Towards the Postmodernesque Picturebook

Abstract

As documented in the Introduction to this book, in recent years a shift has become evident in children’s literature from postmodern to what I term postmodernesque literature. That such a shift has occurred is not surprising. According to Barth (1967) all literary trends follow a cycle of a resistance-acceptance-decline and eventually reach a point of exhaustion when the particular strategies and themes of the movement become clichéd. Concurrent with this decline, a literary trend will often take new directions, undergo modification and morph into a related, but recognisably different, development. Certainly adult postmodern fiction has experienced a number of shifts and changes in emphasis in the latter part of the twentieth century. One such shift, despite the reservation expressed by Smethurst in the first epigraph, is a turn from a focus on the ideologies and practices of liberal humanism to engage with the discourses of postmodernity (see Hassan, 2001; Connor, 2004; McLaughlin, 2004; Hoberek, 2007). A number of commentators (Lewis, 2001; McLaughlin, 2004; Kirby, 2010) refer to the resultant fiction produced as post-postmodernist texts. In a similar vein, Hutcheon (2002) argues that postmodern fiction, that she defines as fiction which both disrupts the conventions of narrative and interrogates aspects of liberal humanist society, is now a thing of the past.

I have felt uncomfortable for some time that postmodernism is losing its power to worry, provoke and to question, especially to question its own nature and origin. (Smethurst, 2000, p. 11)

What is undeniable is that globalization, in one form or another, is impacting on the lives of everyone on the planet […] It is changing consciousness, too, as everyone everywhere becomes more globally aware and oriented. In this sense globalization might justifiably be claimed to be the defining feature of human society at the start of the twenty-first century. (Beynon and Dunkerley, 2000, p. 3)