engleski

Intermediality of children’s novels: A transformation of a genre

The paper focuses on the role of visual elements in the discourse of children’s novels. Children’s literature has always been closely related to images. It rarely appears without illustrations, which support the text and adorn books. The meanings of certain literary texts have remained consistent and unique despite different publications with illustrations by various artists. However, the history of children’s novel embraces books in which visual elements interact with literary texts to provide additional narrative meanings. Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland with John Tenniel’s illustrations is a case in point. More recently, visual elements in children’s novels often, and intentionally, become important in conveying narrative meanings. Such publications demonstrate a specific trend in children’s narrative fiction, and lead to a transformation of the novel into a new kind of combined-media narrative form, which differs from graphic novels and which, in some respects, resembles the picturebook in its semiotic structure. The paper describes such examples of recent children’s novels, and attempts at a description of different modes of text-image relationship found in them. The results may point towards a possible definition of this hybrid narrative form.

children’s literature ; illustration ; novel ; semiotic structure ; visual storytelling

nije evidentirano