Читать книгу A Companion to Children's Literature - Группа авторов - Страница 60

The infinite possibilities contemporary picturebooks offer for producers, publishers, and readers had substantial effects in the educational as well as the academic sector. In order to promote books and reading, a television program, Reading Rainbow, was aired in the United States from 1983 to 2006. The dynamic format featured animated versions of picturebooks to encourage children to buy or loan the books on display. The series garnered over 200 awards, including 26 Emmys, and was relaunched as an app in 2010. Another reading promotion program focusing on picturebooks is Bookstart, launched by the British Book Trust in 1992. Still extant, this program fosters early literacy by entrusting different Bookstart packages to newborns, kindergarteners aged 3–4 years, and children starting school. Bookstart has served as a model for similar projects in other countries around the globe.

While the investigation of the (national) history of picturebooks can be traced back to the 1970s (Bader 1976; Doderer and Müller 1973), the theoretical study of the complex picture–text relation in picturebooks gathered momentum in the 1980s with the benchmark studies by Joseph Schwarcz (1982) and Perry Nodelman (1988). These research monographs gave the initial impetus for the rise of picturebook research as a separate domain within children’s literature studies.

This survey on the historical and aesthetic changes of the picturebook in the second half of the twentieth century has shown that this time period laid the basis for the rapidly developing narrative and aesthetic affordances of the picturebook in the new millennium. Without the appreciation of the picturebook as an art form per se, as already witnessed in the production of crossover picturebooks, artists’ books for children, and postmodern picturebooks, and the awareness that picturebooks eminently foster the child’s cognitive, emotional, and narrative development – often coined as (emergent) literacy – the growing success and variety of the picturebook in the twenty-first century cannot be understood in all its facets.