Literary Text Types: Postmodern Picturebooks

This article is drawn from content originally included in PETAA Book A Literature Companion for Teachers 2nd Edition, written by Lorraine McDonald and published in 2017.

There are numerous definitions of 'postmodern' in relation to picturebooks. Good introductions include Bull & Anstey (2010) and the YouTube CG Publishing presentation Playing with the postmodern: picture books for multiliteracies.

Traditionally, fiction texts of all forms encourage their readers to 'forget' that the text world is a constructed one (McDonald, 1999) and regard characters as people living their lives in their 'real world'. Consequently, experienced readers have expectations about how a picturebook functions and may be surprised, perplexed, confounded and delighted (often in this sequence) when they first view a postmodern picturebook.

Conventions of Postmodern Picturebooks
(from Allen, 2014, and Lewis, 2001; see also Sipe & McGuire, 2008).

Frame or 'boundary breaking':

  • characters, narrators, writers and illustrators may talk to each other, and the reader
  • generic conventions are clearly evident, rather than hidden
  • 'high' culture (for example Shakespeare's plays) and 'low' culture (comic books) are bundled together.

Excess:

  • characters are grotesque or overstated and their behaviour shocks or is atypical for a children's picturebook
  • language is exaggerated
  • content is 'over the top' or introduces taboo topics
  • images are flamboyant, layout is exuberant
  • there is a general 'gigantism' (Lewis, 2001) that disrupts reader expectations.

Indeterminacy, ambiguity, lack of closure:

  • information is deliberately vague, omitted or ambiguous, for example, rather than a satisfying resolution, there is no closure
  • verbal and visual information connections are missing
  • the reader must make inferential leaps across textual gulfs, as nothing is routine, closed, or apparent - narrative gaps may become chasms
  • there are multiple meanings and multiple ways of thinking about the narrative.

Parody & intertextuality:

  • exploits literary and artistic traditions to make humorous or satirical comment - mocking, trivialising or making fun of a more serious original
  • borrows from multiple texts - a high level of intertextuality is called a pastiche (or, colloquially, a mash-up)
  • to enjoy the parody fully, the reader needs to identify the intertextuality, question the worthiness of the original text and appreciate the clever and amusing deployment of the original
  • 'fractured fairy tales' are good examples of parody for young readers

Performance:

  • the reader manipulates the book to follow the verbal or visual text
  • the book's physical space on the page is manipulated beyond normal expectations, for example, with tiny or huge print or collage work
  • attention is drawn to the usually 'invisible' parts of the peritext - the endpapers, the title page, foreword and afterword, dedication and even the imprint )copyright page)
  • characters and/or narrator appear to step outside the pages and address readers
  • reader cannot 'get lost' in the story, they are always aware it is a fiction.

These kind of performance features are called metafictive devices (the prefix 'meta' means 'about' or 'beyond' - so they are fiction devices about the fictional nature of the literary text).

The devices construct a fiction story that announces itself as a fiction story - it is self-reflexive, looking inside itself, rather than creating the usual pretence of truth and reality. Such picturebooks raise questions about reality, and how fictional these 'real' contexts may be in the way they are reported and produced.

See A Literature Companion for Teachers 2nd Edition, written by Lorraine McDonald for examples of classroom activities you can use with your students to explore postmodern picturebooks.