Reading Contemporary Picturebooks

Reading Contemporary Picturebooks is happily more eclectic than a primer. Part social scientist and part literary critic, Lewis approaches his subject through a combination of taxonomical evaluation and meditative analysis, producing an even-handed examination of Emil Award winning British picture books published during the last twenty years...offers much useful information that will be of value to the scholar and student of contemporary picturebooks. Lavishly illustrated with 29 black-and-white plates, Lewis' volume makes a contribution to visual literacy, suggesting the variety of ways in which picture books convey meaning to their readers.. <br>-Philip Nel, Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Spring, 2002, Vol. 27, No.1 <br> In Reading Contemporary Picturebooks: Picturing Text, David Lewis studies the similarities and differences between picture books as a way of understanding how picture books work first as a verbal text, then visual, and finally as a process. By considering the responses of children and adults and by looking at picture books created from a postmodern sensibility (e.g., Macaulay's Black and White), Lewis sees the picture book itself as a form of artistic expression that alters constantly and endlessly.Lewis so ably defines this postmodern critical terms ( metafiction, fragmentation, indeterminacy) that even the novice feels comfortable. And the appendices alone - on developments in printing technology and Kress and Leeuwen's Grammar of Visual Design - are worth reading for any student of the picture book.. <br>-The Horn Book Magazine, May/June 2002 <br>