As art objects, picturebooks have the potential to contribute to readers' aesthetic development. Many scholars and practitioners have recognized how using picturebooks with older students can augment their reading motivation and extend their understanding of visual elements of art and design, as well as develop their literacy, language, and…

Narrative embedding is a common narrative structural device. Genette (1980, 1988) distinguished among various diegetic levels to explain the discrete narrative levels in embedded narratives and he defined metalepsis as the deliberate disturbing or breaking of narrative boundaries. Metalepsis, described by Malina (2002) as a mutinous narrative…

"The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales" (1992) by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith was awarded a Randolph Caldecott Honor Medal in 1993. Scieszka and Smith subvert textual authority through playing "with literary and cultural codes and conventions" (McCallum 1996, p. 400) in their metafictive text. In this article, I discuss the…

In the picture book "Shortcut" (1995), the mediated telling of the fabula (the story) by David Macaulay results in a nonlinear and nonsequential syuzhet (the plot). Several metafictive devices used in the construction of the syuzhet of "Shortcut" draw attention to its status as text and fiction. Although researchers and theorists have written…