Picturebooks: Representation and Narration ed. by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Picturebooks: Representation and Narration ed. by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer Lesley D. Clement Picturebooks: Representation and Narration edited by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer. New York: Routledge, 2014. 239 p. ISBN 9780415818018. The goals of Routledge’s Children’s Literature and Culture series, as defined by its founder, Jack Zipes, are “to enhance research in this field and … point to new directions that bring together the best scholarly work throughout the world.” A recent publication in the series, Picturebooks: Representation and Narration, edited by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, unequivocally meets these criteria. The twelve articles in this collection exemplify the outstanding achievements of some pioneers and most respected theorists in western Children’s Literature scholarship of the past twenty-five years and articulate the “new directions” they are forging. Some revisit familiar picturebooks; others travel through new terrains; all open promising portals for future exploration. The collection has three theoretical clusters. Part I, comprising five articles, focuses on “Crossing Genre Boundaries: Artists’ Books, Wordless Picturebooks, and Picturebooks for Adults.” “Boundaries” is interpreted variously for explorations of visual and verbal strategies shared by children’s and adult’s literature, text (however limited)-image synergies, and innovative deconstructions of a book. Included are articles by Åse Marie Ommundsen, who traces the origins of a “Nordic phenomenon,” adult picturebooks, from increasingly advanced picturebooks for children, and Emma Bosch, who interrogates the term “wordless” picturebook by investigating texts and peritexts and developing a system of classification to avoid mislabelling. More beneficial is Sandra Beckett’s advice to question “the need to categorize artists’ books or books of any kind.” Renowned for her work on “crossover” literature, Beckett produces a trailblazing discussion of “The Art of Visual Storytelling: Formal Strategies in Wordless Picturebooks” and the influence that the artist’s book has had on the picturebook. Beckett is the only contributor with an extended discussion of a non-western artist, Katsumi Komagata. While others have not considered non-European writer-illustrators, [End Page 167] there is ample opportunity to build on the laid foundations. As Beckett concludes, “[t]hese extraordinary ‘books’ present new structural formats for the book as well as new ways of reading it.” No one knows this better than Carole Scott, whose publications on picturebook aesthetics and communication are mandatory for anyone studying in this area, and whose article in this collection also examines the influence that the artist’s book has had on the picturebook, particularly its materiality. This group of essays is appropriately rounded off by Evelyn Arizpe, whose extensive publications on literacies and reader response are at the core of Children’s Literature scholarship, and who appeals for more interdisciplinary research into “the ways in which illustrators invite readers to make meaning and how readers respond to these invitations.” Arizpe’s appeal segues well to the three articles in Part II, “Change, Emotions, and Hybridity: Characters in Picturebooks.” Nina Christensen’s “‘Thought and dream are heavenly vehicles’: Character, Bildung, and Aesthetics in Stian Hole’s Garmann Trilogy (2006-2010),” also advises against compartmentalization by eradicating boundaries between instruction and delight, education and art, through the concept of bildung, which captures both the characters’ processes of change and the potential transformative effect that the reading experience can trigger. The heart of this book, and the most cogent discussion on the affective nature of text-image interanimation, is Maria Nikolajeva’s “‘The Penguin Looked Sad’: Picturebooks, Empathy and Theory of Mind.” This prolific scholar, pioneer in picturebook theory, takes us into the cognitive sciences, draws on empirical evidence and psychological theories of empathy and mind-reading to reach her conclusion that “it is in the meeting space between words and images that the emotional tension is created. Cognitive criticism makes this space more visible.” What makes Nikolajeva’s recent work so important is its advocacy of the role that picturebooks can play in honing the potential for empathy and mind-reading (versus “identification”) in the youngest readers. The matchstick figure with its hybridity and seeming incompleteness, discussed by Kümmerling-Meibauer and Jörg Meibauer in the next chapter, may not invite mind-reading, but does evoke empathy. They also explore the connection between the matchstick figure and children’s...