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.
Clare Painter is an Honorary Associate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. J R Martin is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. His research interests include systemic theory, functional grammar, discourse semantics, register, genre, multimodality and critical discourse analysis, focussing on English and Tagalog - with special reference to the transdisciplinary fields of educational linguistics and social semiotics. Len Unsworth is Professor in Education at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. Len was a classroom teacher in Queensland before moving into teacher education at the University of Western Sydney, and then the University of Sydney prior to moving to the University of New England and then to Griffith University. He has been a chief investigator on five Australian Research Council funded projects since 2005 including two ARC Linkage Projects with the NSW Department of Education and Training and the Australian Children's Television Foundation as industry partners. Len's publications include Literacy Learning and Teaching (Macmillan, 1993), Researching Language in Schools and Communities (Continuum, 2000), Teaching Multiliteracies across the Curriculum [with Angela Thomas, Alyson Simpson and Jenny Asha] (Open University Press, 2001), Teaching Children's Literature with Information and Communication Technologies (McGraw-Hill/Open University Press 2005), E-literature for Children and Classroom Literacy Learning (Routledge, 2006), New Literacies and the English Curriculum (Continuum, 2008) and Multimodal Semiotics (Continuum, 2008).
Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty, professionals, and practitioners. Choice, Vol 50.11 Overall, Reading Visual Narrativesis an important contribution to the field of social semiotics, in general, and to the study of visual-verbal narratives in children's picture books, in particular. Painter et al. have produced a work that is (almost) as fascinating as the material upon which it is based. LinguistList, June 2013

JR Martin

Clare Painter

Len Unsworth