Visual criticism and children's literature

The long tradition of the picture book, then, grows out of some essential human characteristic that over the centuries has been the result of a cultural need to represent some basic aspect of the individual and the race through image and myth, and an artist's need to convey some meaning through visual symbols. In ensuing years, the changing needs of society, as reflected in the culture of a given age, have determined the content of the picture book and designated the audience, while technological advances have allowed the medium of the experience to expand beyond the wall of a cave or the floor of the desert to laser reproductions of all manner of original works, bound in paper between the covers of a book. Moreover, just as the cave paintings of Lascaux, the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages, and the "dreamings" of Australian aborigines are usually the province of art historians, today's picture books are art objects and must be subject to a similar visual criticism. For a picture book relies as much or more on visual meaning as it does on verbal meaning.published or submitted for publicatio