Throughout its history, the ecology of the picturebook has been impacted by various social and cultural changes. Postmodernism is one perspective, among other conceptual and theoretical frameworks, that has been proposed to explain some of the fundamental changes evident in many contemporary picturebooks. A review of the literature (Pantaleo &…

In this article, the authors situate their discussion of diverse narrative structures in the context of oral storytelling practices and postmodern picturebooks. They focus on three contemporary picturebooks: "Don't Read This Book!" (Lewis, 2009), "Abe Lincoln Crosses a Creek: A Tall Thin Tale" (Hopkins, 2008), and "The Stinky Cheese Man and Other…

Narrative embedding is a common narrative structural device. Genette (1980, 1988) distinguished among various diegetic levels to explain the discrete narrative levels in embedded narratives and he defined metalepsis as the deliberate disturbing or breaking of narrative boundaries. Metalepsis, described by Malina (2002) as a mutinous narrative…

"The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales" (1992) by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith was awarded a Randolph Caldecott Honor Medal in 1993. Scieszka and Smith subvert textual authority through playing "with literary and cultural codes and conventions" (McCallum 1996, p. 400) in their metafictive text. In this article, I discuss the…

During the past three years, the author has been exploring Grade 5 students' processes of reading and understanding contemporary picturebooks with Radical Change characteristics and metafictive devices, and examining how students use their knowledge of these characteristics and devices to create their own texts. "The Stinky Cheese Man and Other…