If you are looking for a book that examines text within art this is not the book for you. It is just a collection of writing about a handful of artists. Overall it is very dull and boring Xavier Zhapan rated it it was ok Sep 16, Laura added it Oct 10, Foxglove Zayuri marked it as to-read Aug 21, Kenneth marked it as to-read Jul 06, Stephen Robertson marked it as to-read Nov 15, Christina Browne marked it as to-read Jan 02, Morgan Podraza marked it as to-read May 18, Chantal marked it as to-read Jun 21, ZZcat marked it as to-read Feb 12, Victoria is currently reading it Mar 12, Francisco del valle is currently reading it Jul 06, Blanche Barrow added it Aug 28, Steven marked it as to-read Dec 13, Hayley added it Dec 24, There are no discussion topics on this book yet.
He spent much of his life in England and became a British subject shortly before his death. He is primarily known for a series of major novels in which he portrayed the encounter of America with Europe. His plots centered on personal relationships, the proper exercise of power in such relationships, and other moral questions. His method of writing from the point of view of a character within a tale allowed him to explore the phenomena of consciousness and perception, and his style in later works has been compared to impressionist painting.
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James insisted that writers in Great Britain and America should be allowed the greatest freedom possible in presenting their view of the world, as French authors were. His imaginative use of point of view, interior monologue and unreliable narrators in his own novels and tales brought a new depth and interest to realistic fiction, and foreshadowed the modernist work of the twentieth century.
An extraordinarily productive writer, in addition to his voluminous works of fiction he published articles and books of travel writing, biography, autobiography, and criticism,and wrote plays, some of which were performed during his lifetime with moderate success.
What will the readers' reaction be? And even "what implement to draw with there are a lot to choose from ".
The lure of illustrated children's books
Behind apparently spontaneous images lie deep thought and hard labour. Experts distinguish between "illustrated books", where the picture complements the text, and "picture books", where the pictures come first. But in reality the two often overlap, and words and pictures cast a combined spell. The relationship is subtle, and the role of the artist varies. Some are supreme individual storytellers in pictures, such as Raymond Briggs or Maurice Sendak, but as well as creating their own books many artists act as illustrators for other writers.
This has given rise to notable partnerships: And while some illustrators have an instantly recognisable style, others, such as Helen Oxenbury, are almost chameleon-like. Credited with introducing board books for babies, Oxenbury has her own series about a boy called Tom, but as an illustrator for more than 40 years, she cannot be pigeonholed.
I should confess here that my small granddaughter asks for these three books so often that I sometimes hide them as an act of mercy to myself — but to my shame I have only recently noticed that the illustrator is the same. Good pictures do more than complement the text. They enlarge and widen its reference, even providing readings that the author never expected.
When he wrote Bear Hunt , Rosen has said, he imagined a line of kings and queens setting out to hunt — but Oxenbury created an ordinary family, squelching through mud, tiptoeing into the cave, dashing back under the bedclothes. The final, wordless image, of the bear trotting by the sea, a lonely figure in the dusk, is all her own. Small children don't think of characters or settings as being invented: Charlie and Lola, the Little Princess and the Gruffalo simply are.
And children possess stories in their own way too.
As listeners they pooh-pooh the laws of narrative. They rush ahead, or stop maddeningly at a single page and refuse to continue. Often this page involves sudden chaos or disorder, like the joy of knocking down a tower of bricks. In Judith Kerr's Mog the Forgetful Cat the favourite picture is not the climax where Mog surprises the burglar although that allows for a bloodcurdling "miaow".
Instead the choice is Mog's sudden appearance at the window which makes Mrs Thomas jump so that the peas in her saucepan cascade to the floor. Similarly, in Lynley Dodd's Slinky Malinki , the stopping-point is the picture of the felonious cat entangled in all his purloined goods, with milk-bottles crashing and alarm clocks screeching. In John Burningham's Mr Gumpy's Outing the illustrations build up with the rhythm of music, but the most-loved page is the great double-page spread where children and animals tumble — splash!
The chaos is resolved by a later spread, showing Mr Gumpy's passengers dry and warm, enjoying a lavish tea.
Picture and Text (Illustrated Edition)
Six out of 10 books often involving animals seem to end with "and they all had tea" and of course a birthday tea tops them all. It is rather pleasing, therefore, that the tea party we remember best is the anarchic Mad Hatter's tea party in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. But any ritual can be disrupted in a children's book.
In Judith Kerr's The Tiger Who Came to Tea , the tiger eats and drinks everything in the house, nicely defying the rules tidy children long to break about "only one cake" or "no more juice". But this great beast with his slanting smile has an added power. He somehow harks back to the fatal fascination of the charming, mysterious stranger, like the devil in ballads and fairytales who arrives without warning and disappears with equal suddenness, and who is longed for as well as held in awe.
The Tiger is the opposite of Kerr's bumbling domestic cat; it is her anti-Mog. In Illustrated Children's Books , she is quoted as joking that she couldn't draw tigers: Unexplained elements and out-of-scale drawings lend edginess to the cosiest stories. The chaos can be internal, and in picture books loneliness, fear, bad dreams, anxiety about separation all find their visual analogues. The scrumbly watercolour sketches of Shirley Hughes's Dogger , where the much-loved toy dog is accidentally sold at the jumble sale, express the ache of childhood loss and the joy of return, as well as complex relations between siblings, while Anthony Browne's blend of the surreal and the everyday in Gorilla suggests how imagination can fill a lonely world.
All Browne's work is full of hidden clues, "images which tell us part of the story that the words don't tell us," he says, "and kids are far quicker to spot these details than adults who often take the pictures for granted. The emotion-powered picture book currently under the spotlight, in view of the new film adaptation, is Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. As Michael Rosen says in Children's Books , this is a fable about anger and trying to control our demons — having a wild rumpus, or leaving them behind — which also contains a profound ambivalence about the person who loves us the most.
In the book, whose "text" amounts to nine sentences, all is expressed suggestively rather than directly, through the pictures. Illustrated Children's Books quotes Sendak's own response, in his book on an earlier illustrator, Randolph Caldecott. What do you do with getting mad? Sendak is a master of rage and escape, yet his errant children come back to the world of rules, meals and bed-time: Even in the surreal Mickey in the Night Kitchen , Mickey swoops back from his adventure to find that the milk is still on the doorstep in the morning. Many children find this book, with its chant of "Mickey in the batter!
The lure of illustrated children's books | Books | The Guardian
Both books draw their power from unresolved issues and hidden tensions, and one can see why they provoke obsessive interpretation. Some readers, I learnt from these two surveys, have apparently labelled Mickey's nakedness as "obscene", while other critics argue that "the book has too much sexual symbolism — the phallic milk bottles, fecund batter and sloshing liquids".
This last point might be right, but much is lost in the analytic retelling. Interpret their power as we may, images from children's books are now omnipresent, flitting from books to cartoons, films and toys.
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Indeed it is hard to imagine childhood without them. The demands on space in Children's Books and Illustrated Children's Books mean that, while individual entries are vivid and informative, the broader historical coverage is perfunctory — a pity, since it is a fascinating tale. What did children look at before the advent of illustrations? The richer ones could pore over woodcuts and copperplates embellishing fine editions of Aesop, or follow the tales in tapestries and paintings, but most children made their own pictures in their minds as they listened to stories and ballads, or made do with rough woodcuts from the chapbooks.
These chapbooks, a staple of the peddlers' packs, were really intended for adults: But it was not until the midth century in Britain that children's book publishing really began, prompted by the fashionable belief, influenced by Locke and then by Rousseau, that learning should be fun. The old horn books were replaced by fold-out alphabet games and "lotteries" with sheets of images to colour.
Soon London publishers such as John Newbery were producing tiny books such as the Little Pretty-Pocket Book , the size of a child's hand. At the same time the great French fairytales were translated into English, soon followed by the exotic Arabian Nights.
These, too, appeared in children's editions, often with tiny postage-stamp pictures, like early comic strips, but occasionally with fine illustrations such as the meticulous wood-engravings of Thomas and John Bewick. Young readers could move on to illustrated versions of English favourites such as The Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe.
With regard to pictures, then as now readers were conservative, clinging to versions they knew. Charles Lamb considered it "blasphemy" when a grand, new edition of The Pilgrim's Progress was suggested, with illustrations by John Martin, replacing the chapbook cuts he knew as a child.
Lamb also objected to the evangelical educational material flooding on to the market from writers such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Sarah Trimmer, complaining to Coleridge in Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives tales in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and history. The popularity of children's books ensured that illustrations were taken seriously. In William Roscoe's The Butterfly's Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast came out, with luscious, detailed, hand-coloured engravings; in Tabard's Popular Tales carried fluent, mobile line-drawings of characters such as Sinbad that have influenced interpretations ever since; and in the s George Cruikshank produced his classic, spiky, scary illustrations to Grimm's Fairy Tales.
Pictures improved with each leap in technology, the most important being the invention of lithography in the early 19th century. And although the moral tales marched on, by the s they were being rocked and mocked by translations of Heinrich Hoffmann's violent and satirical Struwwelpeter , and Edward Lear's Book of Nonsense , in which the eccentric drawings, as well as the verse, undercut all solemnity.