based on the author–illustrator’s autobiographical memories. Groundbreaking works are War Boy (1989) by Michael Foreman, dealing with the author’s wartime experiences, and Tibet Through the Red Box (1998), by Peter Sís, which combines the author’s childhood reminiscences with a biographical account on his father’s secret mission to Tibet (Kümmerling-Meibauer 2010). Picturebooks like these raise the abiding question of whether they are targeted at children only or whether they squint at an adult audience as well. That picturebooks can be interpreted on different levels, however, is not a new phenomenon in the development of the picturebook. This tendency already emerged with the picturebooks created by avant-garde artists in the 1920s and 1930s. However, the crossover appeal of picturebooks intensified in the last decades of the twentieth century for manifold reasons. In line with the popularity of crossover fiction for young people, picturebook-makers and publishers found a market for picturebooks addressing multiple audiences, thus calling attention to the picturebook’s potential crossover effect (see Beckett 2012 for a comprehensive survey on this topic).
The capability to attract adult readers is a characteristic that crossover picturebooks share with artists’ books (Drucker 2018). It is therefore not surprising that several artists, such as Warja Lavater, Enzo Mari, and Bruno Munari, created art works in both realms. The “folded stories” by Warja Lavater, the wordless picturebooks by Mari, and the sophisticated Libro illeggible N.Y. 1 (Unreadable Book N.Y. 1, 1967) and I prelibri (The Pre-Books, 1980) by Munari are situated at the interface between crossover picturebooks and artists’ books, since the artists creatively use the intricate book design, typography, and playful character of the material quality, which are typical features of the artists’ book (Beckett 2012, pp. 19–50). Yet they do so by openly addressing children as potential readers, thus paying tribute to the child’s capacity to deal with complicated picturebook concepts.
In the final decades of the twentieth century, postmodernism led to significant changes in the field of picturebooks, particularly in the Western world. Picturebook scholars have described the typical features of postmodern works of art, pointing to their arbitrariness, discontinuity, hybridity, and eclecticism (see Allan 2012 for an extensive survey on this discussion). Other features mentioned in this respect are playfulness, intertextuality, the arbitrariness between signifier and signified, and parodic recycling of popular genres like fairy tales and nursery rhymes (Sipe and Pantaleo 2008). These characteristics can be found in picturebooks such as Black and White (1990) by David Macaulay – winner of the Caldecott Medal in 1991, Shrek (1990) by William Steig, and The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales (1992) by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith. Other picturebooks emphasize the metafictive devices of the picturebook story; a prominent example is Jörg Müller’s Das Buch im Buch im Buch (A Book in a Book in a Book, 1990), which relies on the mise en abyme strategy, or they point to the multiplicity of perspectives, as is evident in Anthony Browne’s Voices in the Park (1998). By these strategies, postmodern picturebooks call attention to their status as works of art; they invite the reader to reflect on the conditions and structures of narratives as a whole and on how a perusal of texts and images may evoke different interpretations. Considering these complex issues, the dual readership of postmodern picturebooks comes to the fore. Due to their playful character and ironic nature, they often appeal to adolescents and adults, although children remain their primary audience.
Seen in this light, postmodern picturebooks are closely connected with crossover picturebooks and all those hybrid picturebooks that aspire to transgress the boundaries between genres and media formats. To go even a step further, it seems that postmodern picturebooks potentially are the successors of the critical picturebooks of the end of the 1960s/beginning of the 1970s, which have challenged the readers by scrutinizing common expectations of what a suitable picturebook for children should look like. In contrast to these previously conceived picturebooks, such as the Pop Art picturebook, postmodern picturebooks as multilayered art forms shift away from the ideological debates in the wake of the 1968 movement but still employ a mixture of styles, resist closure, and proffer multiple perspectives through the exploration of text and visuals.
Conclusion: The Picturebook in Education and Academia
The infinite possibilities contemporary picturebooks offer for producers, publishers, and readers had substantial effects in the educational as well as the academic sector. In order to promote books and reading, a television program, Reading Rainbow, was aired in the United States from 1983 to 2006. The dynamic format featured animated versions of picturebooks to encourage children to buy or loan the books on display. The series garnered over 200 awards, including 26 Emmys, and was relaunched as an app in 2010. Another reading promotion program focusing on picturebooks is Bookstart, launched by the British Book Trust in 1992. Still extant, this program fosters early literacy by entrusting different Bookstart packages to newborns, kindergarteners aged 3–4 years, and children starting school. Bookstart has served as a model for similar projects in other countries around the globe.
While the investigation of the (national) history of picturebooks can be traced back to the 1970s (Bader 1976; Doderer and Müller 1973), the theoretical study of the complex picture–text relation in picturebooks gathered momentum in the 1980s with the benchmark studies by Joseph Schwarcz (1982) and Perry Nodelman (1988). These research monographs gave the initial impetus for the rise of picturebook research as a separate domain within children’s literature studies.
This survey on the historical and aesthetic changes of the picturebook in the second half of the twentieth century has shown that this time period laid the basis for the rapidly developing narrative and aesthetic affordances of the picturebook in the new millennium. Without the appreciation of the picturebook as an art form per se, as already witnessed in the production of crossover picturebooks, artists’ books for children, and postmodern picturebooks, and the awareness that picturebooks eminently foster the child’s cognitive, emotional, and narrative development – often coined as (emergent) literacy – the growing success and variety of the picturebook in the twenty-first century cannot be understood in all its facets.
REFERENCES
1 Ahlberg, J. and Ahlberg, A. (1986). The Jolly Postman or Other People’s Letters. London: Penguin.
2 Allan, C. (2012). Playing with Picturebooks. Postmodernism and the Postmodernesque. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
3 Alloway, L. (1997). Popular culture and pop art. In: Pop Art. A Critical History (ed. S.H. Madoff), 167–174. Berkeley: University of California Press.
4 Awdry, W.V. (1945–1972). Railway series. 23 vols. London: Edmund Ward.
5 Bader, B. (1976). From Noah’s Ark to the Beast Within. New York: Macmillan.
6 Banyai, I. (1995a). Zoom. New York: Viking.
7 Banyai, I. (1995b). Re-Zoom. New York: Viking.
8 Beckett, S.L. (2012). Crossover Picturebooks: A Genre for All Ages. New York: Routledge.
9 Blake, Q. (1995). Clown. London: Jonathan Cape.
10 Bosch, E. (2018). Wordless picturebooks. In: The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks (ed. B. Kümmerling-Meibauer), 191–200. New York: Routledge.
11 Briggs, R. (1973). Father Christmas. London: Hamish Hamilton.
12 Browne, A. (1983). Gorilla. London: Walker Books.
13 Browne, A. (1997). Willy the Dreamer. London: Walker Books.
14 Browne, A. (1998). Voices in the Park. London: Walker Books.
15 Bruna, D. (1963–2006). Nijntje books. 24 vols. The Hague: Mercis. [Eng. trans. Miffy books. London: Methuen, 1964–2007.]
16 Burningham,
