Postmodern Experimentation in Anthony Browne’s Picturebooks: The Reinvention of a Canon in Children’s Literature

Abstract

This article1 intends to highlight the characteristics of the postmodern Picturebook, specifically, the work of Anthony Browne, a British creator of recognized value in the conformation of this segment of the contemporary children’s edition, whose narrativization results from the triadic text-image-support. Revisiting Browne’s whole work, from a necessarily restricted and representative corpus, we propose to highlight the aesthetic-literary and formative potentialities of a significative production, recognizing his contribution to the consolidation of a new paradigm in Children’s Literature. Starting from previous investigations around Picturebooks, with emphasis on theorizations related to the concepts of intertextuality and metafictionality - founding strategies of the “writing” of the appreciated author -, formal, rhetorical-stylistic and ideothematic procedures are observed in a dialogical reading of the verbal and visual components, concluding about its demands at the level of reception, as well as its impact on the literary, critical and reflective education of its main readers.