A Multimodal Approach to Challenging Gender Stereotypes in Children’s Picture Books

This collection offers a thorough treatment of the ways in which the verbal and visual semiotic modes interrelate toward promoting gender equality and social inclusion in children’s picture books.

Drawing on cutting-edge theoretical work in multimodality, including multimodal cognitive linguistics, multimodal discourse analysis, and visual social semiotics, the book expands on descriptive-oriented studies to offer a more linguistically driven perspective on children’s picture books. The volume explores the choice afforded to and the lexico-semantic and discursive strategies employed by writers and illustrators in conveying representational, interpersonal, and textual meanings in the verbal and non-verbal components in these narratives in order to challenge gender stereotypes and promote the social inclusion of same-sex parent families.

This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in multimodality, discourse analysis, social semiotics, and children’s literature.

Chapters 1, 8 and 9 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com.

A. Jesús Moya-Guijarro is Full Professor in the Department of English Language and Linguistics, Faculty of Education, at University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain.

Eija Ventola, now Emerita Professor, was previously Full Professor of International Business Communication at Aalto University, Business School, Finland.