The Use of Images in Literary Texts for Children

What is the significance of the usage of images in children’s literature? Words and images of various kinds are often combined to form narratives for children because: Illustrations may define interpretations of a particular story. Such images would provide a context for the imagination. Visual elements can be utilized to extend to the readership an emotional impact.

Sharon Goodman in her Introduction about “Words and Pictures” in Reader 1 p: 296 points out that: - Children’s literature may not be adequately appreciated, and may be unintelligible, without attention to illustrations. - Images in children’s books may vary enormously in both style and function. This results in:

A) ‘Illustrated books’ that are primarily decorative. b) ‘Picture books’ that are visual narratives where images and words have equally important roles in telling the story.

Barbara Kiefer (1995:70) states that: If we understand the picturebook [sic] experience as one in which participants engage both intellectual and emotional resources with a visual/verbal art form, we can trace the first picturebooks back to perhaps as far as 40,000 years ago. (qtd. in Goodman, 296).

In other terms, the precursors of modern writing could be traced back to European cave paintings and Egyptian hieroglyphics among others. These forms were not specifically aimed at children, but rather gave modern storytellers a wealth of textual possibilities and re-version for new audiences.

The nineteenth century is seen by many working in the field of children’s illustration as the Golden age since: * The period’s technological advances paved the way to full-color reproduction. * It also supplied a larger potential readership in the shape of a population much more widely schooled.

Contrasting Views At the time that many parents and educators view the images as a means to increase the atractieness of books to children, and thereby developing both literacy and a love of story, some feel that these images distract children from the verbal text and, therefore, obstruct the development of fluent and confident children’s reading.

The History and Development of Children’s Book Illustration in Light of the following Essays: a) “Texts and Pictures: A History” by Joyce Irene Whalley b) “Picturebook Codes” by William Moebius c) “Postmodern Experiments” by Bette Goldstone

* Whalley provides a useful historical outline from the mid-seventeenth century to the First World War by: - Tracing the links between the improvements in color reproduction and the increasingly widespread dissemination of books for children.

- Arguing that the cost of producing such texts was an important factor in the early days, as was the prevailing attitude that books for children were less valuable than those produced for adults. Consequently, cheap and simplified illustrations was considered by many to be adequate in the seventeenth century.

- Pointing out that with the improvement of design and quality, artists started to gain reputations in their own right, rather than being merely seen as providers of supplementary material to the more high-minded and serious work of the author.

* Moebius takes a chronological leap to the second half of the twentieth century. In strong contrast to Whalley’s interest in the history of the processes and contexts of book-production, Moebius focuses on the text itself.

- Moebius was among the first to lay out a framework for the analysis of images in children’s books. He is an early contributor to the discipline of visual stylistics, which developed out of structuralism and semiotic analysis into what is often now called the study of multimodality.

What does multimodality mean? It is a close reading of the visual elements of texts in their own right, and of how the visual combines with words in texts to create meaning for readers and viewers.

- Moebius points out that picture books lend themselves to detailed textual analysis and renewed close scrutiny – dispelling the myth that picture books are simple, simplistic, or aimed only at children.

- He argues that images cannot and – must not – be looked at in isolation from the surrounding text since images in children’s books always have a context, a sequence, and meaning is derived at least partially from their positioning in the text and their interaction with the words.

- He claims that interpretation is not fixed; allusions and inter- textuality may be in the text, and available for us to interpret. However, a certain device may not always mean the same in symbolic terms, while generalization is a consequence that is to be resisted as we read children’s books.

* Bette Goldstone analyses the most recent forms of the picture book, concentrating on consciously postmodern texts such as David Wiesner’s The Three Pigs (2001).

- She argues that the three- dimensional space can be expanded into five dimensions in order to include that between the book and the reader and that which is the space ‘beneath the physical page’ – open for characters to step into.

- She believes that reading itself takes on new patterns: As images and words are intertwined, the text becomes resistant to more traditional, linear, and chronological practices of reading.

Prepared by Dr. Layla F. Abdeen AOU – The Jordan Branch