Although scholars have explored the meaning-making affordances of peritextual features such as dust jackets, case covers, beginning and final endpapers, frontispieces, title pages and imprint pages in picturebooks, limited research has focused on the peritextual elements of graphic novels. Purposive sampling was used to select a data set of 30…

Picture books are important mediums for transformation and learning. They offer both the tools and the truths for readers to critically engage with important issues, such as the reality of death and dying. The primary purpose of this study is to inspire engaged and deliberate conversations about mortality, dying, and grief in the context of…

This study explores the potential of illustrated barcodes of picturebooks in the educational context. The study reviews the modification by artists of conventional and mandatory barcodes into creative barcode placements in picturebooks. By raising awareness of the aesthetic subtleties of barcodes, the paper articulates how these attractive and…

This article examines the reconstruction of human foibles in picturebook adaptations of three popular Aesop's fables: "The Ants and the Grasshopper", "The Lion and the Mouse", and "The Hare and the Tortoise". Adopting adaptation and globalectics perspectives, the author illustrates how social hierarchy is…

Love, beauty, and the good are three key concepts of Platonic aesthetics, which frequently appear in the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde, a classical scholar deeply influenced by Plato and his philosophy. Plato's views on music, as a part of his aesthetics, were championed by Wilde, who regarded music as "the perfect type of art." It is…

The Basque Country is a stateless nation located in the western part of the Pyrenees, divided between France and Spain. The romanticist nationalist trend that emerged in Europe throughout the nineteenth century gave rise to a nationalist feeling in the Basque Country that has been fed, among others, by children's literature. Children's literature…

This paper examines the changing presentation of teachers in the post-Mao era. The image of teachers was almost sacred in traditional Confucian society until Mao Zedong launched China's Cultural Revolution in 1966, when children were encouraged to use the pretext of class struggle to critique and even to attack their teachers. As such, restoring…

Child-produced marginalia, annotations written or drawn in the margins of a text by a young reader, have been stigmatized as devaluing the book on which it was created and often dismissed as "graffiti." Recent historical studies of marginalia created by older children, those who have mastered conventional writing and drawing, have…

While scholars have recognized the importance of page breaks in both the construction and comprehension of narrative within picture books, there has previously been limited research that focused directly on how children discuss and make sense of these spaces in the text. Yet, because of their nature as dramatic gaps in the narrative, page breaks…

This article explores children's picturebooks about death and grieving by considering both psychological and literary aspects. Two questions frame this analysis: How can picturebooks, particularly written for young children, support children's grief when someone dies? How do the illustrations and text of picture books express and convey the…

As art objects, picturebooks have the potential to contribute to readers' aesthetic development. Many scholars and practitioners have recognized how using picturebooks with older students can augment their reading motivation and extend their understanding of visual elements of art and design, as well as develop their literacy, language, and…

Situated at the intersections of ethnography, childhood studies, literary studies, and education research, this reception study seeks to access real children's responses to a particular text, and to offer empirical description of actual reading experiences. Survey data is generated by taking advantage of an online resource: an archive of…

The telling of lies is significant in fiction written for children, and is often (though not in all cases) performed by child protagonists. Lying can be examined from at least three perspectives: philosophical, moral and aesthetic. The moral and the aesthetic are the most significant for children's literature. Morality has been subtly dealt with…

In this article, we explore one of the important peritextual features of picturebooks--the endpapers. In order to represent the rich diversity of form and function displayed by endpapers, we group examples along two dimensions: whether the endpapers are illustrated or unillustrated, and whether the front and back end papers are identical or…