ABSTRACT

Extending the discussion of critical content analysis to the visual realm of picturebooks and graphic novels, this book provides a clear research methodology for understanding and analyzing visual imagery. Offering strategies for "reading" illustrations in global and multicultural literature, chapter authors explore and bring together critical theory and social semiotics while demonstrating how visual analysis can be used to uncover and analyze power, ideologies, inequity, and resistance in picturebooks and graphic novels. This volume covers a diverse range of texts and types of books and offers tools and procedures for interpreting visual images to enhance the understandings of researchers, teachers, and students as they engage with the visual culture that fills our world. These methods are significant not only to becoming a critical reader of literature but to also becoming a critical reader of visual images in everyday life.

part I|2 pages

Research Methodology and Analytical Tools

part II|2 pages

Visual Images in Counter-Narratives

part III|2 pages

Visual Images and Positioning

chapter 7|25 pages

The Power of a Gaze

Inviting Entrée into the World of a Picturebook while Positioning a Lived Reality

chapter 8|16 pages

De(MIST)ifying Depression

Dark Clouds and the Construction of Disability

chapter 9|19 pages

Grandma and the Great Gourd

A Comparison of Images in an App and a Picturebook

part IV|2 pages

Visual Images and Ideologies

chapter 11|18 pages

Postwar Images

Japanese Ideologies of National Identity in Picturebooks

chapter 12|19 pages

Immigrant Memoirs as Reflections of Time and Place

Middle Eastern Conflict in Graphic Novels

chapter 14|20 pages

A Picturebook as a Cultural Artifact

The Influence of Embedded Ideologies

part V|2 pages

Final Reflections