Reading Visual Narratives: Image Analysis of Children's Picture Books (Functional Linguistics) - Softcover

Painter, Clare; Martin, J.R.; Unsworth, Len

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1781791015 ISBN 13: 9781781791011

Publisher: Equinox Publishing Ltd, 2013

Synopsis

Contemporary children’s picture books provide a rich domain for developing theory and analysis of visual meaning and its relation to accompanying verbal text. This book offers new descriptions of the visual strand of meaning in picture book narratives as a way of furthering the project of ‘multimodal’ discourse analysis and of explaining the literacy demands and apprenticing techniques of children’s earliest literature.

Reading Visual Narratives uses the principles of systemic-functional theory to organise an explicit account of visual meaning in relation to three perspectives: the visual construction of the narrative events and characters (ideational meaning), the visual positioning of the reader through choices related to focalisation and appraisal (interpersonal meaning) and the discourse organization of visual meanings through choices in framing and composition (textual meaning). The descriptions throughout are illustrated with examples from highly regarded children’s picture books.

Reading Visual Narratives extends previous social-semiotic accounts of the ‘grammar’ of the image, by focussing attention on discourse level meanings and on semantic relationships created by sequences of images. At the same time, it extends current understandings of how picture books work through its explicit and systematic account of the visual meanings and their integration with verbal aspects of the texts.

It will be of interest to researchers in multimodal discourse analysis, systemic-functional theory, and children’s literature and literacy.

About this title

About the Author

Clare Painter is Honorary Associate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. J R Martin is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. Len Unsworth is Professor in Education at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia.

Edition details

• Publisher: Equinox Publishing Ltd
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1781791015
• ISBN 13: 9781781791011
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 202