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Blurring the Boundaries and Extending Imagination: Anthony Browne’s Picturebooks

This study examines Anthony Browne’s unique characteristics of picturebooks focusing on the levels of communication, the visual and the verbal narratives. Pictures represent or describe by showing while words narrate by telling. However, seeing the pictures in picturebooks closely, you could realize that the pictures have their own narratives. Pictures in picturebooks have complex meanings. Children know this by intuition when they read the picturebooks. By concentrating on the pictures in the book, they go more and more deeply into its meaning. One who only reads the verbal information cannot read the pictures as children do. Sometimes pictures and words repeat the same story, and pictures show or point to the different things that are not told in the verbal text. So the gaps are created between the verbal and the visual text. Readers should fill the gaps with their knowledge or experience. With surrealistic pictures in his books, Browne disturbs the clear distinction between reality and fantasy. He blurs the boundaries and lets the limited imagination extend to a wider field. In Willy the Dreamer, he encourages readers to think of objects with new perspectives while representing the close relationship between reality and imagination. Piggybook raises the questions about the gender roles using a transformation of male characters into pigs. The Tunnel deals with the source of dreadful feeling about the growth as well as the matter of empathy. Through Browne’s fantastic picturebooks, child and adult readers travel the wide sea of imagination along with the well-organized text and its loose gaps.