Text and image in children's literature

This special issue journal will consider the interaction between words and pictures which lies at the heart of children’s literature. Originally, and essentially, meant to entertain and instruct, children’s literature stages the complicity between two semiotic codes engaged in a relation which is alternately, or simultaneously, didactic, hermeneutic, emblematic, aesthetic or ludic, as words and pictures serve or subvert each other, complete or compete with one another. In our discussion of the ways in which the hybrid combination of text and image is what produces meaning as well as provides verbal and visual pleasure, we will also examine the status of the reader/viewer of such texts, thus broadening the emphasis on formal issues to cultural and historical issues of power and gender.