A pioneering study of a unique narrative form, Words about Pictures examines the special qualities of picture books-books intended to educate or tell stories to young children. Drawing from a number of aesthetic and literary sources, Perry Nodelman explores the ways in which the interplay of the verbal and visual aspects of picture books conveys more narrative information and stimulation than either medium could achieve alone. Moving from "baby" books, alphabet books, and word books to such well-known children's picture books as Nancy Ekholm Burkert's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Gerald McDermott's Arrow to the Sun, Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, and Chris Van Allsburg's The Garden of Abdul Gasazi, Nodelman reveals how picture-book narrative is affected by the exclusively visual information of picture-book design and illustration as well as by the relationships between pictures and their complementary texts.
"Nodelman brings the disciplines of psychology and art history, of semiotics and reader-response theory, as well as insights from an eclectic cadre of other disciplines to this book. Words About Pictures is the most complete theoretical analysis of the genre."
Wilson Library Bulletin
"This stunning book applies anthropological perspectives on myth and kinship to the pervasive legacy of slavery, which still dominates American understandings of race, humanity, freedom. Auslander's skilled collaboration with the descendants of 'Miss Kitty,' sometimes called 'the person who caused the civil war,' brings the unexpected story of her family to light, forging firm links across separat
Booklist
"A brilliant, almost overwhelming study that treats Maurice Sendak and Trina Schart Hyman with the same attention to detail and nuance that Wayne Booth gives Jane Austen in The Rhetoric of Fiction. . . . An exceptionally rich book, Words About Pictures asks you to think and read and look and look again. It will open your eyes."
