How does the postmodern picturebook set out to capture both the adult Essay

How does the postmodern picturebook set out to capture both the adult and the child reader's interest - Essay Example This paper examines two postmodern children’s picture books, Voices in the Park, and The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Fairy Tales, and explains four techniques that they use to capture both the adult and the child reader’s interest, namely non-traditional plot structure, shifting character perspective, paratextual devices, and intertextual references. The postmodern children’s picture book does not exist in a vacuum, but follows a long history of writing and illustrating which goes back many centuries. It sets itself against the rather rigid traditional stories such as fables and fairy tales, which usually have an anonymous narrator who leads the reader along a steady chronological timeline through a single plot with key characters who play fairly predictable roles. Children and adults alike enjoy the comfortable framework that is provided, and there are conventions like a â€Å"once upon a time† beginning, some thrills and spills with good an d bad characters in the middle, and a nice, neat â€Å"happy ending† in which all the loose ends of the plot are tied up. A postmodern children’s picture book relies upon this framework too, but in a different way. Instead of following these predictable patterns, it springs outside them and introduces different narrative voices and non-chronological structures to mix things up and make the story multifaceted. A good example of this is Voice in the Park which tells four stories in succession, all of which refer to the same actual time frame. No one narrative voice is dominant, and the perspectives of mother figure, father figure, girl figure and boy figure are allowed to coexist, even though they do not exactly agree with each other. Portraying them as gorillas is a clever technique which echoes older traditions of anthropomorphism but at the same time forces modern readers out of any race or class stereotypes: age and gender are what distinguish the characters, and the re is an equal number of each. There is no single plot in this book, but instead there is a spell of time in a park in which four people meet, and the book presents this from four different angles. In The Stinky Cheeseman there is a single narrator, who is the â€Å"Jack† character from the well-known fairy tale â€Å"Jack and the Beanstalk† but he appears in the book outside the confines of his own story, and interacts with characters from other tales such as the Little Red Hen and Little Red Riding Hood. None of the characters in the stories agree to play along with the original plotlines that adults especially will have learned, and the result is a kaleidoscope of fairy tale elements turned upside down. There are short tales within a tale, but the boundaries are fluid and characters appear in stories where they traditionally do not belong, all of which indicates a postmodern playfulness. The narrator is not in control of the stories, and the characters run amok. Thi s is an example of metafiction (Pantaleo, 2004, p. 213) because it draws attention to how the story is put together. This in turn stimulates discussion between readers about both the content of the story and the whole process of story formation, reading, listening and understanding. Returning to Voices in the Park, this book adult and child personas to engage both adult and child interest. Adults will be able to identify with the mother figure, criticising the