stand out for having the similar features which prevent from differentiating them from each other. A handful of scholars initiate the development of wholistic theory of sequential art without dividing the graphical literature into subsets. The other researchers advancing attempts to define the picturebook paused the investigation of its formal features and began the survey on the peculiarities of reading situations anticipated to be different graphic literature genres. This approach refers to sociology of text.

Keywords: children’s literature, picturebook, illustration, graphical novel, comics, sequential art, sociology of text, social semiotics