AustLit

'This volume represents the current state of research on picture books and other adjacent hybrid forms of　visual/verbal texts such as comics, graphic novels, and book apps, with a particular focus on texts produced for and　about young people. When Perry Nodelman’s Words about Pictures: the Narrative Art of Children’s Picture Books was published almost three decades ago, it was greeted as an important contribution to studies in children’s　picture books and illustration internationally; and based substantially on it, Nodelman has recently been named the 2015 recipient of the International Grimm Award for children’s literature criticism. In the years since Words About Pictures appeared, scholars have built on Nodelman’s groundbreaking text and have developed a range of other approaches, both to picture books and to newer forms of visual/verbal texts that have entered the marketplace and become popular with young people. The essays in this book offer 'more words' about established and emerging forms of picture books, providing an overview of the current state of studies in visual/verbal texts and gathering in one place the work being produced at various locations and across disciplines. Essays exploring areas such as semiological and structural aspects of conventional picture books, graphic narratives and new media forms, and the material and performative cultures of picture books represent current work not only from literary studies but also media studies, art history, ecology, Middle Eastern Studies, library and information studies, and educational research.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Like many scholars of young people's texts and cultures, I expect, I have watched with great interest the protest movements collectively known as Occupy and media coverage of these movements over the past year. From the beginning, whichever event is cited as the beginning, the activists collectively have been represented and addressed as young people. Adbusters, the Vancouver culture-jamming magazine that first posted the call to "#OCCUPYWALLSTREET" on its website in July 2011, implies an audience of young people in its style and content. The playful register of the September-October 2011 issue, with its now-famous centrefold of a ballerina gracefully posed on the rampaging bull used by Wall Street as a metonym for the markets, is one example, as are the pictures of young people used to illustrate the spreads that end the issue: two prepubescent boys with slogans painted on their chests clown for the camera while another boy who has discarded his shirt faces down a line of police in full riot gear in the piece on "World War IV," and a swarm of youthful demonstrators fill the background of the page headlined "Dreaming of Democracy." The mainstream media reports followed the lead of Adbusters. Articles about Occupy are almost invariably accompanied either by high-angle shots of a crowd of mostly young protesters in an urban space or by a series of head-and-shoulder shots of individual occupiers. The 31 October 2011 issue of Maclean's: Canada's National Magazine, for example, uses both of these visual cues: the crowd shot appears on the front cover behind the provocative title, "The Occupy Wall Street Movement Has It All Wrong," while four youthful activists, posed with their placards in front of them, appear at the head of the article.'  (Introduction)