ABSTRACT
Nowadays, however, scholars of Children’s literature, writers, illustrators and teachers recognise that good picture books are complex visual narratives in which both words and images play an important role in the construction of the stories. In the sense, Sunderland highlights the need to adopt multimodal approaches that complement those traditional narrative theories which have focused mainly on the study of literary and content issues when analysing contemporary picture books. The multimodal analyses reveal how the verbal and visual modalities contribute to each other’s meaning and make evident the potential of combining words and images in picture books. Nodelman explores how that happens in picture books about boys wearing female-identified clothing in relation to a series of interrelated ideological assumptions. First of all, the male characters mostly consider dresses as signs of femininity, and by wearing them defend their choice of ignoring ongoing conventions.
