Postmodern Picturebooks: Play, Parody, and Self-Referentiality

Children's literature, along with all the other genres in the past fifty years, has taken on an appreciation for the tenets of postmodernism, according to the contributors of these 16 essays. Lest we worry that small children may not fully grasp the presence of irony or ambivalence, the contributors speak primarily to adult readers, describing the evolution of form and substance in children's picture books, defining the role of the artist in such books, and applying radical change theory. They describe how play and playfulness work in postmodern picture books, global postmodernism in Australia's picture books, postmodern picture books and the material conditions of reading, the paradox of space, anxieties in imagination and multi-modality, picture books as artifacts, the work of Lauren Child and Ed Vere, true fairy tales, third-graders' collaborative sense-making, and children's responses to postmodern picture books. The case study on responses to Wiesner's The Three Pigs is especially interesting. Annotation c2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Dr. Lawrence R. Sipe is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education of the University of Pennsylvania, where he is a member of the Reading/Writing/Literacy Program. He teaches courses in children's literature, ranging from picturebooks to young adult fiction, and his research interests focus on the responses of kindergarten, first- and second-graders to picture storybooks. He is the North American Editor of Children's Literature in Education.

Dr. Sylvia Pantaleo is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in language and literacy, and in literature for children and adolescents. Her program of research has focused on exploring elementary students’ understanding, interpretations and responses to contemporary picturebooks, specifically literature with Radical Change characteristics and metafictive devices.