The Child and the Book Coursework
Comparison of Raymond Brigg’s ‘The Snowman’ and ‘When the Wind Blows’
“ The picture book, which appears to be the cosiest and most gentle of genres, actually produces the greatest social and aesthetic tensions in the whole field of children’s literature” – (Egoff 1981, p.118.)
We live in a world where the norms of our day to day activities are constantly being challenged and adjusted in the light of new technologies and cultural change. Resolute values and beliefs that used to be highly regarded and rigorously held on to appear to slowly diminish under a wave of new attitudes towards children’s learning. However, picture books still remain an effective way through which children become acculturated into the society in which we live, meaning that their importance and impact cannot be undermined. Raymond Brigg’s ‘The Snowman’ and ‘When the Wind Blows’ are two example of picture books as the illustrations play an important role in the telling of a story; “Story depends on the interactions between written text and image” (Arizpe and Styles 2009,slide 2.4)
The layout and principles of the genre used in ‘The Snowman’ and ‘When the Wind Blows’ arecrucial in evaluating their effectiveness as picture books. These two books represent the two extremes in the word-picture dynamic; text with pictures and a wordless picture book. ‘The Snowman’ adopts the form of a picture narrative featuring no words, and ‘When the Wind Blows’ can be described as a verbal narrative or an illustrated story. Brigg’s design is integral to the way he conceptualizes his books with his illustrations and text forming the anatomy of the two picture books.
‘The Snowman’ and ‘When the Wind Blows’ adopt a physical rectangular shape with the spine falling in the centre. The endpapers of ‘When the Wind Blows’ are a solid brown colour, possibly reflecting the bleakness of the war scenario which the story revolves, while ‘The Snowman’ has blank endpapers....