Contemporary children's picture books provide a rich domain for
developing theory and analysis of visual meaning and its relation to
accompanying verbal text. This book offers new descriptions of the
visual strand of meaning in picture book narratives as a way of
furthering the project of 'multimodal' discourse analysis and of
explaining the literacy demands and apprenticing techniques of
children's earliest literature.
Reading Visual Narratives uses the principles of systemic-functional
theory to organise an explicit account of visual meaning in relation to
three perspectives: the visual construction of the narrative events and
characters (ideational meaning), the visual positioning of the reader
through choices related to focalisation and appraisal (interpersonal
meaning) and the discourse organization of visual meanings through
choices in framing and composition (textual meaning). The descriptions
throughout are illustrated with examples from highly regarded children's
picture books.
Reading Visual Narratives extends previous social-semiotic accounts of
the 'grammar' of the image, by focussing attention on discourse level
meanings and on semantic relationships created by sequences of images.
At the same time, it extends current understandings of how picture books
work through its explicit and systematic account of the visual meanings
and their integration with verbal aspects of the texts.
It will be of interest to researchers in multimodal discourse analysis,
systemic-functional theory, and children's literature and literacy.
