Reading the Contemporary Picturebook: Negotiating Change

In this multimedia world, technology has challenged the place of the book and, indeed, the way in which we might read texts. The digital culture has provided opportunities for radical changes in books for children and adolescents. In particular, one form of multimodal text, the picturebook, provides enormous challenges in its capacity for what Lewis calls an 'endless metamorphosis' (2001: 136). Its intended audience has expanded to embrace young adults as well as younger readers. The picturebook constantly borrows and exploits genres and manipulates interanimation of word and image. Its flexibility means that it has the ability to respond to social and cultural changes and technological developments. In particular, the very nature of the picturebook allows for the incorporation of electronic modes of expression in both obvious and subtle ways. The diversity provided by print and electronic versions of picturebooks has led to changes in reader expectations 'where communication in this digital culture is marked by the interactivity, immediacy and complexity of both image and text' (Unsworth 2005: 6). This paper explores ways in which educators might respond to these changes and draw on this interactivity and provide new navigation skills to allow the reader to engage with such texts in the twenty- first century. Recent research has emphasized an examining of picturebooks through a visual literacy framework, with a focus on function and form where tools are developed for meaning-making. Yet, if picturebooks provide, as Lewis suggests, opportunities for readers to not only absorb but interpret and re-present, then an understanding of picturebooks as literature is also significant. This paper searches for a rigorous approach that would allow the reader what Leavis calls 'a power … of creative response to the new challenges of time' (Leavis 1962:27).