Typography and Narrative Voice in Children's Literature: Relationships, Interactions, and Symbiosis

Abstract

This thesis explores the relationship between typography and narrative voice in children’s literature. Substantial attention has been paid in the past to the word/image interaction in children’s books due to their multimodal nature. Considerably less research has been concerned with the potential for meaning-making through the often highly expressive typographic features of books for children. This is complicated by the unique power dynamic at play between adult producers and child consumers of texts for children, as well as the obvious issues relating to early literacy and legibility in children’s books. By examining a wide range of texts from the eighteenth-century to the twenty-first, I argue for an equality of influence between typography and other semiotic modes in creating meaning in children’s literature. The research in this thesis is underpinned by the seminal work of Gerard Genette (1997) on paratext, Theo van Leeuwen and Gunther Kress (1996) on the grammar of visual design, and Theo van Leeuwen (2006) and Nina Norgaard (2009) on the semiotics of typography. The texts examined range from picturebooks to young adult literature. Although limited to texts published in English, this thesis addresses books from Irish, British, American and Australian contexts, the broad range of which serves to highlight the simultaneity of typographic use in much of western society. This research contributes to the ongoing discussion of multimodal literature in children’s literature research. This thesis works to draw together many of the disparate areas of investigation from fields such as narratology, semiotics, psychology, graphic design theory, education and literacy theory, in a coherent analysis of the relationships and interactions of typography and narrative voice in children’s literature. It reconfigures the hierarchy of semiotic modes in books for children, and reifies the position of typography as a meaningful and important site of investigation, and thereby presents a significant contribution to the understanding of multimodality in children’s literature.