An ecology of the Russian avant-garde picturebook / Sara Pankenier Weld.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Weld, Sara Pankenier, author.

Series:

Children's literature, culture, and cognition ; Volume 9.

Children's Literature, Culture, and Cognition, 2212-9006 ; Volume 9

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Picture books for children--Soviet Union--History and criticism.

Picture books for children.

Children's literature, Soviet--History and criticism.

Children's literature, Soviet.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (237 pages) : color illustrations.

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam, [Netherlands] ; Philadelphia, [Pennsylvania] : John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2018.

Summary:

"An Ecology of the Russian Avant-Garde Picturebook takes a new approach to interpreting 1920s and 1930s picturebooks by prominent Russian writers, artists, and intellectuals by examining them within the ecological environment that, first, made them possible and, then, led to their demise. It argues that naturalistic models of the complex interactions of dynamic systems offer effective tools for understanding the fraught interrelations of art and censorship in the early Soviet period. Through illustrative case studies, it mounts a close analysis of word and image and their synergistic interplay in avant-garde picturebooks, while also recontextualizing them within the ecology of their original environment where extraordinary countervailing forces played out a drama of which these books survive as telling artifacts. Ultimately, it argues that the Russian avant-garde picturebook offers a uniquely illustrative example of literary ecology that sheds light on issues of creativity and censorship, politics and art, more broadly as well"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

A natural history of the Russian avant-garde picturebook

Precursors of the avant-garde picturebook

Origins of the revolutionary picturebook

Aesthetic renewal from the primitivist periphery

Unnatural selection : censorship and ideology

Dual audience and double vision : Aesopian depths and hidden subtexts

The unspoken and the unspeakable : political allegory in children's books

Revolutionary rhetoric and the semiotics of size

Early Soviet images of America in picturebooks

The infantilization of thought and theory in books for children

Authorial appearances in picturebooks

Metatextual exploits in writings for children

The obliteration of the avant-garde aesthetic : the beginning of the end

The extinction of the Russian avant-garde picturebook.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (EBC, viewed February 21, 2018).