ABSTRACT
Claude Ponti is a famous contemporary French author, popular with children and adults alike in his home country though his books are little known elsewhere. 1 (Only a few have been translated into English, for instance.) Ponti’s most recent publication at the time of writing, La Venture d’Isée (Isée’s ad-venture), was released in November 2012, while his first picture book L’Album d’Adèle (Adèle’s picture book) came out in 1986. L’Album d’Adèle was a milestone in the world of picture books for younger children in France, even as the large format and non-linear wordless story left many adults sceptical. Ponti’s first three picture books about Adèle – L’Album d’Adèle, Adèle s’en mêle (Adèle muddles in, 1987), and Adèle et la pelle (Adèle and the spade, 1988) – contain all of the elements that the author develops in the rest of his work. In this essay I use Gérard Genette’s definition of the paratext as all of the elements surrounding a text, and Patricia Waugh’s definition of metafictional texts as those in which the act of reading and the book are self-consciously brought to the reader’s attention, to anchor a discussion of Ponti’s picture-book spaces. 2
