Defining Children’s Metafiction: Authorship and Readership in Emily Gravett’s Picturebooks

Because this ending appears deliberate, one may consider the possibility of its not being part of the original book. Since Rabbit was absorbed into the metadiegetic text, having been devoured by the predators therein, and as the book passes on to subsequent readers, the library card was displaced an...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Lion and the unicorn (Brooklyn) 2018, Vol.42 (1), p.1-19
Main Author: Athanasiou-Krikelis, Lissi
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Authorial voice
Authorship
Children
Childrens picture books
Conversation
Emotions
Empiricism
Gravett, Emily
Literary criticism
Literary devices
Metafiction
Narratology
Paratext
Person
Plot (Narrative)
Postmodernism
Readership
Reading
Theory
Writers
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Summary:Because this ending appears deliberate, one may consider the possibility of its not being part of the original book. Since Rabbit was absorbed into the metadiegetic text, having been devoured by the predators therein, and as the book passes on to subsequent readers, the library card was displaced and another ending was concocted from the book’s individual parts. The bottom border signifies Mouse’s “reality,” as opposed to the rest of the page, which portrays her emotional instability.18 Mouse is confined within the white space between the lower and upper borders of the notebook and is often portrayed walking on the bottom border like an acrobat. [...]the bottom border functions like a roadmap for Mouse directing her, as well as the reader, from one page to the next. According to Jarmila Mildorf, this type of second person narrative would be a “conversational second-person narration” (78); narrator and reader are engaged in a communicative act. 18.
ISSN:0147-2593
1080-6563
1080-6563
DOI:10.1353/uni.2018.0001