Illustrated tales of Kusu Island

Kusu Island is one of Singapore's sixty-three islands and has several names, such as "Pulau Tembakul" in Malay and "Peak Island" in English. Its most popular name, Kusu, comes from the Hokkien pronunciation of the Chinese characters 龟屿 (guī yǔ), which means 'Turtle Island'." As a small island city-state with centuries of history, Singapore is filled with traditional tales that have been passed down orally through generations. Kusu Island depicts two men – a Malay and a Chinese – who are saved by a giant turtle during a storm and then live on the island together. This island with the aid of the turtle is built through friendship and trust. There has been scant scholarly research focusing on island creation stories and visual imagery in children’s illustrated books especially in Southeast Asia. Moreover, there is a research gaps in examining illustrated children’s books through an art historical perspective. Hence, this thesis focuses on the evolution of the illustrated tales of Kusu Island over the past decades. This includes contextualising the changes in narratives and visual representations of the story with reference to the transformations in society of the time, and how the past and present, fiction and reality collide. In order to respond to the research gap, I used Frank Serafini’s journal articles alongside Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scotts’ How Picturebooks Work to argue that the increased sophistication of visual images over the past decades has enhanced the interplay of image and text in the illustrated tales of Kusu Island. The visual narrative adds a complexity and depth to the textual narrative, hence influencing the meaning and experiences of the story. The structural narratives of the tales of Kusu Island were also studied using Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale, revealing its consistency throughout the decades. Using Lutz Röhrich’s Folktales and Reality I studied the ‘reality’ of the age in which the book was written and illustrated, showing the evolution of the folktales. In addition to Röhrich’s theories, interviews with the authors and illustrators were also conducted to contribute as primary data to the analysis of the tales of Kusu Island. A grounded theory was used to analyse the interview results to show that the creation of these tales is highly dependent on the illustrators’ and authors’ decisions and influences in the process, and how these tales can affect the implied child readers through its visual and textual narratives. The significance of this research is threefold. First, it brings forth a working model of visual image analysis in illustrated children’s books by creating a framework for future scholarship to build on. The second significance of this thesis heightened the relationship between cultural development and their defining historical and social features of different epochs, where illustrated books were also products of their time and space despite recounting “timeless stories”. Finally, in researching on the illustrated tales of Kusu Island, this study promotes the appreciation for existing islands creation stories so as to encourage further scholarship into this domain in children’s literature.Master of Art