Literature aimed at children and youth readers received a boost in 1978. The National Prize was created and where before, above all, didactic material began to appear collections such as El Barco de Vapor and the offer diversified with new authors, illustrators, designers and cartoonists. Today, gender is a broad and promising field Intended for an age group that lasts from five years to fourteen. It could well be thirty percent of the total market. But, be careful, here it is not just about money, it is about what is transmitted to very plastic beings in the process of growth and socialization.
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Title: Album books that challenge gender stereotypes and the concept of traditional family
Author: A. Jesús Moya and Cristina Cañamares (coords.)
Editorial: Editions of the University of Castilla-La Mancha
Publication year: 2020
Available in Editions of the University of Castilla-La Mancha
Available in Unebook
In this broad framework, the proposal of professors Jesús Moya Guijarro and Cristina Cañamares Torrijos is inserted: a multimodal analysis that, with the album book as a common denominator, focuses on gender stereotypes, homoparental families and their neighbors. Such a complex and current endeavor began with an R&D research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness. From the excellent research team, brought together by both, the ten articles come together in a carefully presented volume.
The introduction to the ten chapters of this publication opens with a general plan in which Moya and Cañamares define the album book as a “complementary symbiosis between text and image”. A mixture in which text and image are inextricably fused in the narration they offer to a reader who receives two overlapping codes: visual and written language. In reality, all elements count; the layout, the format, the typography, the selection of colors, the covers or even the quality of the paper. All this contributes to give meaning to the story. And, at the same time, it imposes on authors, as highlighted in these pages, a multimodal analysis.
Returning to Moya and Cañamares we see that, although the illustration of children’s books was produced in the 19th century, It is in the middle of the last century when the album book, especially with the work of Beatrix Potter, begins to stretch until today to constitute a consolidated genre. Advances in digital technology and graphic design have revolutionized illustration styles. They have empowered very stimulating content both from a thematic point of view and from a formal point of view. By expanding traditional narrative structures and resorting to metafiction, they have become attractive and current literary proposals that enter with full rights into the universe of artistic objects. Today they are the subject of study by art historians, pedagogues, social scientists, linguists and researchers of children’s and young people’s literature.
The most immediate analytical material of the investigation that has given rise to these pages comes from fifty-four album books produced, with some exceptions, by the Anglo-Saxon culture. In the opening section they come to light “Female characters who, in one way or another, break stereotypes traditionally assigned to women ”. Carmen Santamaría García in the first place, Francisco J. Rodríguez Muñoz and María del Mar Ruíz Domínguez in second place and, finally, Jesús Díaz Armas situate and demystify values of traditional stories.
In the second section, it is highlighted “Male characters who do not adapt to traditional gender stereotypes”. Izaskun Elorza, on the one hand, Emanuel Madalena and Ana Margarida Ramos, on the other, and finally, Moya and Cañamares develop changes that have occurred in the album books. In the third and last section, the reader discovers “boys and girls who live in contexts different from the classic patterns of the family model”. María Martínez Lirola, María Jesús Pinar-Sanz, and jointly Guillermo Soler Quílez, Arantxa Martín-Martín and José Rovira-Collado, the latter from pedagogy Queer, they sign the last three chapters of the brilliant and incisive mosaic gathered in a volume that is completed with numerous illustrations and a selected bibliography.
Although this is not the place to go into the technicalities involved in the analysis of the breakdown of the meaning of album books, it is convenient to record their importance. Let us remember that the Russian anthropologist and linguist Vladimir Propp (1895-1970), after analyzing different Russian folk tales, discovered recurring aspects capable of creating constant structures in these narratives and established relationships between all the fairy tales of western culture. From there, the development of semiotics drives an analytical wave on which our authors rely. The multimodal models of Kress and van Leeuwen, those of Painter, Martin and Unsworth or those of Kress and Halliday, among others, are used by the researchers who collaborate on the book as suitable tools to unveil the enormous potential of album books.
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