The Rhetoric Of Children’s English Picturebooks: A Narrative Criticism

Children’s picturebook has developed for several centuries since its appearance in children’s literature. Compared with the long history, the researches on children’s picturebook lag behind a lot. Nowadays, as a multidisciplinary field, the study on children’s picturebook involves children’s literature, art, child psychology, child education, and the publishing of children’s books, etc.. With the popularity of picturebook in the mainland of China, it is advisable to study excellent children’s picturebooks in English, which may benefit both the audiences’ understanding and the authors’/illustrators’creating of picturebook to some degree.This thesis combines qualitative and quantitative research methods, with the former as the main one, to probe the rhetoric of children’s picturebooks from three levels, i.e. narrative elements, narrative structure, and narrative signs, in the framework of narrative rhetorical criticism. On the level of narrative elements, the key narrative elements of all 30 sample picturebooks and the relationships among them are analyzed. On the second level, narrative structure is discussed by examining mainly chronological narrative and multi-screen narrative employed in children’s picturebooks, aiming at revealing its rhetorical purposes. On the third level, narrative signs are addressed by analyzing the characteristics of verbal text from three aspects, namely lexis, syntax, and rhetoric, and the characteristics of the visual text concerning iconic signs, indexical signs, symbolical signs and colors.This thesis reaches the following major findings. Firstly, narrator, setting, characters, temporal relation and theme are the key narrative elements of children’s picturebooks, which interact mutually to accomplish the rhetorical purposes of children’s picturebooks by conveying information and influencing audiences. Secondly, it is chronological narrative and multi-screen narrative that are discussed on the base of Labov’s argumentation, whose rhetorical powers include pushing the development of the narrative and inviting the audiences into the storytelling itself. Finally, at the level of narrative signs, both verbal text and visual text are examined. It is found that concrete words are used frequently to provide the audiences with vivid descriptions. And the frequent use of short sentences and the deliberate division of long sentences into short ones make it easy for the audiences to read on one hand, on the other hand they can generate a sense of rhyme, make verbal signs echo with visual signs, evoke the audiences’ curiosity and advance the narrative. Many figures of speech are employed to attract the audience’s attention through making statements more vivid and persuasive. Four visual signs (icons, indexes, symbols and colors) are utilized to accompany the verbal text and to enrich the contents of the narrative, resulting in the theme and the persuasive force enhanced.