Starring in the intimate space: picture book narratives and performance semiotics

This article examines the impact of narratological pragmatics as applicable to both theatre and children picture book performances. The premise is interdisciplinary in that it negotiates points of intersection between performance semiotics and theoretical approaches to Children's Literature. Employing a comparative case study of Samuel Beckett's Happy Days and John Burningham's picture book Aldo, the research assesses the narratological outcomes of intersecting semiotic codes in relation to these specific texts.<br />

Cultural orienteering: a map for Anthony Browne`s into the forest

Bullen and Parsons identify Anthony Browne's picture book Into the Forest as a re-gendered retelling of 'Little Red Riding Hood' that expresses recent assumptions about childhood, risk and the resources children need to survive in today's world. In Browne's version, the forest is the terrain in which a young male protagonist imaginatively explores his anxiety about his father's unexplained absence.<br />

Identity territory: Pamela Allen's picture books in the Australian psyche

Parsons examines the dialogic space of the picture book reading, and its co-opting of the authority of the &quot;significant other&quot; in relation to Pamela Allen's picture books. Mapping Australian identity theory in Allen's picture books involves recognizing Australian-ness as both formed and performed at a point of intersection between colonial, migrant, and patriarchal tropes. Each of these tropes is readable through the dynamics of theater semiotics, and each is mirrored by child maturation as embodied by a movement toward adult authority.<br />

Capitalism run wild: Zizou Corder`s lion boy and Victor Kelleher`s dog boy

While capitalism has long made highly efficient ideological use of Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' principle to justify ruthless business practices, this appropriation of animal metaphor has taken on new and considerably more problematic resonances in the wake of globalization. At a time when the negative consequences of corporate greed are becoming more apparent, as inequalities widen and power is shifted beyond governments and their borders, there is a spate of children's novels that explicitly challenges this new world order.<br />