Children's Picturebooks as cultural and geographic products: actors of spatialities, generator of spaces

International audienceThe work presented in this paper fits in the field of cultural geography and hopes to prove that there exists a spatial turning point as defined by Edward Soja in 1996, which will allow a further look into societies, analyzing them by means of the cultural objects that they produce. Children " s picturebooks, these books conceived for the young public which combine images, props, and very often text in a relationship of interdependence, constitute the objects of this research work. Drawing from a body of narrative, iconotextual picture books published in France between 1919 and 2012, this paper intends to demonstrate that the interdependence among text, pictures and props generates and imagines not only space for the reader but also a spatial intentionality, a transmission of living such as envisioned by the author-illustrator. Another part of this paper, more exploratory, proposes seeing in children " s books a place of communication in which the spatial intentionality would help the child-reader to act on the space. The reception, the esthetic experience, the performative reading of the picturebook would allow the child to construct for himself a spatial cultural capital in which he could delve to " play with " the space in which he lives or that he will have to live