The Truth Behind Picture Books

In this essay I will discuss if and how picture books break the rules of reader expectations, earlier children’s literature in the 19th century, expected behaviour of children, grammar, as well as typeface and images. Picture books challenge the ideas of what children’s books used to be, breaking the rules of early childhood literature, when children’s books usually emphasised religious or moral issues. (Whalley. J.I, 2009, pp 303) Books at this time (early 19th century) did not contain illustrations that added depth to the text as picture books do now. (Whalley. J.I, 2009, pp 300) It was the discovery of the educationalist Moravia that children remembered more about what they saw than what they read that had an impact on how books were presented to children. (Whalley. J.I, 2009, pp 300) Using the knowledge that children learn to read pictures before words encouraged the
Where The Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1992) has very few words, the whole book is just ten sentences long. Each sentence occupies more than one page, thus breaking the rules of literature, as usually sentences begin and end on one page, yet these breaks are intentional. The breaks encourage pace and rhythm, AV 2 ensuring the pages are turned. (Mackey, 2009, pp93)) The middle six pages (fig, 1, 2, 3 below) have no text whatsoever as some images can make words redundant, AV2 Using pictures alone encourages the reader to become the author, again breaking literature rules where the author leads the reader through their book, it also breaks the rules of the readers expectations as it is expected there will be text to accompany the