Picturebooks
Words About Pictures
On 20, Dec 2015 | In Picturebooks | By Chris Vitale
Nodelman, Perry. Words About Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children’s Picture Books. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1988. Print.
Referrer: Chris Vitale
Categories: picture theory, visual language, definitions, image/text, illustrated books, visual storytelling, genre
Annotation:
This text is the seminal work regarding the relationship between pictures and text in picture books. The examination that is done by Nodelman stretches in the intricacy and specialty associated with the aesthetic and literary primary source material found in the corpus of children’s picture books. Nodelman explores a range of text that spans well-known story’s like Where the Wild Things Are to more generic alphabet books. The picture book’s use of visual illustration is explored in depth. The significance of the pictorial elements of the text is brought into the limelight for one of the first times in children’s literary study. Of particular interest are the chapters regarding the relationships between multiple visual objects (Chapter 5) as well as visual objects in relation to the text (Chapter 7).