By examining the subversive discourse of both children, Charles and Smudge, this paper will focus on the child's identity in Anthony Browne's postmodern picture book Voices in the Park. Drawing on ...the postmodern theory and mainly on Lyotard's perception of childhood as a time of intense creativity and imagination, where the child is free to explore the world in a way that is not bound by the adult's rationality and logic, this paper will analyse how Charles's and Smudge's discourses dare to go against the normative discourse of their parents. Smudge manages to change her father's discourse, while Charles deconstructs his mother's discourse by exposing its flaws and creating the possibility for resistance. By analysing the underlying tensions between the normative discourses of the parents and that of the children, which Lyotard calls the 'other of all discourse', this study offers some insights into the identity of the child Browne presents to his readers. This paper highlights the nature of the agency the children manage to construct through their encounters in the park. It will conclude that although children are an integral part of the parents' normative power structure, they manage to become a disruptive force of change from within the system itself.
The main aim of this article is to study the communicative functions of visual metonymies in a sample of picture books written and illustrated by Anthony Browne, an internationally acclaimed author ...and illustrator of children’s books. The three tales selected for analysis are Voices in the Park, Gorilla and Piggybook, all of which have been highly praised by critics and become universally accepted as classics. Within the frameworks of visual social semiotics and cognitive linguistics, the strategies available to the illustrator to represent characters in picture books have been identified and analysed in the contexts where they were produced. The results of the analysis show that visual metonymies are used in Browne’s picture books essentially to highlight or minimize a character’s status over another fictional actor, to ascribe negative qualities or attitudes to the main characters and, in turn, to foreshadow what is yet to come in the story.
...that values the empathy and alterity, the literary treatment of animals often becomes the ethical testing ground for children's writers to forge child-animal affinity. According to Malamud, when ...human imperialists shackle animals for the public's viewing pleasure and not the animals' welfare, they "subsume zoos and their captive animals within various anthropocentrist social structures and systems of culture, thus misrepresenting the realities of animals' existence and their role on this planet" (1). Ultimately, these readers implicitly disavow anthropocentrism, encounter animal otherness, and witness a personified presence at the zoo through multiple readings and educational dialogues. ...the anthropomorphizing of zoo animals (and the corollary implied zoomorphizing of humans) in Browne's texts is, in and of itself, a force for both empathy with animal others and for reflection upon the mythic contradictions and continuum we human readers often feel in their human-like animality and our animal-like humanity. ...that may mimic the care provided by zookeepers, the gorilla is anthropomorphized to assume human-like custody of the cat as his pet.
One Gorilla: A Counting Book (review) Stevenson, Deborah
Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books,
2013, 2013-01-00, 20130101, Letnik:
66, Številka:
5
Journal Article, Book Review
Stevenson reviews One Gorilla: A Counting Book written and illustrated by Anthony Browne.
Silly Billy (review) Stevenson, Deborah
Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books,
2007, 2007-01-00, 20070101, Letnik:
60, Številka:
5
Journal Article, Book Review
Stevenson reviews Silly Billy written and illustrated by Anthony Browne.
Bullen and Parsons identify Anthony Browne's picture book Into the Forest as a re-gendered retelling of 'Little Red Riding Hood' that expresses recent assumptions about childhood, risk and the ...resources children need to survive in today's world. In Browne's version, the forest is the terrain in which a young male protagonist imaginatively explores his anxiety about his father's unexplained absence.
The authors review numerous children's books that encourage reader interaction and response, including pop‐up books, books that invite interactive reading aloud, books with evocative illustrations, ...funny books, and those that generate emotional response. A conversation with author Kevin Henkes is also featured, along with reflections from authors Lisa Yee and Robert Sabuda.
Voices in the Park(Browne, 1998) was one of nine picture books I used in a
study that explored the nature of Grade 1 children’s literary
understanding by examining their verbal responses during ...storybook read-aloud
sessions, and their subsequent written, visual arts, and dramatic responses. This
article discusses the Grade 1 students’ responses to and understandings of
the metafictive devices in Anthony Browne’s picture book. Although
researchers and theorists have written about metafiction, a paucity of research has
explored elementary students’ literary understandings of and responses to
books with metafictive devices. As well as defining metafiction and identifying
various metafictive devices described in the literature, this article contextualizes
Browne’s work and the children’s responses in a discussion of
metafictive textual practices in postmodern and Radical Change literature.
