Examines and discusses postmodern picturebooks, and reflects upon their contributions to both the field of children's literature and to the development of literacies for child, adolescent, and adult readers.

Children's literature, along with all the other genres in the past fifty years, has taken on an appreciation for the tenets of postmodernism, according to the contributors of these 16 essays. Lest we worry that small children may not fully grasp the presence of irony or ambivalence, the contributors speak primarily to adult readers, describing the evolution of form and substance in children's picture books, defining the role of the artist in such books, and applying radical change theory. They describe how play and playfulness work in postmodern picture books, global postmodernism in Australia's picture books, postmodern picture books and the material conditions of reading, the paradox of space, anxieties in imagination and multi-modality, picture books as artifacts, the work of Lauren Child and Ed Vere, true fairy tales, third-graders' collaborative sense-making, and children's responses to postmodern picture books. The case study on responses to Wiesner's The Three Pigs is especially interesting. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)