Understanding illustration in children's literature based on Roland Barthes's thought

Abstract

Introduction: Children's literature has its origins in oral myths, fables and fairy tales, and illustration accompanies them from birth as a literary genre. It is required that librarians do not restrict their action only to assuring access of books with images and texts to be read by children, but also to become familiar with the process of constitution and the relations between image and text in the universe of narratives by the illustrator and the author, in order to better mediate between the literary work and the reader. Objective: Therefore, in this article, we intend to discuss the importance of illustration and the role of illustrators in children's literature, as a way to emphasize the architecture of a dialogue between the languages used in the conjunction of narratives that integrate author, illustrator, work and reader.
Methodology: We have collected data through exploratory and documentary bibliographic research, and analyzed them through the concepts of relay and anchorage, by Roland Barthes. Our selection covered works of two illustrators living in the Metropolitan Region of Recife, and we interviewed them.
Results: The statements of the illustrators regarding their production have been recorded, and were instrumental to determine how the interaction processes and the constitution of connotative and denotative meanings between the image and the text take place in children's literature works.
Conclusions: There are at least three ways the relationship between text and image take place: the type of image that is used in books; the graphic design that is used for the preparation of the physical part of the book; and the type of linguistic figure, within the image, which will be used in line or not with the textual part. It will depend a lot on the style of the illustrator, his enunciative project in relation to the author's text and his freedom of creation within the work.