Playing with Picturebooks: Postmodernism and the Postmodernesque (Critical Approaches to Children's Literature)

Postmodernism has played a significant part in the development of playful and experimental picturebooks for children over the past fifty years. Playing with Picturebooks: Postmodernism and the Postmodernesque offers fresh insights into the continuing influence of postmodernism on picturebooks for children, covering a wide range of international picturebooks predominantly from the 1980s to the present. It represents a significant contribution to current debates centred on the decline of postmodernism on fiction and detects a shift from the postmodern to the postmodernesque. Playing with Picturebooks draws on a wide range of critical perspectives in examining postmodrn approaches to narrative and illustration. Chapters discuss how metafictive devices enable different modes of representation, offer different perspectives to authorised versions of history, and promote difference and ex-centricity over unity. Playing with Picturebooks: Postmodernism and the Postmodernesque is essential reading, not only for academics in the field of children's literature, but also for researchers, teachers, and students.