Our understanding of the birth of a book often begins with the author's creation of the narrative text. To this the illustrator adds pictures, enhancing the story's meaning with visual expression. But in Bang's picture books, the classic understanding of illustration as embellishment is upturned; she begins with a picture from which her story unfolds.
Her picture books - The Grey Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher, Goose, Old Mother Bear and When Sophie Gets Angry-- Really, Really Angry... - provide a sampling of unconventional representations of picture-text relations where the role of the forest becomes a place of accommodation for the conveyance of emotional suspense within the narratives. In this selection of four major works illustrated by Molly Bang, the relationship between text and image does not disintegrate meaning in one entity or the other but each enhances the other's presence within a unified whole, achieving communality within the experience of storytelling.
Journal
The Looking Glass : New Perspectives on Children's LiteratureISSN
1551-5680Volume
13Issue
1Publisher
La Trobe UniversitySection Title
Emerging VoicesAuthor Biography
Pamela Fairfield is currently in her final year of the Master of Library and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, completing in June 2009. She holds degrees in English from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and in Theatrical Costume Studies from Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. In 2005, stemming from a three-year period as the Curator of the Interurban Gallery in Vancouver, Pamela published the title essay for Anvil Press's Painted Lives & Shifting Landscapes: Paintings, Prints and Murals of Richard Tetrault. She believes the library, like the gallery, is a place for everyone to engage in the communal environment of learningDate Created
2009-03-02Rights Statement
Essays and articles published in The Looking Glass may be reproduced for non-profit use by any educational or public institution; letters to the editor and on-site comments made by our readers may not be used without the expressed permission of that individual. Any commercial use of this journal, in whole or in part, by any means, is prohibited. Authors of accepted articles assign to The Looking Glass the right to publish and distribute their text electronically and to archive and make it permanently available electronically. They retain the copyright and, 90 days after initial publication, may republish it in any form they wish as long as The Looking Glass is acknowledged as the original source.Data source
OJS data migration 2025: https://ojs.latrobe.edu.au/ojs/index.php/tlg/article/view/131
