Non-Fiction Picturebooks. Sharing Knowledge as an Aesthetic Experience

Since 2010, we have witnessed an exponential increase worldwide in the number of non-fiction books for children. Not only has the number of non-fiction publications increased, the books themselves have completely changed in nature compared to the traditional children’s learning books of the past. Increasingly released in the form of a picturebook non-fiction publications have recently offered and continue to offer ample space for far-reaching experimentation using a range of original, surprising and previously unthinkable ways of combining transmission of knowledge and artistic research, description of the world and a poetic approach, especially achieved by means of a well-meditated and skilfully designed visual code. This new approach invites us to reconsider non-fiction books altogether, re-examine their particular features and full potential, a potential undoubtedly wider than we were aware of when more traditional learning books were the rule, with their manner of transmitting a largely pre-defined knowledge intended to be memorized and stored in the most linear way possible. As a multimodal means of communication, the ‘picturebook’ format calls for a different, more complex, response on the part of the reader, because the very nature of the message is influenced and made more ambiguous by the presence of multiple codes. The book contains contributions by scholars from many parts of the world, all of them interested in analysing this new and extremely interesting children's publishing phenomenon.