ABSTRACT
This chapter revises the theory underpinning people's research in the first edition where author's considered what visual literacy could offer everyone understanding of picturebook reading through a review of the field. In the new version, it considers visual literacy again but author's have fine-tuned people's focus in order to look in more depth at theories, frameworks and approaches that are more closely linked to response to picturebooks. A child can enjoy a picturebook, of course, without sophisticated knowledge of visual literacy. Picturebook artists invite readers to do exactly this, to see the whole through careful observation of the parts, encouraging the reader to move back and forth between the details and the big picture. Postmodern literary theory has contributed in a substantial manner to everyone understanding of the visual and of picturebooks in particular by providing terminology and definitions of the features of teeverxts that work in less traditional ways.
