ABSTRACT
All aspects of textual discourse, from story outcomes to the expressive forms of language and pictorial representation, are informed and shaped by ideology. In books for children, as in wider society, ideology functions as a cognitive framework that shapes, among other things, "knowledge, opinions and attitudes, and social representations". Picturebooks express the ideology of a society both verbally and visually. Ideology may be expressed as social ecology or habitus in such a way that it permeates visual and verbal discourses without becoming overt. Because ideology is not fixed, the function of stories both to make the world intelligible and to shape it in desirable forms must necessarily be fluid and flexible. The confluence of affect and ideology pivots on the production of empathy, which is the endpoint of reader self-reference. The conjunction of affect and ideology in the outcome of Miss Annabel Spoon accords with Patrick Colm Hogan's argument that story structures are shaped and oriented by emotion systems.
