A STUDY OF LINGUISTIC AND NARRATIVE CHARACTERISTICS IN MODERN PICTUREBOOKS: IRONY AND UNRELIABLE NARRATION IN THE WORKS OF CHRISTIAN VOLTZ AND JON KLASSEN
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31435/ijitss.3(51).2026.6075Keywords:
Picture Books, Irony, Unreliable Narration, Verbal-visual Interplay, Jon Klassen, Christian VoltzAbstract
This paper examines the techniques of irony and unreliable narration in contemporary illustrated children's books, specifically John Klassen's The Hat Trilogy and Christian Voltz's Toujours rien?. Through text-oriented analysis, we study how meaning is created against the backdrop of the tension between text and visual material, i.e. illustrations. According to the findings, the authors apply different methods: Klassen mostly uses minimalist, homodiegetic narration, thereby creating narrative unreliability and ethical ambiguity, while Voltz uses different forms of irony, such as situational irony and different linguistic registers, to disrupt pedagogical and general expectations. The study shows that these visual-verbal strategies create a dual addressee structure that questions the age hierarchy in the reading process. Ultimately, the ironic illustrated book becomes a site of epistemological negotiation that fosters the development of critical thinking, interpretive autonomy, and narrative literacy in both children and their adult readers.
References
Booth, W. C. (1961). The rhetoric of fiction. University of Chicago Press.
Gallagher, J. L., & Kelly, E. (2019). Economic thinking with Jon Klassen’s animal hat books. Social Studies and the Young Learner, 32(2), 21–26.
Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics: Vol. 3. Speech acts (pp. 41–58). Academic Press.
Hancock, J. T., Dunham, P. J., & Purdy, K. (2000). Children’s comprehension of critical and complimentary forms of verbal irony. Journal of Cognition and Development, 1, 227–248.
Hutcheon, L. (1994). Irony’s edge: The theory and politics of irony. Routledge.
Klassen, J. (2011). I want my hat back. Candlewick Press.
Klassen, J. (2012). This is not my hat. Candlewick Press.
Klassen, J. (2016). We found a hat. Candlewick Press.
Klassen, J. (2016). Jon Klassen’s Hat Trilogy teachers’ guide. Candlewick Press.
Lozano-Palacio, G. (2020). Pragmatic layered structures in ironic discourse. Pragmatics & Cognition, 27(1), 12–26.
Lozano-Palacio, G. (2022). Irony and political discourse: A multimodal and multidisciplinary approach. Peter Lang.
Mallan, K. (1993). Laugh lines: Exploring humour in children’s literature. Primary English Teaching Association.
Muecke, D. C. (1969). The compass of irony. Methuen.
Nikolajeva, M., & Scott, C. (2001). How picturebooks work. Garland Publishing.
Nünning, A. (1999). Unreliable, compared to what? Towards a cognitive theory of unreliable narration. In W. Grünzweig & A. Solbach (Eds.), Grenzüberschreitungen: Narratologie im Kontext (pp. 53–73). Narr.
Rabinowitz, P. J. (1987). Before reading: Narrative conventions and the politics of interpretation. Cornell University Press.
Stephens, J. (1992). Language and ideology in children’s fiction. Longman.
Voltz, C. (1997). Toujours rien? [Still nothing?]. Éditions du Rouergue.
Wall, B. (1991). The narrator's voice: The dilemma of children's fiction. Macmillan.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Maria Mamuladze
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
All articles are published in open-access and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). Hence, authors retain copyright to the content of the articles.
CC BY 4.0 License allows content to be copied, adapted, displayed, distributed, re-published or otherwise re-used for any purpose including for adaptation and commercial use provided the content is attributed.
