چكيده
This study intends to investigate the applicability of narrative theory as appropriated by Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott for studying children’s picture books. As children’s literature theorists and narratologists, Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott argue that children’s literature is best understood through narrative theory. In several works, they not only develop a theory of what distinguishes children’s books from other narrative works, but also emphasize the fact that children’s literature has entered the field of literary criticism in many ways. Therefore, they make an effort to find new ways of reading children’s picture books. Nikolajeva and Scott distinguish between five types of text-image interaction in picture books, which can be used as an adequate way of examining narratological aspects such as characterization, temporality, and point of view in picture books. They believe that these aspects make up the narrative structure of children’s books. Specifically, the purpose of this thesis is to use Maria Nikolajeva’s and Carole Scott’s categorization of the types of relations that exist between texts and images in children’s picture books to see how they affect structural narrative aspects such as characterization, temporality, and point of view, and to finally decide how the content of a picture book is related to its form. In the course of this thesis six famous picture books are selected in order to examine the above mentioned theory’s applicability to the study of children’s picture books. The picture books that are selected as case studies of the current thesis include not only classic picture books but also modernist and postmodernist ones. The picture books that are selected are as follows: Regards to the Man in the Moon by Ezra Jack Keats; Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss; Olivia by Ian Falconer; If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Joffe Numeroff; The Monster at the End of This Book by jon Stone; Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans.
