Contemporary children's picture books provide a rich domain for developing theory and analysis of visual meaning and its relation to accompanying verbal text. This book offers new descriptions of the visual strand of meaning in picture book narratives as a way of furthering the project of 'multimodal' discourse analysis and of explaining the literacy demands and apprenticing techniques of children's earliest literature. Reading Visual Narratives uses the principles of systemic-functional theory to organise an explicit account of visual meaning in relation to three perspectives: the visual construction of the narrative events and characters (ideational meaning), the visual positioning of the reader through choices related to focalisation and appraisal (interpersonal meaning) and the discourse organization of visual meanings through choices in framing and composition (textual meaning). The descriptions throughout are illustrated with examples from highly regarded children's picture
