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i
A Multimodal Approach to Challenging

Gender Stereotypes in Children’s
Picture Books
This collection offers a thorough treatment of the ways in which the

verbal and visual semiotic modes interrelate toward promoting gender
equality and social inclusion in children’s picture books.
Drawing on cutting-edge theoretical work in multimodality, including
multimodal cognitive linguistics, multimodal discourse analysis, and
visual social semiotics, the book expands on descriptive-oriented studies to
offer a more linguistically driven perspective on children’s picture books.
The volume explores the choice afforded to and the lexico-semantic and
discursive strategies employed by writers and illustrators in conveying
representational, interpersonal, and textual meanings in the verbal and
non-verbal components in these narratives in order to challenge gender
stereotypes and promote the social inclusion of same-sex parent families.
This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in
multimodality, discourse analysis, social semiotics, and children’s
literature.
A. Jesús Moya-Guijarro is Full Professor in the Department of English

Language and Linguistics, Faculty of Education, at University of Castilla-
La Mancha, Spain.
Eija Ventola, now Emerita Professor, was previously Full Professor of

International Business Communication at Aalto University, Business
School, Finland.
ii
Routledge Studies in Multimodality

Edited by Kay L. O’Halloran, Curtin University
Designing Learning with Embodied Teaching

Perspectives from Multimodality
Fei Victor Lim
Kinesemiotics
Modelling How Choreographed Movement Means in Space
Arianna Maiorani
Naming and Framing

Understanding the Power of Words across Disciplines, Domains, and
Modalities
Viktor Smith
Engagement in Medical Research Discourse

A Multisemiotic Approach to Dialogic Positioning
Daniel Lees Fryer
Multimodality and Classroom Languaging Dynamics

An Ecosocial Semiotic Perspective in Asian Contexts
Dan Shi
A Multimodal Approach to Challenging Gender Stereotypes in Children’s

Picture Books
Edited by A. Jesús Moya-Guijarro and Eija Ventola
Mediation and Multimodal Meaning Making in Digital Environments

Edited by Ilaria Moschini and Maria Grazia Sindoni
Multimodal Literacies Across Digital Learning Contexts

Edited by Maria Grazia Sindoni and Ilaria Moschini
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.

routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-Multimodality/book-series/RSMM
iii
A Multimodal Approach
to Challenging Gender
Stereotypes in Children’s
Picture Books
Edited by
A. Jesús Moya-Guijarro and
Eija Ventola
iv
First published 2022

by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 selection and editorial matter, A. Jesús Moya Guijarro and Eija Ventola;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of A. Jesús Moya Guijarro and Eija Ventola to be identified as the
authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters,
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
With the exception of Chapter 1, no part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Chapter 1 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the
individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Moya Guijarro, Arsenio Jesús, editor. | Ventola, Eija, editor.
Title: A multimodal approach to challenging gender stereotypes in children’s
picture books / edited by A. Jesús Moya-Guijarro and Eija Ventola.
Description: New York : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Routledge studies in
multimodality | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2021017082 (print) | LCCN 2021017083 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367703592 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003145875 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Children’s literature–History and criticism. |
Stereotypes (Social psychology) in literature. | Sex role in literature. |
Picture books for children. | LCGFT: Literary criticism. | Essays.
Classification: LCC PN1009.5.S73 M85 2021 (print) |
LCC PN1009.5.S73 (ebook) | DDC 809/.89282–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021017082
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021017083
ISBN: 978-0-367-70359-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-70361-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-14587-5 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003145875
Typeset in Sabon
by Newgen Publishing UK
v
To our beloved parents, who taught us

to embrace diversity and promote equality.
vi
vi
Contents
List of Figures x
List of Tables xiii
List of Contributors xv
Acknowledgements xxi
1 Picture Books, Gender and Multimodality: An

Introduction 1
A . J E S Ú S M O YA -G UIJA RRO AN D E IJA VE N TOLA
PART I
Stories Portraying Boys Who Challenge Gender
Stereotypes 21
2 Julián Is a Mermaid Challenging Gender Stereotypes:

A Qualitative Multimodal Content Analysis 23
D A N I E L L E K A CH O RSKY AN D A L E XAN DRIA PER EZ
3 Ideational Construal of Male Challenging Gender

Identities in Children’s Picture Books 42
I Z A S K U N E L O RZA
4 At the Heart of It: Once There Was a Boy 69

B R O O K E C O L L IN S-G E A RIN G
5 Gender Assumptions in Picture Books about Boys

in Dresses 87
P E R RY N O D E L MAN
vi
viii Contents
PART II
Picture Books Featuring Princesses and Girls Who Do Not
Conform to Female Gender Stereotypes 105
6 Queering the Princess: On Feminine Subjectivities and

Becoming Girl in Contemporary Picture Books 107
A N G E L A TH OMA S AN D A . JE SÚS MO YA- G UIJAR R O
7 A Clever Paper Bag Princess, a Fearless Worst Princess

and an Empowered Little Red: A Critical Multimodal
Analysis 126
V E R Ô N I C A CO N STAN TY AN D VIVIA N E M. HEBER LE
8 A Semiotic and Multimodal Analysis of Interactive

Relations in Picture Books That Challenge Female
Gender Stereotypes 144
C A R M E N S A NTAMA RÍA-G ARCÍA
9 Communicative Functions of Part-Whole

Representations of Characters in Picture Books That
Challenge Gender Stereotypes 164
A . J E S Ú S M O YA -G UIJA RRO
PART III
Visual Narratives Portraying and Challenging the
Concept of Traditional Family 183
10 Gender Stereotypes in Children’s Picture Books: A

Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis 185
X I N C H A O Z H AI, KAY L . O ’H AL L O RAN , LYN DON WAY,
A N D S A B I N E TAN
11 Linguistic and Visual Trends in the Representation

of Two-Mum and Two-Dad Couples in Children’s
Picture Books 213
M A R K M C G L ASH A N
12 The Depiction of Family and Self in Children’s Picture

Books: A Corpus-Driven Exploration 239
C O R A L C A LV O -M ATURA N A AN D CH ARL E S FOR C EV ILLE
xi
Contents ix
13 The Moomin Family: An Elastic Permeable Multi-
Dimensional Construct in Semiotic and Social Space 268
C H R I S TI A N M. I. M. MATTH IE SSE N
Index 306
x
Figures
2.1 Women dressed as mermaids. Illustration from Julián

is a Mermaid by Love, J. Copyright © Reprinted
by permission of the publisher, Candlewick Press,
Somerville, MA, 2018 31
2.2 Transforming into a mermaid. Illustration from Julián
is a Mermaid by Love, J. Copyright © Reprinted
by permission of the publisher, Candlewick Press,
Somerville, MA, 2018 32
2.3 Julián and Abuela. Illustration from Julián is a Mermaid
by Love, J. Copyright © Reprinted by permission of the
publisher, Candlewick Press, Somerville, MA, 2018 35
3.1 Oliver’s transitivity roles according to mode 53
3.2 Oliver ‘on his own’ vs Oliver interacting with ‘the boys’
(bimodal roles) 54
3.3 Nate’s and Ben’s transitivity roles according to mode 55
3.4 Nate co-classified as a ballerina (8th double spread,
recto). Copyright © Reprinted by permission of the
publisher Dial Books for Young Readers, 2006 57
3.5 The pirates, Boris, and the stowaway boy as Participants 61
4.1 The beating heart. Copyright © Reprinted by permission
of Magabala, 2011(69) 77
4.2 Sharing a heart. Copyright © Reprinted by permission of
Magabala, 2011(70–71) 84
5.1 Danny’s imagination. Copyright © Reprinted by kind
permission of Blood Orange, 2016 91
6.1 Bea swabs the deck. Illustration copyright © 2012
by Jill McElmurry. From The Pirate Princess, published
by Harper Collins. Used with permission (verso, double
spread 6) 112
6.2 Bea suffers seasickness. Illustration copyright © 2012
by Jill McElmurry. From The Pirate Princess,
published by Harper Collins. Used with permission
(double spread 10) 113
xi
List of Figures xi
6.3 Violetta’s abject body. Illustration from The Princess
Knight by Funke, C. and Meyer. K. Copyright ©
Reprinted by permission of Kerstin Meyer (verso, double
spread 5) 117
6.4 Violetta’s dreams of becoming knight. Illustration
from The Princess Knight by Funke, C. and Meyer. K.
Copyright © Reprinted by permission of Kerstin Meyer
(recto, double spread 8) 120
7.1 The princess saves the prince. Copyright © Annick Press,
2019 (10th double spread) 134
8.1 Emma somersaulting across the floor. Illustration from
Skeers, L. and A. Wilsdorf. Tutus Aren’t My Style.
New York: Dial Books for Young Readers. 2010. With
copyright permission by © Penguin Random House 151
8.2 Arthur’s inquisitive gaze. Illustration from Turin, A. and
N. Bosnia. Arthur and Clementine. Writers and Readers
Publishing Cooperative. 1976. With copyright permission
by © Kalandraka, publishers of the Spanish version 158
9.1 A shadow for Buster Nose. Illustration from Willy
the Champ by Anthony Browne. Copyright © Walker
Books, 2010. Reprinted by kind permission of Anthony
Browne 174
10.1 Options for ideational meaning adapted from Painter
et al. (2013: 64, 71, 80) 190
10.2 Basic options for construing interpersonal meaning,
adapted from van Leeuwen (2008: 141) 191
10.3 Options for visual modality, adapted from Painter et al.
(2013: 35, 36) 191
10.4 Options for compositional meaning, adapted from
Painter et al. (2013: 94, 99, 103) 192
10.5 Screenshot of multimodal systems (left column) and
system choices (right column) in MMA Image 194
10.6 SF-MDA analysis of a double-paged spread in Busy
Mother book 195
10.7 Flowchart of Mother Cat’s action sequence and their
inter-event relations 200
10.8 Flowchart of Father Cat’s action sequence and their
inter-event relations 202
10.9 Screenshot of piggyback ride page of Mommies book in
MMA Image 205
10.10 Screenshot of piggyback ride page of Daddies book in
MMA Image 206
11.1 Number of books published over time (cumulative) 216
11.2 Number of stories featuring same-sex parent families
published over time (cumulative) 217
xi
xii List of Figures

12.1 Grandfather and grandson spending time together
(MMaM). Illustrations © Chantal Stewart. New Frontier 247
12.2 Grandfather Frank talking to the schoolmates of his
grandson, who is seated to his left (TFS). Text and
illustrations © David Mackintosh. HarperCollins
Children’s Books 248
12.3 Princess Violetta, her brother, and other court members
outside the palace (TPK). Illustrations © Kerstin Meyer.
The Chicken House 248
12.4 Elmer and other participants at a sport event (TSD).
Illustrations © Henry Cole. Simon & Schuster 249
12.5 The queen’s anguished speech to her son (KaK). Text and
illustrations © Linda de Haan and Stern Nijland. Tricycle
Press 249
12.6 Father and child in the foreground, and other community
members, in an everyday street scene (TKtMH).
Illustrations © Yossi Abolafi a. Kane/Miller 250
12.7 Tough Boris, the boy, and the pirates grieving their loss
(TB). Illustrations © Kathryn Brown. Voyager Books 252
12.8 Birth of the penguins couple longed child (ATMT).
(Illustrations © Henry Cole. Simon and Schuster.) 258
12.9 Contemplating nature, over the shoulder view of
“Nókom” (WWWA). (Illustrations © Julie Flett.
Highwater.) 259
13.1 The lexical item “family” throughout the books of the
Moomin corpus 274
13.2 Word cloud for the corpus generated by Voyant Tools 278
13.3 Frequency of the most common words across the nine
books of the corpus 279
13.4 Links in a collocates graph among the most common
terms 279
13.5 Frequency of the names of the most common characters
across the nine books of the corpus 282
13.6 Multidimensional space of personality traits
characteristic of a selection of inhabitants of the
Moominvalley 290
xi
Tables
3.1 Characterisation of traits, physical characteristics,

occupations and role behaviours (visual mode) 45
3.2 Verbal vs visual construal of participants (Beneficiary
vs Goal) 47
3.3 Visual realisations of figures of doing, saying and sensing 48
3.4 Quantitative visual/verbal distribution in the picture
books sample 51
3.5 Ben’s verbal construal of male stereotype 56
3.6 Nate’s “mixed” roles (verbal mode) 58
3.7 Nate’s challenging response to male stereotyping
(verbal mode) 58
3.8 Pattern variation in a logical causal chain 63
6.1 Intermodal analysis of double spread 6 of The Pirate
Princess (Figure 6.1) 114
6.2 Intermodal analysis of double spread 10 of The Pirate
Princess (Figure 6.2) 115
6.3 Intermodal analysis of double spread 5 of The Princess
Knight (Figure 6.3) 118
6.4 Intermodal analysis of double spread 8 of The Princess
Knight (Figure 6.4) 121
8.1 Complementary interpersonal meaning systems across
image and language. Adapted from Painter and Martin
(2011: 134–135) 148
8.2 Interactive choices for affiliation between characters and
viewers in the sample texts 150
9.1 Male and female characters in the stories * type of
representation crosstabulation 178
10.1 Busy Father /Busy Mother books: distribution of
semantic roles 197
10.2 Multimodal choices in Daddies /Mommies and Busy
Father /Busy Mother books 208
11.1 Picture book corpus sample size versus total number of
all known SSPF picture books 217
11.2 Most frequent/key words in the SSPF corpus 222
vxi
xiv List of Tables

11.3 Comparison of the top 30 most frequent lexical words
and keywords in the SSPF corpus 223
11.4 Naming strategies for mothers 224
11.5 Naming strategies for fathers 224
11.6 Matrix of co-occurrence in ‘MOTHER’S NAME and
MOTHER’S NAME’ formulation 225
11.7 Matrix of co-occurrence in ‘FATHER’S NAME and
FATHER’S NAME’ formulation 226
11.8 Open-class collocates of ‘wedding’ 227
11.9 Collustration between ‘wedding’ and images of cake 228
11.10 Images of cake in Table 11.9 isolated 229
11.11 Wedding collustration: grooms. Copyright © 2005
Ken Setterington. From Mom and Mum Are Getting
Married! by Michael Willhoite and illustrated by Alice
Priestley. Reprinted by kind permission of Second
Story Press 230
11.12 Wedding collustration: bridesmaids 232
12.1 Participants in and around the child’s family 246
12.2 Depictions of diversity 251
12.3 Positive and negative physical intimacy 253
12.4 Child’s indoor and outdoor physical environment 253
12.5 Contact with sports, literacy, art, and creativeness 254
12.6 Animals in child’s environment 255
13.1 Books included in the Moomin corpus 269
13.2 Distinctive words (compared to the rest of the corpus),
generated by Voyant Tools 277
13.3 Most frequent character names in the Moomin corpus,
their relation to Moomin and their residency 281
13.4 Interaction among and representations of characters 284
v
x
Contributors
Coral Calvo-Maturana https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5947-1486 is English

Lecturer at the University of Granada. Her research interests include
stylistics, (critical) discourse analysis, multimodality, metaphor, corpus
linguistics, children’s literature, and Scottish and Irish contemporary
poetry. She is a member of the research groups ‘Digital Applications
to the Description and Teaching of the English Language’ (HUM-439)
at the University of Granada, and ‘Discourse, Communication and
Creativity’ (HUM-F60) at the Autonomous University of Madrid. She
is at the moment working on the narratives of adoption and foster care
represented across modes, media and languages.
Brooke Collins-Gearing https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8196-720X is a
Senior Lecturer in Children’s Literature at the University of Newcastle,
Australia. She is of Murri heritage from Kamilaroi Country in north-
west NSW, Australia. Her PhD was in non-Aboriginal representations
of Aboriginality in Australian children’s literature and she currently
teaches and researches in the areas of children’s literature, Aboriginal
literature and weaving ways of Knowing into pedagogy. Her ARC
Discovery project with Professor Nancy Wright and Dr Therese Davis
was concerned with Indigenous and non-Indigenous collaboration in
film and literature.
Verônica Constanty http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9831-7908 is Professor
at Western Paraná State University (UNIOESTE), Brazil. She has been
involved in educational research for the last ten years. Her key research
interests include the development of critical multimodal competence
concerning learning and teaching English as a second language as well
as literature for children and adolescents.
Izaskun Elorza https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9807-4811is Associate
Professor in the Department of English Studies at the University of
Salamanca, where she develops her research in the area of descrip-
tive linguistics. Her research focuses on discourse analysis through
quantitative and qualitative methods, particularly those developed
by systemic functional linguistics and corpus linguistics. Her most
xvi
xvi List of Contributors

recent publications include the volume (co-edited with Pérez-Veneros)
Systemic Functional Linguistics at the Crossroads: Intercultural and
Contrastive Descriptions of Language (Aquilafuente 266, 2019).
Charles Forceville https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6365-500X is Associate
Professor of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Committed
to cognitivist, socio-biological, and relevance-theoretical approaches,
he works on multimodality in metaphor, argumentation, and narrative
discourse. Media and genres he has published about include adver-
tising, pictograms, comics and cartoons, documentary film, and ani-
mation. He is author of Pictorial Metaphor in Advertising (1996)
and co-editor, with Eduardo Urios-Aparisi, of Multimodal Metaphor
(2009, Mouton de Gruyter); with Tony Veale and Kurt Feyaerts, of
Creativity and the Agile Mind (2013, Mouton de Gruyter); and, with
Assimakis Tseronis, of Multimodal Argumentation and Rhetoric
in Media Genres (2017, Benjamins). His monograph Visual and
Multimodal Communication: Applying the Relevance Principle was
published by Oxford University Press (2020).
Viviane M. Heberle https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0517-1613 is Professor
of English and Applied Linguistics at the Federal University of Santa
Catarina (Universidad Federal de Santa Catarina), Brazil, where she
teaches and supervises masters and doctoral students at the Graduate
Program in English. She is a researcher in Applied Linguistics of the
Brazilian Science and Technology Research Council (CNPq). She
taught courses for the Bachelor of Education Honours Degree at
Westhill College, Birmingham, UK, and was a Visiting Scholar at The
Faculty of Education and Social Work at The University of Sydney,
Australia. Her research interests include systemic functional linguis-
tics, critical discourse analysis, multimodality and multiliteracies.
Danielle Kachorsky https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4010-6056 is an
Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum, Instruction,
and Learning Sciences in the College of Education and Human
Development at Texas A&M University- Corpus Christi. She is a
Professor of Children’s and Adolescent Literature and Literacy. Prior
to her PhD studies, Dani was a secondary English Language Arts
teacher who utilised and embraced multimodal literacies and multi-
modal texts in her classroom spaces. As a researcher, she works to
understand multimodal texts at the site of production, the site of the
text itself, and the site of reception. In particular, she is interested in
how reader-viewers transact with multimodal children’s and adoles-
cent literature, and the pedagogical approaches that support the use of
multimodal texts in classrooms and other contexts.
Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0247-5723 is
Chair Professor of the Department of English, the Faculty of Humanities
at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where he is a member of
xvi
List of Contributors xvii

the PolySystemic Research Group. He has degrees in linguistics from
Lund University (BA), where he also studied Arabic and philosophy,
and from UCLA (MA, PhD), and has previously held positions at USC
/Information Sciences Institute, Sydney University, and Macquarie
University. He has held visiting appointments at e.g., the University
of Hamburg and the Brain Science Division of the RIKEN Institute in
Tokyo. He is Honorary Professor, Beijing Normal University, Beijing,
the Australian National University, Canberra, and Guest Professor,
University of Science and Technology, Beijing. Among many other
books, Matthiessen has published Working with Functional Grammar
(with J.R. Martin and Clare Painter, 1997), Halliday’s Introduction to
Functional Grammar (revised version of Halliday’s book, with M.A.K.
Halliday, 2014), Functional Typology (edited, with Alice Caffarel
and J. R. Martin, 2004), Deploying Functional Grammar (with J. R.
Martin and Clare Painter, 2010), The Texture of Casual Conversation
(with Diana Slade, forthcoming). A Guide to Systemic Functional
Linguistics (with Kazuhiro Teruya and Marvin Lam, forthcoming),
and eight volumes of collected works (edited by Kazuhiro Teruya, Wu
Canzhong and Di Slade, forthcoming).
Mark McGlashan https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9129-0848 is Lecturer in
English Language in the Birmingham Institute of Media and English,
Birmingham City University. His research interests predominantly
centre on Corpus-based (Critical) Discourse Studies and the analysis of
a wide range of social issues typically relating to nationalism, racism,
sexism, and homophobia. He has published and presented widely
on his PhD research, which focused on representations of same-sex
parents in a large collection of children’s picture books.
A. Jesús Moya-Guijarro https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6591-6680, https://
ror.org/05r78ng12 is Professor at the Faculty of Education in the
University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain. He has published several
articles on multimodal discourses in international journals such as
Review of Cognitive Linguistics, Word, Text, Functions of Language,
Journal of Pragmatics and Text and Talk. Among other books, he
is co-editor, with Eija Ventola, of the book The World Told and the
World Shown: Multisemiotic Issues (2009, Palgrave Macmillan) and
author of A Multimodal Analysis of Picture Books for Children (2014,
Equinox). He is currently the main researcher of the I+D project, The
Construction of Discourse in Picture Books which Challenge Gender
Stereotypes, reference number FFI2017-85306-P (2018–2021).
Perry Nodelman https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9098-483X is Professor
Emeritus of English at the University of Winnipeg and the 2015
recipient of the International Grimm Award for Research in
Children’s Literature presented by the international Institute for
Children’s Literature, Osaka. He is the author of four books about
xvii
xviii List of Contributors

children’s literature, including Words about Pictures: The Narrative
Art of Children’s Picture Books (1988), More Words about Pictures:
Current Research on Picture Books and Visual/Verbal Texts for Young
People (2017), The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature
(2008) and The Pleasures of Children’s Literature (2003).
Nodelman has also published over 150 essays on various aspects of
children’s literature, many of which are available for downloading at
perrynodelman.com. He has also published a number of novels for
children. In retirement in Halifax, Canada, he volunteers as a guide at
the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.
Kay L. O’Halloran https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7950-0889 is Chair
Professor and Head of Department of Communication and Media in
the School of the Arts at the University of Liverpool. She is an inter-
nationally recognised leading academic in the field of multimodal ana-
lysis, involving the study of the interaction of language with other
resources in texts, interactions and events. In particular, a key focus of
her work is the development of digital tools and techniques for multi-
modal analysis. O’Halloran is developing mixed methods approaches
that combine multimodal analysis, data mining and visualisation for
big data analytics within and across different media platforms.
Alexandria Perez https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8481-6805 is a PhD stu-
dent and graduate assistant at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi
in the Department of Curriculum, Instruction, and Learning Science. As
a former middle school teacher, she has experience in teaching students
at varying levels from minority backgrounds in low-socioeconomic
areas. Alexandria has an interest in teaching and researching in the
areas of social semiotics and multimodalities, comics and graphic
novels, and pop culture in education.
Carmen Santamaría-García http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4160-169X is
Associate Professor at the University of Alcalá, Spain. She does research
on pragmatics and systemic functional linguistics and has participated
in several projects: FUNDETT, 2010–2013; EMOFUNDETT, 2014–
2017; AMULIT, 2018–2021; (Im)Politeness, Univ. Sheffield Hallam,
2019). Santamaria has published papers and chapters in different
journals and books. Among them, Evaluative Discourse and Politeness
in University Students’ Communication through Social Networking
Sites, Thompson and Alba-Juez (eds) Evaluation in Context (2014,
John Benjamins); and Connected Parents: Combining Online and Off-
Line Parenthood in Vlogs and Blogs, Romero-Trillo (ed.) Yearbook of
Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics (2016, Springer).
Sabine Tan https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1244-4077?lang=en is a Senior
Research Fellow at Curtin University, Western Australia. She has a back-
ground in critical multimodal discourse analysis, social semiotics, and
xi
List of Contributors xix

visual communication. She has applied multidisciplinary perspectives
for the analysis of institutional discourses involving traditional and
new media. She has worked on interdisciplinary projects involving
the development of interactive software for the multimodal analysis
of images, videos and 360-degree videos for research and educational
purposes. She has also worked on projects to develop mixed methods
approaches which combine multimodal analysis, data mining and
visualisation for big data analytics in areas such as violent extremism,
news discourse and 360-degree video.
Angela Thomas https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4508-2874 is a Senior
Lecturer in English Education at the University of Tasmania in
Australia. Her research interests include Children’s Literature, social
semiotics, multimodal discourse analysis, critical literacies and
the fusion of literature and new media. She is the author of Youth
Online (2007), co- author of Children’s Literature and Computer-
based Teaching (2005), and co-editor of English Teaching and New
Literacies Pedagogy: Interpreting and Authoring Digital Multimedia
Narratives (2014). Angela is also a member of several professional
organisations, including ACLAR (Australasian Children’s Literature
Association for Research), IRSCL (International Research Society for
Children’s Literature), CBCA (Children’s Book Council of Australia)
and ASFLA (Australian Systemic Functional Linguistics Association).
Eija Ventola, educated in English language and literature in Finland and
linguistics in Australia, held professorial posts in Germany (Martin-
Luther University) and in Austria (Salzburg University) and guest
professorships in various countries. Back in Finland, she is now Professor
Emerita of Aalto University, Business School, Helsinki, but also worked
previously as Professor in the English Department at the University of
Helsinki. She has been a member of the Finnish Academy of Science and
Letters since 2011. Her research areas include functional linguistics,
analysis of various kinds of discourses (e.g., casual, service, academic,
business, media), applications of linguistics into teaching and learning,
issues of multisemiotic aspects of communication and applications of
linguistics to literary studies. She has published and edited 16 books
and over 80 research articles and is known as an initiator and organiser
of various research symposia, including The International Conference
on Multimodality (ICOM) and Multi-Semiotic Talks (MUST), which
both focus on the challenges that multisemiotic changes in global and
media communication set on our societies.
Lyndon Way https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0481-4891 is a lecturer in
Communication and Media at The University of Liverpool. He has
published extensively on the multimodal nature of digital popular cul-
ture, popular music and news. His interest in music as multimodal pol-
itical discourse has culminated in a monograph that uses a multimodal
x
xx List of Contributors
critical discourse studies approach alongside insights from musicology.
He has also co-edited a book and special editions of scholarly journals
on music and digital popular culture as political discourse. Presently,
he is writing a book entitled Analysing Politics and Protest in Digital
Popular Culture (2021, Sage).
Xinchao Zhai https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5344-5834 is currently a
PhD student in the Department of Communication and Media at the
University of Liverpool. She has a background in general linguistics,
especially functional linguistics. Her research interests include social
semiotics, critical multimodal discourse analysis, and systemic func-
tional linguistics.
xxi
Acknowledgements
This study was carried out as part of the research project FFI2017-
85306-P (The Construction of Discourse in Children’s Picture Books,
AMULIT), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and
Competitiveness (2018–2021). First of all, we would like to express our
sincere gratitude to all the contributors in the volume, who offered their
commitment to this project from the very beginning when we launched
the book proposal to Routledge. All of them have been working inten-
sively and enthusiastically to develop their chapters during the Covid 19
pandemic, sometimes having to deal with on-line classes, face-to-face
teaching and research simultaneously.
We would also like to thank Christine Harris and Julia McNally for
their stylistic comments and helpful advice for the finishing touches of
the volume. Last but not least, the editors wish to thank the following
publishers for granting copyright permissions, free of charge, to reprint
textual and visual material from the following picture books:
Copyright © 2018 Jessica Love. From Julián is a Mermaid. Reprinted

by permission of the publisher, Candlewick Press, Somerville,
MA (Figures 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3).
Copyright © 2016 Laurin Mayeno and Robert Lui-Trujillo. From
One of a Kind, Like Me. Reprinted by kind permission of Blood
Orange (Figure 5.1).
Copyright © 2012 Sudipta Bardhan-Quallan and Jill McElmurry.
From The Pirate Princess. Reprinted by kind permission of
Harper Collins (Figure 6.1).
Copyright © 2012 Sudipta Bardhan-Quallan and Jill McElmurry.
From The Pirate Princess. Reprinted by kind permission of
Harper Collins (Figure 6.2).
Copyright © 2004 Cornelia Funke and Kerstin Meyer. Illustration
from The Princess Knight. Reprinted by kind permission of
Kerstin Meyer (Figure 6.3).
Copyright © 2004 Cornelia Funke and Kerstin Meyer. Illustration
from The Princess Knight. Reprinted by kind permission of
Kerstin Meyer (Figure 6.4).
xx
ii
xxii Acknowledgements
Text and Illustrations © 1976 Kalandraka. From Arturo y Clementina
[Arthur and Clementine] by Adela Turín and Nella Bosnia.
Reprinted by kind permission of Kalandraka, publisher of the
Spanish version (Figure 8.2).
Copyright © 2010 Anthony Browne. From Willy the Champ by
Anthony Browne. Reprinted by kind permission of Anthony
Browne (Figure 9.2).
Copyright © 2008 Sarah S. Brannen. From Uncle Bobby’s Wedding
by Sarah S. Brannen. Reprinted by kind permission of Sarah
S. Brannen (Tables 11.9–11.12).
Copyright © 2011 Eric Ross. From My Uncle’s Wedding by Eric
Ross. Reprinted by kind permission of Eric Ross (Tables 11.9–
11.12). Acknowledgements to illustrator Tracy K. Greene.
Copyright © 2011 Michael Willhoite. From Daddy’s Wedding by
Michael Willhoite. Reprinted by kind permission of Michael
Willhoite (Table 11.11).
Copyright © 2005 Ken Setterington. From Mom and Mum Are
Getting Married! by Michael Willhoite and illustrated by Alice
Priestley. Reprinted by kind permission of Second Story Press
(Table 11.11).
Copyright © Chantal Stewart. From Max Meets a Monster by Tracey
Hawkins and Chantal Stewart. Reprinted by kind permission of
Chantal Stewart and New Frontier. (Figure 12.1).
Copyright © David Mackintosh. From The Frank Show by David
Mackintosh. Reprinted by kind permission of David Mackintosh
and HarperCollins Children’s Books. (Figure 12.2).
Copyright © Kerstin Meyer. From The Princess Knight by Cornelia
Funke and Kerstin Meyer. Reprinted by kind permission of
Kerstin Meyer and The Chicken House. (Figure 12.3).
Copyright © Henry Cole. From The Sissy Duckling by Harvey
Fierstein and Henry Cole. Reprinted by kind permission of
Henry Cole and Simon & Schuster. (Figure 12.4).
Copyright © Linda de Haan and Stern Nijland. From King and King
by Linda de Haan and Stern Nijland. Reprinted by kind permis-
sion of Linda de Haan and Stern Nijland, and Tricycle Press.
(Figure 12.5).
Copyright © Yossi Abolafia. From The Key to my Heart by Nira
Harel and Yossi Abolafia. Reprinted by kind permission of Yossi
Abolafia Kane/Miller. (Figure 12.6).
Copyright © Kathryn Brown. From Tough Boris by Mem Fox and
Kathryn Brown. Reprinted by kind permission of Kathryn Brown
and Voyager Books. (Figure 12.7).
Copyright © Henry Cole. From And Tango Makes Three by
Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell [writers] and Henry Cole
xx
ii
newgenprepdf
Acknowledgements xxiii
[illustrator]. Reprinted by kind permission of Henry Cole and
Simon & Schuster. (Figure 12.8).
Copyright © Julie Flett. From When we were Alone by David
A. Robertson and Julie Flett. Reprinted by kind permission of
Julie Flett and Highwater. (Figure 12.9).
x
vi
1
1
Picture Books, Gender and
Multimodality
An Introduction
A. Jesús Moya-Guijarro and Eija Ventola
Scope and Aims of the Book

A Multimodal Approach to Challenging Gender Stereotypes in
Children’s Picture Books is a collection of research papers in the fields
of multimodality and picture books.1 The chapters broaden the pre-
vious analyses of this genre, carried out from content, psychological,
literary and didactic points of view. Most of the analyses of picture
books come from literary studies (Moebius 1986; Nodelman 1988;
Nikolajeva and Scott 2001), narrative theory (Genette 1980), didactic
perspectives (Kümmerling-Meibauer et al. 2015) and content approaches
(Cohen et al. 2007; Sunderland 2012). The results of these analyses are
extremely revealing and predominantly focus on content issues: on the
number of male and female characters that appear in the stories, the fre-
quency in which these characters carry out a leading or secondary role,
the garments they wear, aspect of distance and proximity, the narrative
structure of the stories, the stories’ didactic possibilities for introducing
children to literature, etc. Although these earlier studies are relevant,
they are largely qualitative, and are often based more on descriptive than
on linguistic analyses. On other occasions, the text-image interface has
been approached using classifications that were excessively anchored to
established lexical-grammatical, cohesive (Martinec and Salway 2005),
rhetorical (Bateman 2008) or transitivity structure models that do not
adapt easily to the visual mode (Bateman 2014). So, it seems that, as
McGlashan indicates in Chapter 11, there is still a gap in the literature
for approaching verbal, visual and multimodal trends/tendencies in visual
narratives.
Certainly, there are also some researchers who have taken a multi-
modal perspective in their analyses of specific children’s picture books,
for example Lewis (2006), Unsworth (2008), Painter (2007), Martin
(2008) and Moya-Guijarro (2014), among others. Yet there are still
too few multimodal studies that focus on how a common theme and
communicative purpose are captured in a unified manner in a selected
sample of children’s picture books; in our case, in stories that challenge
gender stereotypes and the concept of the traditional family. The research
DOI: 10.4324/9781003145875-1
2
2 A. Jesús Moya-Guijarro and Eija Ventola

presented here addresses this gap by focusing on a sample of children’s
picture books that in some way question and challenge stereotypes
concerning gender or the concept of a traditional family, or which pro-
mote the social inclusion of same-sex parent families.
Starting from this premise, the contributing authors of this volume
aim to explore the choices afforded to the writer/illustrator in transmit-
ting representational, interpersonal and textual meanings in both the
verbal and non-verbal components in a selection of children’s picture
books. More specifically, the main aims of the book are to identify the
verbal and visual strategies that are available to authors and illustrators
for (i) generating representational meaning and construing gender (rep-
resentational metafunction), (ii) establishing an interaction between the
characters of the story and also between the protagonists and the young
readers (interpersonal metafunction) and, finally, (iii) creating inform-
atively coherent multimodal texts (textual/compositional metafunction)
in a sample of children’s picture books written in or translated into
English (Halliday 2004; O’Halloran 2004; Kress and van Leeuwen
2006; Moya-Guijarro 2014). Finally (iv), the aim of the volume is also to
examine the complementarity or synergy that is created between the text
and illustrations to transmit meaning in multimodal children’s narratives
(Painter, Martin and Unsworth 2013). Summarising, the chapters in
the volume reveal how verbal and visual semiotic modes interrelate in
order to promote gender equality and social inclusion in children’s visual
narratives.
Picture Books, Multimodality and Gender

In the final decades of the twentieth century, Nodelman (1988: ix)
pointed out that “most discussions of children’s picture books have
either ignored their visual elements altogether or else treated the pictures
as objects of a traditional sort of art appreciation rather than narrative
elements”. Nowadays, however, scholars of Children’s Literature, writers,
illustrators and teachers recognise that good picture books are complex
visual narratives in which both words and images play an important role
in the construction of the stories. The function of images is not just to
make the picture books more appealing and accessible to young and inex-
perienced readers; quite the opposite, they play a key part in creating and
raising ideas that are beyond the meanings that the verbal or visual modes
can each convey on their own (Nodelman 1988; Arizpe and Styles 2003;
Painter and Martin 2011; Moya-Guijarro 2019a and b). In line with this
thought, in this book all the chapters start from the premise that picture
books can only be understood and approached as complex multimodal
products, in which images and words complement each other in different
ways to create meaning. Indeed, this variation across modalities is, as
Painter and Martin (2011) point out, a common literary and pedagogic
strategy used in visual narratives intended for young children.
3
Picture Books, Gender and Multimodality 3

Another characteristic of children’s picture books is their potentiality
for dealing with diverse and controversial topics such as death, depres-
sion, violence, wars and discrimination (Colomer, Kümmerling-Meibauer
and Silva-Díaz 2010; Evans 2015). Some researchers on children’s litera-
ture assume that picture books should provide children with the neces-
sary tools to face controversial problems that they may encounter in their
lives (Evans 2015; Nodelman 2015). Adopting a similar point of view,
Nikolajeva (2014: 125) considers that the absence of controversial topics
in children’s books deprives them from the opportunity to develop their
basic emotions and, more importantly, to raise their empathy to others
involved in situations of distress, fear or anger different from their own.
Among the different topics that are approached in picture books are
also those related to gender issues, as shown by the studies carried out
by Knowles and Malmkjaer (1996), Wharton (2005) and, especially,
Sunderland (2012). Sunderland (2012: 143), for example, has carried
out a study on the content of a sample of picture books that feature
boys and girls who do not conform to gender stereotypes. Her research,
which is essentially anchored in Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough
1995, 2003; Caldas-Coulthard and Coulthard 1996) and content ana-
lysis (Cohen et al. 2007), proves that characters in children’s stories have
been traditionally constructed through a language based on established
and predetermined stereotypes. Thus, the male characters take on more
active roles and their actions affect other actants. The female characters,
however, appear to be more focused on pleasing or liking the other
participants that surround them. Male characters outnumber females
in these children’s narratives, both in the linguistic mode and in the
illustrations, an aspect that has implications for the gender image that is
constructed by the child. Women are usually ignored or not sufficiently
considered in books intended for this audience consisting of children.
Today, although the ratio of male to female characters in stories is similar,
at least in quantitative terms, and since the 1980s feminist stories have
been published that extol the role of the female figure (Prince Cinders
(1987) or Princess Smarty Pants (1986) by Babette Cole are examples
of this), the male figure continues to prevail over the female one in pic-
ture books; or, at least, linguistic resources are used that still impov-
erish the representation of the female characters in children’s narratives
(Sunderland 2012: 19, 36).
Moreover, the concept of genre in picture books has not only been
approached at the individual level of the character, but also at the family
level, a unit which has undergone substantial changes, considering
the new family formats that are emerging in today’s society. We refer,
in particular, to same-sex parent families. This change has had direct
repercussions in social, political and also literary areas. In fact, in the
most recent decades picture books have been published that address
this issue, probably aiming at presenting the child with a reality that,
whether we agree with it or not, is part of the twenty-first-century society
4

(Sunderland 2012: 143). As with the emergence of non-sexist stories after
the 1970s and 1980s, associated with feminist liberation movements, the
arrival of stories illustrating same-sex parent families came in the 1980s
after the gay liberation movement.
The first book with this topic was published in 1983, Jenny Lives with
Eric and Martin, written by Susanne Bösche and illustrated by Adreas
Hansen. However, between 1983 and 1987, due to the spread of AIDS and
the responsibility attributed to homosexual couples in the development
of the disease, some negative attitudes towards homosexuality emerged
(Sunderland and McGlashan 2013, 2015). Since then, although, unfor-
tunately, not always successful, attempts have been made to introduce
picture books that portray children living in same-sex parent households
into schools, basically in order to promote the acceptance of all types of
families existing in our society. Sunderland (2012: 143 and ff), in collab-
oration with McGlashan, carried out a study on the content of picture
books that feature same-sex-parent families and promote the acceptance
of gay couples with biological or adopted children. Among other aspects,
they analyse the realistic or fantastic nature of the stories, their images
(specifically, the number of times characters establish physical or emo-
tional contact), their linguistic component (the types of verbs that are
used to express affection) and, above all, the narrative strategies used by
authors to promote the acceptance of same-sex parents and create a posi-
tive image of the gay identity.
Although the research carried out on picture books portraying same-
sex-parent families from a content and linguistic perspective is certainly
conclusive, it is also true that despite the multimodal nature of pic-
ture books, more attention needs to be paid to the meaning that comes
from the interaction of images and text in these literary works. In this
sense, Sunderland (2012: 52) highlights the need to adopt multimodal
approaches that complement those traditional narrative theories which
have focused mainly on the study of literary and content issues when ana-
lysing contemporary picture books. For this reason, in this book, special
attention is given to the analyses of the meaning that is created from the
word-image interaction in a large sample of stories that feature children
who either live in sex-same family households or who do not necessarily
conform to the macho or female stereotypes typically associated with
their gender in traditional narratives. These multimodal analyses reveal
how the verbal and visual modalities contribute to each other’s meaning
and make evident the potential of combining words and images in pic-
ture books.
Theoretical Frameworks
The chapters included in this book take the most relevant literary theories
and multimodal social-semiotic and discourse frameworks a step further
from previous studies and apply them to the genre of children’s visual
5

narratives that challenge gender stereotypes. The theoretical approaches
adopted for carrying out the multimodal and discourse analysis in this
collection of chapters are predominantly Systemic Functional Linguistics
(Halliday 1978, 2004), Appraisal theory (Martin and White 2005),
Multimodal Social Semiotics (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006; Painter,
Martin and Unsworth 2013) and Systemic- Functional Multimodal
Discourse Analysis (O’Halloran 2004). Other chapters have adopted
cognitive approaches (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Coat 2019), cultural
and feminist theories (Langton and Bowers 1993; Deleuze and Guattari
1987; Butler 1999, etc.), and Corpus- driven Multimodal Discourse
Analysis (Abbott and Forceville 2011). The application of these multi-
modal (and cultural /cognitive /social-semiotic) discourse approaches
can yield results of interest, not only for researchers in the field of dis-
course and multimodality, but for writers, illustrators and teaching
professionals as well. These approaches provide us with tools to describe
the meaning-making resources of verbal and visual language in multi-
modal texts, which are conceptualised as choices from semiotic systems
that are beyond language itself.
Although SFL focuses essentially on verbal language, Halliday (1978,
2004) assumes that language is just one of the many semiotic systems,
along with images, sound, music, etc., that can be used to express meaning.
Besides, Halliday asserts that all texts, whether verbal or visual, inde-
pendently or in combination with other semiotic modalities, simultan-
eously entail representational, interpersonal and textual/compositional
meanings. This idea has led Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) to develop
a grammar of visual design to describe the meaning-making resources of
images in a specific social context. They propose that images are capable of
simultaneously realising three types of meaning: representational, which
is related to Halliday’s ideational metafunction, interactive, which cor-
responds to Halliday’s interpersonal metafunction, and finally, compos-
itional meaning, which is associated with Halliday’s textual metafunction.
Both SFL and Visual Social Semiotics view language as a social semiotic
system where the options available to its users to achieve their communi-
cative goals and make meanings are determined by the social context or
the culture in which language is used (Halliday 1978, 2004; O’Halloran
2004; Moya-Guijarro 2014). In addition to being functional, contextual
and social theories, SFL and Visual Social Semiotics are also systemic
theories. This means they use systems, combined into networks (transi-
tivity, mood, theme, etc.) that operate at a number of levels and model
paradigmatic relations. The systems formalise the paradigmatic choices
or abstract features which are available to the speaker of a language to
make meaning and are basically defined by their opposition to each other.
In the last few decades, the analysis of text-image interaction has
indeed gained momentum both in literature and linguistic research, as
proved by the numerous studies of Moebius (1986), Nodelman (1988),
Nikolajeva and Scott (2001), Lewis (2006), Unsworth (2008, 2011),
6

Unsworth and Ortigas (2008), Serafini (2010) or Moya-Guijarro (2019a
and b). Nonetheless, the taxonomies proposed for defining a text-image
interface tend to put forward a continuum amongst the relationships
of equivalence, expansion, complementarity or divergence between the
visual and the textual modes. However, sometimes the frontiers between
different categories are too fuzzy or not clearly defined. The key issue is,
according to Painter et al. (2013: 6) that most of the proposed taxon-
omies for analysing image and text synergy only allow for establishing
one type of relationship between text and image in a visual composition
or even only one interrelation type throughout a multimodal assembly.
For this reason, Painter et al. (2013: 3) consider that, although Kress and
van Leeuwen’s (2006) visual grammar is a productive analytic framework
for the study of images (Unsworth and Ortigas 2008), their account is not
sufficiently developed to study some aspects of picture books, essentially
those concerning intermodal relations. Aware of this fact, they extend
Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar and develop further systems at
representational, interpersonal and textual/compositional levels of ana-
lysis to deal with image realisations in picture books. The model they
propose for analysing the verbal and visual intersemiosis in picture books
is based on the concepts of commitment and coupling (Painter et al.
2013: 134, 143) and is adopted in some of the chapters in this book.
Commitment refers to the particular selections taken up and actualised
from the whole meaning potential of a system to convey meaning in a
specific text. Coupling involves the repeated co-patterning combinations
of meaning within a text of realisations within two or more systems or
metafunctions. The application of these two notions to the sample texts
will lead some of the contributors of this volume to determine if there are
co-patterns of realisations from the verbal and visual systems at repre-
sentational, interpersonal and textual/compositional levels in the picture
books selected for analysis.
Today, more and more, there seems to be general agreement on the
need to adopt interdisciplinary approaches (Kümmerling-Meibauer
2018) that consider not only the literary, feminist post-structural, queer
and narrative theories, but also multimodal, discursive and cogni-
tive approaches, in order to address the communicative potential that
arises from the interaction of words and images in multimodal texts.
Following these new multimodal and interdisciplinary approaches, the
authors in the volume analyse a sample of children’s visual narratives that
question gender stereotypes and the concept of traditional family. The
tools offered by Halliday’s SFL (1978, 2004), O’Halloran (2004), Kress
and van Leeuwen’s (2006) and Painter et al.’s (2013) Multimodal Social
Semiotics, combined with approaches of a more literary, content, cultural
and cognitive nature (Nodelman 1988; Arizpe and Styles 2003; Wharton
2005; Lewis 2006; Sunderland 2012; Forceville 2009; Kelly 2012, etc.)
are used in the chapters that follow, in order to explore the verbal and
7

visual strategies that authors and illustrators of picture books have used
to generate progressive messages.
The picture books that comprise the sample texts analysed in this
volume share a scathing review of gender stereotypes and family models.
Indeed, the selected picture books portray either children who do not
necessarily conform to the male and/ or female stereotypes typically
associated with their gender in traditional narratives, or children living in
same-sex parent families. The intended target audience of most of these
stories is children aged approximately between three and nine. With these
addressees in mind, all the visual narratives are original stories that stand
out for their literary quality, an opinion that has been shared by critics
(McCabe et al., 2011; Sunderland, 2012), and specialised journals such
as Children’s Literature in Education, Sex Roles and Gender and Society,
inter alia). A further important aspect that primarily determined their
selection was that all the stories defend freedom and social acceptance,
independently of people’s preferences. Sometimes, as for example in
Chapters 3, 5 and 9, the authors have chosen the same picture books
among their sample texts for analysis. Far from leading to repetition, this
has actually allowed for different aspects offered by the stories’ themes
to be highlighted, depending on the different tools chosen for analysis,
which we believe brings about an additional dimension of interest to the
book we present.
Structure of the Book

The book comprises a total of 13 chapters, arranged in three main parts
after this introduction. The introductory Chapter 1 outlines the scope of
the volume, its overall motivation and its structure. Chapters 2 to 5 form
the first part of the book with a focus on male characters that do not
conform to masculine gender stereotypes, and they illustrate how what
is told and what is shown complement and enhance each other. These
four chapters analyse picture books whose protagonists are boys who
challenge male gender stereotypes and whose behaviour reveals a desire
to promote social acceptance. The second part includes the next four
chapters, Chapters 6 to 9, which feature non-traditional princesses and
girls whose behaviour deconstructs patriarchal views of gender. Finally,
the third part, comprising Chapters 10 to 13, explores both the trad-
itional gendered representation of family life in children’s picture books,
and the verbal and visual strategies used by writers and illustrators to
promote the acceptance of same-sex parent households, most of which
are composed of either biological or adopted sons or daughters and their
parents. Thus, together the contributors of these chapters invite reflexion
on existing family models and analyse the verbal and visual strategies
used by the writers and illustrators to challenge the concept of traditional
family and promote inclusion and respect for diversity.
8
Part I: Stories Portraying Boys Who Challenge Gender Stereotypes

Chapter 2 by Kachorsky and Perez, Julián Is a Mermaid. Challenging
Gender Stereotypes: A Qualitative Multimodal Content Analysis, begins
the first part of the book, where the focus is on the analysis of pic-
ture books that portray boys who challenge traditional gender stereo-
types. Kachorsky and Perez aim to study how Love, the writer and
illustrator of the Stonewall Book Award-winning picture book, Julián
Is a Mermaid, uses both individual modes and modes in combination
to “normalise” Julián’s love of mermaids, his desire to be a mermaid,
and his grandmother’s acceptance of his transformation into a mermaid.
The authors start from the premise that images play a role in producing,
reproducing and contributing to the dominance of hegemonic ideolo-
gies that uphold the interests of those with power and status in society
(Sturken and Cartwright 2001).
To analyse Julián Is a Mermaid, Kachorsky and Perez use a Multimodal
Content Analysis instrument adapted from the work of Serafini and Reid
(2019). They also draw upon Social Semiotics (Kress and van Leeuwen
2006; Painter et al. 2013) and gender/queer theory. With these tools, the
authors examine the multimodal structures within the visual images and
the verbal elements of the story, as well as the intermodal relationships
present in the selected picture book. These aspects of the analytical tools
help Kachorsky and Perez explore the meaning potentials created in the
visual narrative, and how those meaning potentials are influenced by
social factors. The analysis also demonstrates that, although there are
inconsistent representations of gender identity and expression across
the modes, the combination of verbal and visual elements promotes a
message of gender acceptance in the story.
In Chapter 3, Ideational Construal of Male Challenging Gender
Identities in Children’s Picture Books, Elorza analyses how gender iden-
tities are challenged in three picture books whose protagonists are boys,
Ballerino Nate by Bradley and Alley (2006), Oliver Button Is a Sissy by
dePaola (1979) and Tough Boris by Fox and Brown (2009). In the three
picture books, the gender identities of protagonist boys clash in some way
with the characters who represent stereotypical gender behaviour. The
stories present boys who do things that are either not expected of them or
that other boys do not like to do, and thus the traditional acceptability of
binary social gender roles is challenged, mainly in terms of agency, desire
and behaviour. Drawing upon SFL (Halliday 1978, 2004) and Visual
Social Semiotics (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001, 2006; Moya-Guijarro
2014; Painter et al. 2013), Elorza explores the lexico-grammatical and
semiotic visual resources that are deployed to construe gender identities
as ideational meaning and showcases the rich potential and flexibility
that bimodality (visual-verbal) allows for this.
Contrary to the literature on identity and attribution, which tradition-
ally has been concerned with how language is used from an interpersonal
9

perspective, including aspects related to appraisal and polarity, Elorza
focuses on ideational meaning in her description of the range of linguistic
and semiotic resources available to construe challenging gender identities.
The ideational analysis carried out allows the author to conclude that
the depiction of the protagonist’s gender identity is crucially based on the
relationship established in the narration between the protagonist and the
group representing the gender stereotype. This can be portrayed not only
as a contrastive relation (the case of Ballerino Nate and Oliver Button
Is a Sissy) but also as a relation of comparison (Tough Boris). Findings
also reveal the logical causal chains underlying the construal of stereotyp-
ical gender behaviour in the three visual narratives, which pivot around
the concept of ‘sissy’. Elorza shows how those logical causal chains are
challenged by the protagonists, which she connects with the educational
potential of ‘gender inclusive’ picture books for contributing to critical
literacy.
In Chapter 4, At the Heart of It: Once There Was a Boy, Collins-
Gearing discusses how the children’s picture book Once There Was a
Boy by the Aboriginal Australian writer Dub Leffler (2011) challenges
the dominant ideas of culture and stereotyped gender binaries through
the metaphor of a beating heart. The picture book tells the story of a boy
who lives alone on an island. One day a girl visits and breaks his heart,
which is kept hidden outside of his body in a box under his bed, leaving
the boy devastated for she had not followed his request to respect his
privacy. Drawing on Langton and Bower’s (1993) theory of intersub-
jectivity, Country et al’s (2016) work on “co-becoming”, and Feng and
O’Halloran’s (2013) work on feeling and emotion, the author explores
the representations of “boyness”, trauma and healing through sharing
and reconciliation.
By examining both the written and visual elements of the picture book,
Collins-Gearing invites readers to disrupt dominant ideas of gender bin-
aries and dig into the way characters relate with their environment.
Through the embodied encounters of the characters with the active and
vibrant places where they grow up, and through the synergy of images
and words, Leffler shifts traditional Western ideas of the construction of
“boyness”, showing that boys have feelings and can be just as vulnerable
as their female counterparts. In addition, Collins-Gearing’s findings reveal
that the combination of verbal and visual modalities creates an intersub-
jective dialogue between the verbal and visual elements of the story and
the readers, generating a space that favours feelings and sharing, as well
as male/female interconnections and connectivity, rather than separate-
ness and objectification.
In Chapter 5, Gender Assumptions in Picture Books about Boys in
Dresses, Nodelman puts the finishing touch to the first section of the
book by exploring picture books about boys who like to wear dresses and
other female-identified clothing. Some of the contemporary picture books
included in his analysis are: 10,000 Dresses by Ewert (2008), My Princess
01

Boy by Kilodavis (2010), Morris Micklethwaite and the Tangerine Dress
by Baldacchino (2014), I am Jazz by Herthel and Jennings (2014), Jacob’s
New Dress by Hoffman, Hoffman and Chase (2014), Big Bob, Little Bob
by Howe (2016), One of a Kind, Like Me by Mayeno and Liu-Trujillo
(2016), The Boy and the Bindi by Shraya and Perrera (2016), Sparkle Boy
by Newman and Mola (2017) or Julian Is a Mermaid by Love (2018),
among others. In his analytical approach, Nodelman draws not only on
semiotic theoreticians like Kress and van Leeuwen (2006), but also on
the cognitive approaches developed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and
Coats (2019).
Nodelman’s study shows that initially the existence of these books
about boys in dresses shows an intention to promote, if not transgender
acceptance specifically, gender equality and social inclusion more gener-
ally. But a closer look reveals ways in which the books undermine that
intention. His analysis of visual images reveals ways in which their creators
unconsciously reference visual conceptual metaphors along with other
signs that contradict their more obvious intentions. Nodelman explores
how that happens in picture books about boys wearing female-identified
clothing in relation to a series of interrelated ideological assumptions.
First of all, the male characters mostly consider dresses as signs of fem-
ininity, and by wearing them defend their choice of ignoring ongoing
conventions. Furthermore, although claimed to be relating to sex-and
gender issues by reviewers and advertising, most of the texts in the stories
do not connect dress-wearing with possibilities of being gay or trans-
gender, but rather function as a sign of individuality and the right to be
different. Moreover, in depicting boys in fancy, brightly coloured, glittery
dresses, in bleak, empty, dark-toned landscapes, the picture books tend
to imply both the virtues of being attractive and the idea that attractive-
ness is inherently and essentially feminine. As a result, these images evoke
another unfortunate cliché: while men ideally produce wealth, women
(and effeminate boys) characteristically consume as much as they are
consumed by the gaze.
Part II: Picture Books Featuring Princesses and Girls Who

Do Not Conform to Female Gender Stereotypes
The second part begins with Chapter 6 by Thomas and Moya-Guijarro,
Queering the Princess: On Feminine Subjectivities and Becoming Girl in
Contemporary Picture Books. The authors aim to explore the representa-
tion of non-traditional “princesses” in two picture books, Pirate Princess
by Bardhan-Quallan and McElmurry (2012) and The Princess Knight by
Funke and Meyer (2004) and to examine the relationship that is created
between the text and image to communicate meanings that are complex,
subtle and not necessarily in line with the purported claim of challenging
gender stereotypes. Drawing on feminist post-structural theories (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987; Butler 1999), Visual Social Semiotics (Painter, Martin
1

and Unsworth 2013) and Appraisal Theory (Martin and White 2005),
Thomas and Moya-Guijarro identify the ways in which diverse feminine
subjectivities are constructed in each visual narrative and interrogate each
text for how effectively it represents the complexities of girlhood in rela-
tion to the multiplicities of ways of being and becoming girl.
In line with Nodelman’s findings in Chapter 5, Thomas and Moya-
Guijarro conclude that while traditional roles of femininity are contested
in these two texts, the messages they offer to young girls are mixed and
somewhat problematic, as evidenced through the detailed intersemiotic
analysis. In both instances, the texts construct a difficult path for choices
other than normative female. Moving beyond traditional binary roles is
fraught with difficulties for each female protagonist, while the roles of
a knight or a pirate are simply presented as natural for a male. The two
contemporary picture books that are the subject of this chapter also con-
test traditional gender roles, but their starting point is still with a nor-
mative feminine role, and the process of becoming different is a process
marked by physical and psychological difficulty and the subject of much
humour. This raises the question about the effectiveness of the stories to
actually contest traditional ideas of the feminine.
In Chapter 7, A Clever Paper Bag Princess, a Fearless Worst Princess
and an Empowered Little Red: A Critical Multimodal Analysis,
Constanty and Heberle aim at verifying how lexico-grammatical and
visual resources are used in three children’s picture books to (de)con-
struct the representation of young ladies as powerless and fragile (Bittner
and Arnold 2019). The stories selected are: The Paper Bag Princess
(Muncsch and Martchenko 1980), The Worst Princess (Kemp and Ogilvie
2012) and Little Red (Woollvin 2016). To do that, they carry out an ana-
lysis concerning the verbal and visual meanings created in the three visual
narratives to characterise the protagonists and the actions performed by
them, as well as the types of evaluations that encompass the stories. The
theoretical approaches adopted to carry out this study are SFL, Painter,
Martin and Unsworth’s (2013) Visual Social Semiotics and feminist lit-
erary perspectives.
In line with Elorza’s conclusions in Chapter 3, Constanty and Heberle’s
results show how lexico-grammatical features in SFL, such as transitivity
choices in verbal processes, furnish some of the particular characteristics
of the main characters in the stories. Similarly, images serve to empha-
sise the role of body position in establishing the interpersonal exchange
of information between characters. The study also reveals the features
used to deconstrue the patriarchal and binary views of gender shown
in traditional fairy tales, which embed cultural messages closely related
to patriarchal values (Crew 2002; Parsons 2004). In short, this chapter
contributes to the discussion of new forms of discourse and cultural
norms in new versions or “re-visions” (Parsons, 2004) of picture books,
and gives space for discussion on gender equality and women’s empower-
ment in our twenty-first century society.
21

Chapter 8 by Carmen Santamaría-García, A Semiotic and Multimodal
Analysis of Interactive Relations in Picture Books That Challenge Female
Gender Stereotypes, shows a semiotic and multimodal analysis of the
interactive relations in three picture books that tell stories of female
characters who do not conform to traditional gender stereotypes. The
stories, Princess Smartypants by Cole (1996), Arthur and Clementine
by Turin and Bosnia (1976) and Tutus Are Not My Style by Skeers
and Wilsdorf (2010), combine verbal and visual modalities to actively
engage readers with the characters. Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) and
Painter et al.’s (2013) social-semiotic approaches are used in combination
with Halliday’s (2004) Systemic-Functional model to explore the visual
resources used in the construction of interactive meanings that build
an interpersonal relationship among the characters, and between them
and the readers. The text-image synergy resulting from the interaction
of both words and pictures and their relationship of interdependence is
also analysed from the perspectives of commitment and coupling (Painter
et al. 2013).
Santamaría’s analysis of affiliation draws on focalisation resources
for eye contact and type of gaze, pathos (engaging or alienating drawing
styles), social distance and attitude, which produce different relationships
of power and involvement. Her analysis reveals how the female characters
portrayed in the stories relate to each other, both within and outside of
their family environments. The results of the analysis throw light on
the meaning potential of the systems of affiliation and attitude to depict
female characters who are released from the pressure of traditional gender
roles and find a voice of their own.
Chapter 9, Communicative Functions of Part-Whole Representations
of Characters in Picture Books that Challenge Gender Stereotypes, by
Moya-Guijarro, explores how visual metonymies contribute to the chal-
lenging of gender stereotypes in a sample of 20 picture books. Ten of the
picture books feature boys who do not necessarily conform to macho
stereotypes. The other ten tales portray girls who promote social inclu-
sion and equality. Multimodal social semiotic (Kress and van Leeuwen
2006; Painter et al. 2013), and cognitive approaches (Forceville 2009;
Pinar 2015) have been adopted to carry out this research. The integration
of both cognitive and social-semiotic approaches to study multimodal
artefacts has already been proposed by other researchers such as Feng
and O’Halloran (2013, 2014), who have demonstrated how the inte-
gration of Social Semiotics and Cognitive approaches to metaphor and
metonymy is significant for the exploration of multimodal discourses.
Adopting these Social Semiotic and Cognitive approaches, the current
study expands the research already developed by Moya-Guijarro (2011,
2013, 2019a and b) on the communicative functions of part- whole
depictions in picture books, a genre which has been practically unex-
plored within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics. The results of the
study show that metonymic representations are essentially used in the
31

picture books featuring girls to ascribe negative qualities to chauvinistic
and careless characters and to highlight that women can do all types of
jobs. Furthermore, part-whole depictions are used in the stories portraying
boys to highlight the idea that children should always be proud of who
they are, independently of their vital preferences and orientations.
Part III: Visual Narratives Portraying and Challenging

the Concept of Traditional Family
In Chapter 10, Gender Stereotypes in Children’s Picture Books: A Systemic
Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis, Zhai, O’Halloran, Way and
Tan examine how text and images interplay to construct gender roles in
children’s picture books that portray family life and day-to-day activities.
The four picture books that form the sample texts are Richard Scarry’s
Mother Cat’s Busy Day (1997) and Father Cat’s Busy Day (1997), and
Laura Numeroff’s and Lynn Munsigner’s What Daddies Do Best (2001)
and What Mommies Do Best (1998). Drawing on SF-MDA (O’Halloran
2008; O’Halloran and Lim 2014; Jewitt, Bezemer and O’Halloran
2016), Halliday’s (2014) metafunctional framework and Social Semiotics
(Kress and van Leeuwen 2006; Painter, Martin and Unsworth 2013),
the authors investigate how writers and illustrators use different multi-
modal strategies at representational, interpersonal and textual levels of
analysis to represent and construct gender relations in picture books.
Thus, the semantic content of picture book representation is theorised
as interrelated systems of participants, processes and circumstances,
and logical systems which articulate the imposed connections between
actors and their actions (Painter et al. 2013). Interpersonal relationships
are theorised into the systems of Shot Distance, Perspective, Gaze and
Modality. Finally, textual/ compositional meaning, which is about
packing meaning coherently, is theorised into the systems of Layout and
Framing (Painter, Martin and Unsworth 2013).
The analysis of the text and images shows that distinct sets of semantic
features are selected in multimodal constructions of husbands and wives,
forming a consistent pattern across different picture books. The gender-
biased semantic choices make experiential content of family life unevenly
distributed, where husband/wife roles are limited to restricted settings
and social activities, resulting in the perpetuation of gender stereotypes as
certain semantic features tend to be fossilised into gender specific ones. By
identifying this gender-biased pattern in semantic choices in picture book
representation, this study challenges traditional gender stereotypes and
invites reflection on existing role distinctions in the real world.
Chapter 11 by McGlashan, Linguistic and Visual Trends in the
Representation of Two-Mum and Two-Dad Couples in Children’s Picture
Books, explores the ways in which the fathers and mothers in families
with same-sex parents are represented in children’s picture books. By
examining a complete corpus of more than 52 picture books published
41

in English, featuring families with two mums or two dads, the chapter
provides a comprehensive account of trends in the naming and visual
representations of parents and focuses on how representational strat-
egies have changed over time. The analysis also focuses on quantitative
co-occurrence between the visual and verbal elements of picture books
through collustration (collocation and illustration, McEnery and Hardie
2012: 240). Drawing principally on Corpus-assisted Multimodal Critical
Discourse Analysis, the study detailed in this chapter examines and critic-
ally interprets changing representations of same-sex parents in the picture
book corpus selected for analysis.
Findings appear to suggest that, although changes in representation
are largely to do with being favourable to lesbian women and gay men
in equal measure, representation of lesbian and gay parents still reaffirms
some dominant social norms and some gender, family and parenting
stereotypes. This is probably in an attempt to characterise gay male and
female parents as being capable of fulfilling ‘normal’ social and family
activities such as marriage and caregiving duties, fields of action from
which LGBTQ+ people have traditionally been excluded. As such, trends
are changing and for the first time McGlashan’s chapter outlines chan-
ging representational patterns in children’s picture books featuring same-
sex parents.
In Chapter 12, The Depiction of Family and Self in Children’s Picture
Books: A Corpus-Driven Exploration, Calvo-Maturana and Forceville
investigate how families are represented in picture books in terms of
gender and other aspects of diversity that partake in portraying the self.
They do so through a thorough multimodal analysis taking the visual
mode (including the use of typography) as a starting point (Lewis 2006;
Painter et al. 2013; Moya-Guijarro 2014) and approaching the visual
narratives from a corpus-driven perspective (Abott and Forceville 2011).
They analyse 30 picture books that are targeted at children aged 4–8 in
which the story is framed through the integration of visual and textual
modes: (1) books from the AMULIT corpus compiled by the editors of
this volume; (2) a random selection of prize-winning books retrieved via
the search engine of the International Youth Library online catalogue;
and (3) a random selection from the same catalogue of either non-prize-
winning books or books awarded with prizes other than those selected
for (2).
The authors chart the following dimensions in their analysis of the
representation of (plural) identities of parents and children: (i) the roles
and activities of (grand)parents, children, (pet) animals, and other (non)
family members as well as visualisations of events in/outside the house
or in public spaces; (ii) the identification of helpers and adversaries vis-
à-vis the child’s problems; (iii) the degree to which art and sports are
represented in the child’s environment, and the degree to which imagin-
ation is promoted; (iv) the extent to which physical intimacy, in both
its potentially positive and negative dimensions, is depicted; and (v) the
51

representation of sexual, gender, colour and age diversity in and around
the household. Their analysis involves both a quantitative and quali-
tative approach to the data. The results shed light on how diversity is
depicted and re- addressed through the integration of the visual and
textual affordances specific to the genre of picture books, and chart
whether there are differences and similarities in representing the family
in the three sub-corpora studied. Moreover, the chapter draws a map
of relevant areas to explore various visual and multimodal strategies in
future research and suggests visual density (Carter and Nash 1990) as a
powerful cognitive tool to re-evaluate issues pertaining to representing
the family and the self.
Finally, in Chapter 13, The Moomin Family: An Elastic Permeable
Multi-Dimensional Construct in Semiotic and Social Space, Matthiessen
adopts Malinowski’s (1945) foundational insights on anthropology and
a Systemic-Functional approach to explore how Tove Jansson, a Finnish
author, enacts and construes the Moomin family (also making refer-
ence to the work by her brother Lars Jansson) verbally and pictorially.
Considering Malinowski’s foundational insights, Matthiessen interprets
families and other institutions as (1) semiotic constructs –systems
of meaning, (2) social constructs –systems of behaviour, and (3) bio-
logical constructs –as manifested within biological populations. When
he explores “the family” along these lines, he finds, not surprisingly, that
descriptively it is a permeable region somewhere midway between poten-
tial and instance –one that is in the first instance semiotic and then social,
but also biological.
These different orders of manifestation may be “aligned” but they are
shifting. In fact, a key reason for Matthiessen’s choice of the Moomin
Family stories is that Jansson provides us with a very enlightened
view of the family –a family that is caring and inclusive, a family that
challenges traditional stereotypical conceptions of the family; a family
whose members are secure enough to form unusual friendships and
to transform fear into understanding (Karjalainen 2013). Matthiessen
focuses on the task of exploring how Jansson created the (world of
the) Moomin Family, enacting and construing it as a resource for
her readers, a resource that will in fact help them transcend limiting
conceptions of the family, and of the world in general. The author of
this chapter thinks about this situation metafunctionally, noting that
folk tales simultaneously construe world view and enact protocols for
interactive behaviour.
To summarise the overall value of the chapters in this volume, we can
say that they are a considerable step towards an enhanced understanding
of the message that picture books transmit to young children through the
combination of text and illustrations. We live in an eminently techno-
logical and visual society, where meaning is not created exclusively
through the written text, but through the combination of different semi-
otic modes. No doubt, the visual mode is one of them. Visual narratives
61

may contribute to the development of young readers’ visual literacy and
have become essential both to understand the multimodal manifestations
of the media-oriented world in which we live today, and to comprehend
discourses which promote social inclusion and equality. As models of
shared cultural values and meanings, children’s picture books may influ-
ence their readers’ attitudes and beliefs and boost the acceptance of the
non-traditional gender models or family formats that are progressively
emerging in today’s society. We, co-operating for the second time on a
volume on Multisemiotics, hope that authors, illustrators, and readers
of picture books as well as students, teachers, reviewers and researchers
of children’s literature, linguistics and Multisemiotics find the content of
these chapters interesting and that the chapters serve as inspiration for
discussions on the meaning potential of picture books that deal with
gender issues. Gender equality and inclusion are concepts to be addressed
from childhood in school and family settings. Certainly, picture books
are, without a doubt, essential resources to familiarise young children
with these aspects and, in turn, develop their visual literacy.
Note
1 This research was carried out as part of the research project FFI2017-85306-P
(The Construction of Discourse in Children’s Picture Books, AMULIT), funded
by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness.
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Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
“I hope this is the right thing, Clarissa. It would be terrible if it
weren’t.”
“Of course it’s right ... whatever that means: if it works it’s right ...
perfectly simple. Such conceptions are all a matter of fashion
anyway. One year women expose only their ankle; the next year
their derrière. What’s right one year is wrong the next. If Cave
captures the popular imagination, he’ll be right until someone better
comes along.”
“A little cynical.” But Clarissa was only repeating my own usual line. I
was, or had been until that night on the Washington farm, a
contented relativist. Cave, however, had jolted me into new ways
and I was bewildered by the change, by the prospect ahead.
2
That evening was a time of triumph, at least for Cave’s companions.
They arrived noisily. Paul seemed drunk, manically exhilarated, while
Iris glowed in a formal gown of green shot with gold. Two men
accompanied them, one a doctor whose name I didn’t catch at first
and the other a man from the television network who looked
wonderfully sleek and pleased and kept patting Cave on the arm
every now and then, as if to assure himself he’d not vanished in
smoke and fire.
Cave, still dressed in his dark suit, was mute. He sat answering
questions and replying to compliments with grave nods of his head.
He sat in a high brocaded chair beside the fire and drank tea which
Clarissa, knowing his habits, had ordered in advance for him.
After our first burst of greetings at the door I did not speak to Cave
again and soon the others left him alone and talked around him,
about him yet through him, as though he had become invisible ...
which seemed the case when he was not speaking, when those
extraordinary eyes were veiled or cast down, as they were now,
moodily studying the teacup, the pattern in the Aubusson rug at his
feet.
I crossed the room to where Iris sat on the wide couch. The doctor,
in the chair close to her, snuffled brandy and said, as I joined them:
“Your little book, sir, is written in a complete ignorance of Jung and
all those who have come after him.”
This was sudden but I answered, as graciously as possible, that I

had not intended a treatise on psychoanalysis.
“Not the point, sir, if you’ll excuse me.... I am a psychiatrist, a friend

of Mr Himmell’s” (so this was the analyst to whom Paul so often
referred) “and I think it impossible for anyone today to write about the
big things without a complete understanding of post-Jungian
development....”
Iris interrupted as politely as possible. “Doctor Stokharin is a zealot,

Gene. You must listen to him but, first, did you see John tonight?”
“I did, here with Clarissa: he was remarkable, even more so than in

person.”
“It is the isolation,” said Stokharin, nodding. Dandruff fell lightly like
dry snow from his thick brows to his dark blue lapels. “The camera
separates him from everyone else. He is projected like a dream
into....”
“He was so afraid at first,” said Iris, glancing across the room at the
silent Cave who sat, very small and still in the brocaded chair, the
teacup still balanced on one knee. “I’ve never seen him disturbed by
anything before. They tried to get him to do a rehearsal but he
refused. He can’t do rehearsals ... only the actual thing.”
“Fear is natural when ...” but Stokharin was in the presence of a

master drawing-room tactician: Iris was, I saw at that moment, a
born hostess. For all her ease and simplicity she was ruthlessly
concerned with keeping order, establishing a rightness of tone which
Doctor Stokharin, in his professional madness, would have
completely undone, reducing the drawing room to a seminar in
mental therapy, receiving public confessions judiciously, and
generalizing to a captive audience. I admired Iris’s firmness, her
devotion to the civilized.
“At first we hardly knew what to do.” Iris’s voice rose serenely over
the East European rumblings of the doctor. “He’d always made such
a point of the audience. He needed actual people to excite him. Paul
wanted to fill the studio with a friendly audience but John said no.
He’d try it without. When the talk began there were only a half dozen
of us there: Paul, myself, and the technicians. No one else.”
“How did he manage?”
“It was the camera. He said when he walked out there he had no
idea if anything would happen or not, if he could speak. Paul was
nearly out of his mind with terror; we all were. Then John saw the
lens of the camera. He said looking into it gave him a sudden shock,
like a current of electricity passing through him, for there, in front of
him, was the eye of the world and the microphone above his head
was the ear into which at last he could speak. When he finished, he
was transfigured. I’ve never seen him so excited. He couldn’t recall
what he had said but the elation remained until....”
“Until he got here.”
“Well, nearly.” Iris smiled. “He’s been under a terrible strain these last
two weeks.”
“It’ll be nothing like the traumatizing shocks in store for him during
the next few days,” said Stokharin, rubbing the bole of a rich dark
pipe against his nose to bring out its luster (the pipe’s luster, for the
nose, straight, thick, proud, already shone like a gross baroque
pearl). “Mark my words, everyone will be eager to see this
phenomenon. When Paul first told me about him, I said, ah, my
friend, you have found that father image for which you’ve searched
since your own father was run over by a bus in your ninth (the
crucial) year. Poor Paul, I said, you will be doomed to
disappointment. The wish for the father is the sign of your immaturity.
For a time you find him here, there ... in analysis you transfer to me.
Now you meet a spellbinder and you turn to him, but it will not last.
Exactly like that I talked to him. Believe me, I hold back nothing.
Then I met this Cave. I watched him. Ah, what an analyst he would
have made! What a manner, what power of communication: a natural
healer. If only we could train him. Miss Mortimer, to you I appeal. Get
him to study. The best people, the post-Jungians are all here in New
York. They will train him. He would become only a lay analyst but,
even so, what miracles he could perform, what therapy! We must not
waste this native genius.”
“I’m afraid, Doctor, that he’s going to be too busy wasting himself to
study your ... procedures,” Iris smiled, engagingly, dislike apparent in
her radiant eyes. Stokharin, however, was not sensitive to hostility ...
no doubt attributing such emotions to some sad deficiency in the
other’s adjustment.
Iris turned to me. “Will you be in the city the whole time?”
“The whole time Cave’s here? Yes. I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”
“I’m glad. I’ve so much I want to talk to you about. So many things
are beginning to happen. Call me tomorrow. I’ll be staying at my old
place. It’s in the book.”
“Cave?”
“Is staying with Paul, out on Long Island at someone’s house. We

want to keep him away from pests as much as possible.”
“Manic depression, I should say,” said Stokharin thoughtfully, his pipe

now clenched between his teeth and his attention on Cave’s still
figure. “With latent schizoid tendencies which ... Miss Mortimer, you
must have an affair with him. You must marry him if necessary. Have
children. Let him see what it is to give life to others, to live in a
balanced....”
“Doctor, you are quite mad,” said Iris and she crossed the room, cool
in her anger. I too got away from the doctor as quickly as I could:
“False modesty, inhibited behavior, too early bowel training,” and
similar phrases ringing in my ears.
Paul caught me at the door. I’d intended to slip away without saying
good night, confident that Clarissa would understand, that the others
would not notice. “Not going so soon, are you?” He was a little drunk,
his face scarlet with excitement. “But you ought to stay and
celebrate.” I murmured something about having an early
appointment the next day.
“Well, see me tomorrow. We’ve taken temporary offices in the

Empire State Building. The money has begun to roll in. If this thing
tonight turns out the way I think it has, I’m going to be able to quit my
other racket for good and devote all my time to Cave.” Already the
name Cave had begun to sound more like that of an institution than
of a man.
“By the way, I want to tell you what I think of the Introduction:
superior piece of work. Tried it out on several highbrow friends of
mine and they liked it.”
“I’m afraid....”
“That, together with the talks on television, should put this thing over
with the biggest bang in years. We’ll probably need some more stuff
from you, historical background, rules and regulations, that kind of
thing, but Cave will tell you what he wants. We’ve hired a dozen
people already to take care of the mail and inquiries. There’s also a
lecture tour being prepared, all the main cities, while....”
“Paul, you’re not trying to make a religion of this, are you?” I could
hold it back no longer even though both time and occasion were all
wrong for such an outburst.
“Religion? Hell, no ... but we’ve got to organize. We’ve got to get this
to as many people as we can. People have started looking to us (to
him, that is) for guidance. We can’t let them down.”
Clarissa’s maid ushered in a Western Union messenger, laden with

telegrams. “Over three hundred,” said the boy. “The station said to
send them here.”
Paul paid him jubilantly and, in the excitement, I slipped away.
3
The results of the broadcast were formidable. My small book which
until then had enjoyed the obscurity of being briefly noted among the
recent books was taken up by excited editors who used it as a basis
for hurried but exuberant accounts of the new marvel.
One night a week for the rest of that winter Cave appeared before
the shining glass eye of the world and on each occasion new millions
in all parts of the country listened and saw and pondered this
unexpected phenomenon, the creation of their own secret anxieties
and doubts, a central man.
The reactions were too numerous for me to recollect in any order or

with any precise detail; but I do recall the first few months vividly:
after that of course the work moved swiftly of its own and one lost
track of events which tended to blur, the way casualties late in a
large war do, not wringing the wearied heart as the death of one or a
particular few might earlier have done.
A few days after the first broadcast, I went to see Paul at the offices
which he had taken in the Empire State Building ... as high up as
possible, I noted with amusement: always the maximum, the
optimum.
Halfway down a corridor, between lawyers and exporters, Cavite,

Inc. was discreetly identified in black upon a frosted-glass door. I
went inside.
It appeared to me the way I’d always thought a newspaper office
during a crisis might look. Four rooms opening in a row off one
another, all with doors open, all crowded with harassed secretaries
and clean-looking young men in blue serge suits carrying papers,
talking in loud voices which together made the room sound like a
hive at swarming time.
Though none of them knew me, no one made any attempt to ask my
business or to stop me as I moved from room to room in search of
Paul. Everywhere there were placards with Cave’s picture on them,
calm and gloomy-looking, dressed in what was to be his official
costume: a dark suit, an unfigured tie, a white shirt. I tried to
overhear conversations as I passed the busy desks and groups of
excited debaters, but their noise was too loud. Only one word was
identifiable, sounding regularly, richly emphatic like a cello note:
Cave, Cave, Cave.
In each room I saw piles of my Introduction which pleased me even

though I had come already to dislike it.
The last room contained Paul, seated behind a desk with a

dictaphone in one hand, three telephones on his desk (none
fortunately ringing at this moment) and four male and female
attendants with notebooks and pencils eagerly poised. Paul sprang
from his chair when he saw me. The attendants fell back. “Here he
is!” He grabbed my hand and clung to it vise-like: I could almost feel
the energy pulsing in his fingertips, vibrating through his body ... his
heartbeat was obviously two to my every one.
“Team, this is Eugene Luther.”
The team was properly impressed and one of the girls, slovenly but
intelligent-looking, said: “It was you who brought me here. First you I
mean ... and then of course Cave.”
I murmured vaguely and the others told me how clear I had made all
philosophy in the light of Cavesword. (I believe it was that day,
certainly that week, Cavesword was coined by Paul to denote the
entire message of John Cave to the world).
Paul then shooed the team out with instructions he was not to be
bothered. The door, however, was left open.
“Well, what do you think of them?” He leaned back, beaming at me

from his chair.
“They seem very ... earnest,” I said, wondering not only what I was
supposed to think but, more to the point, what I did think of the whole
business.
“I’ll say they are! I tell you, Gene, I’ve never seen anything like it. The
thing’s bigger even than that damned crooner I handled ... you may
remember the one. Everyone has been calling up and, look!” He
pointed to several bushel baskets containing telegrams and letters.
“This is only a fraction of the response since the telecast. From all
over the world. I tell you, Gene, we’re in.”
“What about Cave? Where is he?”
“He’s out on Long Island. The press is on my tail trying to interview

him but I say no, no go, fellows, not yet; and does that excite them!
We’ve had to hire guards at the place on Long Island just to keep
them away.”
“How is Cave taking it all?”
“In his stride, absolute model of coolness which is more than I am.
He agrees that it’s better to keep him under wraps while the
telecasts are going on. It means that curiosity about him will increase
like nobody’s business. Look at this.” He showed me a proof sheet of
a tabloid story: “Mystery Prophet Wows TV Audience,” with a
photograph of Cave taken from the telecast and another one
showing Cave ducking into a taxi, his face turned away from the
camera. The story seemed most provocative and, for that
complacent tabloid, a little bewildered.
“Coming out Sunday,” said Paul with satisfaction. “There’s also going
to be coverage from the big circulation media. They’re going to cover
the next broadcast even though we said nobody’d be allowed on the
set while Cave was speaking.” He handed me a bundle of
manuscript pages bearing the title “Who Is Cave?” “That’s the story I
planted in one of the slick magazines. Hired a name-writer, as you
can see, to do it.” The name-writer’s name was not known to me but,
presumably, it would be familiar to the mass audience.
“And, biggest of all, we got a sponsor. We had eleven offers already

and we’ve taken Dumaine Chemicals. They’re paying us enough
money to underwrite this whole setup here, and pay for Cave and
me as well. It’s terrific but dignified. Just a simple 'through the
courtesy of’ at the beginning and another at the end of each telecast.
What do you think of that?”
“Unprecedented!” I had chosen my word some minutes before ... one

which would have a cooling effect.
“I’ll say. By the way, we’re getting a lot of stuff on that book of yours.”
He reached in a drawer and pulled out a manila folder which he
pushed toward me. “Take them home if you like. Go over them
carefully ... might give you some ideas for the next one; you know:
ground which needs covering.”
“Is there to be a next one?”
“Man, a flock of next ones! We’ve got a lot to do, to explain. People
want to know all kinds of things. I’m having the kids out in the front
office do a breakdown on all the letters we’ve got: to get the general
reaction ... what it is people most want to hear, and, believe me,
we’ve been getting more damned questions, and not just the main
thing but family problems too, things like that: 'Please, Mr. Cave, I’m
married to two men and feel maybe it’s a mistake since I have to
work nights anyway.’ Lord, some of them are crazier than that.”
“Are you answering all of them?”

“Oh, yes, but in my name. All except a few of the most interesting
which go to Cave for personal attention. I’ve been toying with the
idea of setting up a counselor-service for people with problems.”
“But what can you tell them?” I was more and more appalled.
“Everything in the light of Cavesword. You have no idea how many

questions that does answer. Think about it and you’ll see what I
mean. But of course we follow standard psychiatric procedure only
it’s speeded up so that after a couple of visits there can be a
practical and inspirational answer to their problems. Stokharin said
he’d be happy to give it a try, but we haven’t yet worked out all the
details.”
I didn’t want to hear anything more about this; I changed the subject.
“What did you have in mind for me to do?”
“Cavesword applied to everyday life.” He spoke without hesitation;

he had thought of everything. “We’ll know more what people want to
hear after a few more telecasts, after more letters and so on. Then
supply Cavesword where you can and, where you can’t, just use
common sense and standard psychiatric procedure.”
“Even when they don’t always coincide?”
Paul roared with laughter. “Always the big knocker, Gene. That’s
what I like about you ... the disapproving air ... it’s wonderful and I’m
quite serious. People like myself ... visionaries, you might say,
continually get their feet off the ground and it’s people like you who
pull us back ... make us think. Anyway, I hope you’ll be able to get to
it soon. We’ll have our end taken care of by the time the telecasts
are over.”
“Will you show Cave to the world then? I mean in person?”
“I don’t know. By the way, we’re having a directors’ meeting Friday

morning. You’ll get a notice in the mail. One of the things we’re going
to take up is just that problem, so you be thinking about it in the
meantime. I have a hunch it may be smart to keep him away from
interviewers for good.”
“That’s impossible.”
“I’m not so sure. He’s pretty retiring except when he speaks. I don’t
think he’d mind the isolation one bit. You see how dull he gets in
company when he’s not performing.”
“Would he consent, do you think?”
“I think so. We could persuade him, I’m sure. Anyway, for now he’s a
mystery man. Millions see him once a week but no one knows him
except ourselves. A perfect state of affairs, if you ask me.”
“You mean there’s always a chance he might make a fool of himself

if a tough interviewer got hold of him?”
“Exactly, and believe me there’s going to be a lot of them after his

scalp.”
“Have they begun already?”
“Not yet. We have you to thank for that, too, making it so clear that
though what we said certainly conflicts with all the churches we’re
really not competing with them, that people listening to Cavesword
can go right on being Baptists and so on.”
“I don’t see how, if they accept Cave.”
“Neither do I, but for the time being that’s our line.”
“Then there’s to be a fight with the churches?”
Paul nodded grimly. “And it’s going to be a honey. People don’t take
all the supernatural junk seriously these days but they do go for the
social idea of the church, the uplift kind of thing: that’s where we’ll
have to meet them, where we’ll have to lick them at their own game.”
I looked at him for one long moment: I had of course anticipated
something like this from the moment that Cave had become an
organization and not merely one man talking. I had realized that
expansion was inevitable: the rule of life is more life and of
organization more organization, increased dominion. Yet I had not
suspected Paul of having grasped this so clearly, using it so promptly
to his, to our advantage. The thought that not only was he cleverer
than I had suspected but that he might, indeed, despite his
unfortunate approach, be even cleverer than myself, disagreeably
occurred to me. I had until then regarded myself as the unique
intellectual of the Cavites, the one sane man among maniacs and
opportunists: it seemed now that there were two of us with open
eyes and, of the two, he alone possessed ambition and energy,
qualities neither of which I possessed to any useful degree.
“You mean this to be a religion, Paul?”
He smiled, “Maybe, yes ... something on that order perhaps.

Something workable, though, for now: I’ve thought about what you
said the other night.”
“Does Cave want this?”
Paul shrugged. “Who can tell. I should think so but this is not really a
problem for him to decide. He has happened. Now we respond.
Stokharin feels that a practical faith, a belief in ways of behavior
which the best modern analysts are agreed on as being closest to
ideal, might perform absolute miracles. No more guilt-feeling about
sex if Cave were to teach that all is proper when it does no harm to
others ... and the desire to do harm to others might even be partly
removed if there were no false mysteries, no terrible warnings in
childhood and so on. Just in that one area of behavior we could work
wonders! Of course there would still be problems but the main ones
could be solved if people take to Cave and to us. Cavesword is
already known and it’s a revelation to millions ... we know that. Now
they are looking to him for guidance in other fields. They know about
death at last. Now we must tell them about living and we are lucky to
have available so much first-rate scientific research in the human
psyche. I suspect we can even strike on an ideal behavior pattern by
which people can measure themselves.”
“And to which they will be made to conform?” Direction was

becoming clear already.
“How can we force anyone to do anything? Our whole power is that

people come to us, to Cave voluntarily because they feel here, at
last, is the answer.” Paul might very well have been sincere: there is
no way of determining, even now.
“Well, remember, Paul, that you will do more good than harm by
attempting to supplant old dogmas and customs with new dogmas. It
will be the same in the end except that the old is less militant, less
dangerous than a new law imposed by enthusiasts.”
“Don’t say 'you.’ Say 'we.’ You’re as much a part of this as I am. After
all you’re a director. You’ve got a say-so in these matters. Just speak
up Friday.” Paul was suddenly genial and placating. “I don’t pretend
I’ve got all the answers. I’m just talking off the top of my head, like
they say.”
A member of the team burst into the office with the news that Bishop
Winston was outside.
“Now it starts,” said Paul with a grimace.
The Bishop did not recognize me as we passed one another in the

office. He looked grim and he was wearing clerical garb.
“He’s too late,” said a lean youth, nodding at the churchman’s back.
“Professional con-men,” said his companion with disgust. “They’ve

had their day.”
And with that in my ears, I walked out into the snow-swirling street,
into the bleak opening of the new year, of Cave’s year.
I was more alarmed than ever by what Paul had told me and by what
I heard on every side. In drugstores and bars and restaurants,
people talked of Cave. I could even tell when I did not hear the name
that it was of him they spoke: a certain intentness, a great curiosity, a
wonder. In the bookstores, copies of my introduction were displayed
with large blown-up photographs of Cave to accompany them.
Alone in a bar on Madison Avenue where I’d taken refuge from the
cold, I glanced at the clippings Paul had given me. There were two
sets. The first were the original perfunctory ones which had
appeared, short, puzzled ... the reviewers, knowing even less
philosophy than I, tended to question my proposition that
Caveswood was anything more than a single speculation in rather a
large field. I’d obviously not communicated his magic, only its record
which, like the testament of miracles, depends entirely on faith and
to inspire faith one needed Cave himself.
“What do you think about the guy?” the waiter, a fragile sensitive
Latin with parchment-lidded eyes mopped the spilled gin off my table
(he’d seen a picture of Cave among my clippings).
“It’s hard to say,” I said. “How did he strike you?”
“Boy, like lightning!” The waiter beamed; a smile which showed

broken teeth spoiled the delicate line of his face. “Of course I’m
Catholic but this is something new. Some people been telling me you
can’t be a good Catholic and go for this guy. But why not? I say. You
still got Virginmerry and now you got him, too, for right now. You
ought to see the crowd we get here to see the TV when he’s on. It’s
wild.”
It was wild, I thought, putting the clippings back into the folder. Yet it
might be kept within bounds. Paul had emphasized my directorship,
my place in the structure ... well, I would show them what should be
done or, rather, not done.
Then I went out into the snow-dimmed street and hailed a cab. All
the way to Iris’s apartment I was rehearsing what I would say to Paul
when next we met. “Leave them alone,” I said aloud. “It is enough to
open the windows.”
“Open the windows!” The driver snorted. “It’s damn near forty in the
street.”
4
Iris occupied several rooms on the second floor of a brownstone in a
street with, pleasantest of New York anachronisms, trees. When I
entered, she was doing yogi exercises on the floor, sitting
crosslegged on a mat, her slender legs in leotards and her face
flushed with strain. “It just doesn’t work for me!” she said and stood
up without embarrassment for, since I’d found the main door
unlocked, I’d opened this one too, without knocking.
“I’m sorry, Iris, the downstairs door was....”
“Don’t be silly.” She rolled up the mat efficiently. “I was expecting you
but I lost track of time ... which means it must be working a little. I’ll
be right back.” She went into the bedroom and I sat down, amused
by this unexpected side to Iris: I wondered if perhaps she was a
devotee of wheat germ and mint tea as well. She claimed not. “It’s
the only real exercise I get,” she said, changed now to a heavy robe
which completely swathed her figure as she sat curled up in a great
armchair, drinking Scotch, as did I, the winter outside hid by drawn
curtains, by warmth and light.
“Have you done it long?”
“Oh, off and on for years. I never get anywhere but it’s very restful
and I’ve felt so jittery lately that anything which relaxes me ...” her
voice trailed off idly. She seemed relaxed now.
“I’ve been to see Paul,” I began importantly.

“Ah.”
But I could not, suddenly, generate sufficient anger to speak out with
eloquence. I went around my anger stealthily, a murderer stalking his
victim. “We disagreed.”
“In what?”
“In everything, I should say.”
“That’s so easy with Paul.” Iris stretched lazily; ice chattered in her
glass; a car’s horn melodious and foreign sounded in the street
below. “We need him. If it wasn’t Paul, it might be someone a great
deal worse. At least he’s intelligent and devoted. That makes up for
a lot.”
“I don’t think so; Iris, he’s establishing a sort of supermarket, short-

order church for the masses.”
She laughed delightedly. “I like that ... and, in a way, you’re right:
that’s what he would do left to himself.”
“He seems in complete control.”
“Only of the office. John makes all the decisions.”
“I wish I could be sure of that.”
“You’ll see on Friday. You’ll be at the meeting, won’t you?”
I nodded. “I have a feeling that between Paul and Stokharin this

thing is going to turn into a world-wide clinic for mental health.”
“I expect worse things could happen, but Paul must still contend with
me and you and of course the final word is with John.”
“How is Cave, by the way? I haven’t seen him since the night of the
first telecast.”
“Quite relaxed, unlike the rest of us. You should come out with me
one day to Long Island and see him. I go nearly every day for a few
hours. He’s kept completely removed from everyone except the
servants and Paul and me.”
“Does he like that?”
“He doesn’t seem to mind. He walks a good deal ... it’s a big place
and he’s used to the cold. He reads a little, mostly detective stories
... and then of course there’s the mail that Paul sends on. He works
at that off and on all day. I help him and when we’re stuck (you
should see the questions!) we consult Stokharin who’s very good on
some things, on problems....”
“And a bore the rest of the time.”
“That’s right,” Iris giggled. “I couldn’t have been more furious the
other night, but, since then, I’ve seen a good deal of him and he’s
not half bad. We’ve got him over the idea that John should become a
lay analyst: the response to the telecast finally convinced Stokharin
that here was a racial 'folk-father-figure’ ... his very own words. Now
he’s out to educate the father so that he will fulfill his children’s
needs on the best post-Jungian lines.”
“Does Cave take him seriously?”
“He’s bored to death with him. Stokharin’s the only man who’s ever
had the bad sense to lecture John ... who absolutely hates it; but he
does feel that Stokharin’s answers to some of the problems we’re
confronted with are ingenious. All that ... hints to the lovelorn is too
much for John, so we need the Stokharins to take care of details.”
“I hope he’s careful not to get too involved.”
“John’s incorruptible. Not because he is so noble or constant but

because he can only think a certain way and other opinions, other
evidence, can’t touch him.”
I paused, wondering if this was true; then: “I’m going to make a
scene on Friday. I’m going to suggest that Paul is moving in a
dangerous direction, toward organization and dogma and that if
something is not done soon we’ll all be ruined by that which we most
detest: a militant absolutist doctrine.”
Iris looked at me curiously. “Tell me, Gene, what do you want? Why
are you still with Cave, with all of us when you so apparently suspect
the general direction? You’ve always been perfectly clear about what
you did not want (I can recall, I think, every word you said at the farm
that night) but, to be specific, what would you like all this to become?
How would you direct things if you could?”
I’d been preparing myself for such a question for several months yet
I still had no single answer to make which would sharply express my
own doubts and wishes. But I made an attempt. “I would not
organize, for one thing. I’d have Cave speak regularly, all he likes,
but there would be no Cavite, Inc., no Paul planting articles and
propagandizing. I’d keep just Cave, nothing more. Let him do his
work. Then, gradually, there will be effects, a gradual end to
superstition....”
Iris looked at me intently. “If it were possible, I would say we should

do what you suggest, even though it would be ruinous not only for us
but for everyone....”
“Why ruinous? A freedom to come to a decision on one’s own

without....”
“That’s it. No one can be allowed that freedom. One doesn’t need
much scholarship or even experience to see that. Everywhere
people are held in check by stifling but familiar powers. People are
used to tyranny: they expect governments to demand their souls,
and they have given up decisions on many levels for love of security.
What you suggest is impossible with this race at this time.”
“You’re talking nonsense. After all, obeisance to established religions

is the order of the day, yet look at the response to Cave who is
undermining the whole Christian structure.”
“And wait until you see the fight they’re going to put up!” said Iris
grimly. “Fortunately, Cave’s word is the mortal blow though Cave
himself would be their certain victim if he was protected, if there was
no organization to guard him, and the Word.”
“So Paul and his—his team, his proselytes are to become merely an
equivalent power, combating the old superstitions with their own
weapons.”
“More or less, yes. That’s what it has come to.”
“Even though his talking to the people would be enough? Let them
use him, not he them.”
“A good slogan,” Iris smiled. “But I think I’m right. No one would have
a chance to see or hear him if it weren’t for Paul; you should read the
threatening letters we’ve been getting.”
“I thought all the mail was most admiring?”
“All that came from people who’ve actually heard him but there’s a
lot coming in now from religious fanatics. They are very extreme.
And of course the churches, one by one, are starting to take notice.”
“I saw Bishop Winston in Paul’s office today.”
“He’s been trying to see John all week. He finally settled for Paul, I
gather. In any case, after the next telecast there will really be a
storm.”
“The next? What’s going to happen then?”
“John will tell them that there’s no need for the churches, that their
power derives from superstition and bloody deeds.”
I was startled. “When did this hit him? I thought he intended to go on

as he was, without ever coming out openly against them.”
“I was surprised too. He told me yesterday; he’d been brooding all
day and, suddenly, he started to attack them. It’s going to be
murderous.”
“I hope not for him.”
“Oh, he’ll convince, I’m sure of that: but their revenge....” She gave a
troubled sigh. “Anyway, Gene, you do see why we can’t, for our own
safety, dispense with Paul and his financiers and press agents and
all the squalid but necessary crew.”
“It may be too late,” I agreed. “But I fear the end.”
“No one can tell; besides, as long as you and I are there with John it
will be all right.”
I felt her confidence was not entirely justified but I determined, for the
moment, to defer my attack on Paul’s methods until a safer time.
We argued about the wisdom of the coming telecast: was it really

necessary to confront the enemy explicitly? and in his own country,
so to speak? Iris was not sure, but she felt Cave’s instinct was right
even though he had, perhaps, been goaded into action sooner than
we’d anticipated by the harsh letters of Christian zealots.
And then by slow degrees, by careful circling, the conversation grew

personal.
“I’ve never told anyone else,” said Iris, looking at me speculatively.
“Don’t worry; I haven’t repeated any of it.” And, as always at such

times, I felt a warm flood of guilt: any direct statement of personal
innocence has always made me feel completely criminal.
“But since I’ve told you, I ... it’s a relief to have someone I can talk to
about John. I don’t dare mention his name to my family, to my old
friends ... I don’t think they even know yet that I’ve met him.”
“I thought it has all been in the papers.”

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A Multimodal Approach to Challenging

Gender Stereotypes in Children s

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The Children s Music Studio A Reggio inspired Approach

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Language Disorders a functional approach to assessment

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Methuselah s Children Heinlein Robert A

A Multimodal Approach to Challenging

This collection offers a thorough treatment of the ways in which the

A. Jesús Moya-​Guijarro is Full Professor in the Department of English

Eija Ventola, now Emerita Professor, was previously Full Professor of

Routledge Studies in Multimodality

Designing Learning with Embodied Teaching

Naming and Framing

Engagement in Medical Research Discourse

Multimodality and Classroom Languaging Dynamics

A Multimodal Approach to Challenging Gender Stereotypes in Children’s

Mediation and Multimodal Meaning Making in Digital Environments

Multimodal Literacies Across Digital Learning Contexts

For more information about this series, please visit: https://​www.

First published 2022

To our beloved parents, who taught us

1 Picture Books, Gender and Multimodality: An

2 Julián Is a Mermaid Challenging Gender Stereotypes:

3 Ideational Construal of Male Challenging Gender

4 At the Heart of It: Once There Was a Boy 69

5 Gender Assumptions in Picture Books about Boys

6 Queering the Princess: On Feminine Subjectivities and

7 A Clever Paper Bag Princess, a Fearless Worst Princess

8 A Semiotic and Multimodal Analysis of Interactive

9 Communicative Functions of Part-​Whole

10 Gender Stereotypes in Children’s Picture Books: A

11 Linguistic and Visual Trends in the Representation

12 The Depiction of Family and Self in Children’s Picture

2.1 Women dressed as mermaids. Illustration from Julián

xii List of Figures

3.1 Characterisation of traits, physical characteristics,

xiv List of Tables

Coral Calvo-​Maturana https://​orcid.org/​0000-​0002-​5947-​1486 is English

xvi List of Contributors

List of Contributors xvii

xviii List of Contributors

List of Contributors xix

Copyright © 2018 Jessica Love. From Julián is a Mermaid. Reprinted

Scope and Aims of the Book

2 A. Jesús Moya-Guijarro and Eija Ventola

Picture Books, Multimodality and Gender

Picture Books, Gender and Multimodality 3

4 A. Jesús Moya-Guijarro and Eija Ventola

Picture Books, Gender and Multimodality 5

6 A. Jesús Moya-Guijarro and Eija Ventola

Picture Books, Gender and Multimodality 7

Structure of the Book

8 A. Jesús Moya-Guijarro and Eija Ventola

Part I: Stories Portraying Boys Who Challenge Gender Stereotypes

Picture Books, Gender and Multimodality 9

10 A. Jesús Moya-Guijarro and Eija Ventola

Part II: Picture Books Featuring Princesses and Girls Who

Picture Books, Gender and Multimodality 11

12 A. Jesús Moya-Guijarro and Eija Ventola

A. Jesús Moya-Guijarro is Full Professor in the Department of English

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.

9 Communicative Functions of Part-Whole

Coral Calvo-Maturana https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5947-1486 is English