Picturebooks
‘Wait a Second . . .’: Negotiating Complex Narratives in Black and White.
On 20, Dec 2015 | In Picturebooks | By Chris Vitale
McClay, Jill Kedersha. “‘Wait a Second . . .’: Negotiating Complex Narratives in Black and White.” Children’s Literature in Education 31.2 (June 2000): 91–106.
Referrer: Carrie Hintz
Categories: picturebook, visual storytelling, art, illustration, text/image relationship, color codes, Black and White, postmodernism, deconstruction
Annotation:
Exploring the impact of postmodern fiction on children’s literature and in effect their realities, McClay reads Macaulay’s Black and White. The postmodern picture book is a special case that seeks to break the boundaries set up by traditional examples. Visual and textual information is particularly important in this genre of literature. The words and pictures are assigned explicitly and equally important value on the title page which asserts a warning. McClay points out that both the textual narrative and the stylization of the art within the text work within a constantly intermingling quadruple parallel. The effect of this diversified deconstruction of picture book norms is a variety of positive and negative readings based on space and narration. The value of the visuals in juxtaposition to the textual narrative is clearly pinpointed in this article.
