Abstract
Picture books are a vital mechanism for developing child literacies and connecting children with the world in which they exist. These literacies obviously include verbal and visual literacies, and these modes offer an opportunity to articulate pain and its biopsychosocial impacts in a powerful way, approximating pain’s nebulosity.
In this research, we explore how picture books attempt to generate emotion through the multiple literacies in action within a reading, and particularly in relation to the experience of pain as a biopsychosocial phenomenon. We’re interested in understanding how we come to comprehend and feel in response to such picture books, by applying theoretical principles of pain to a comparative textual analysis of Libby Gleeson and Freya Blackwood’s Banjo and Ruby Red (2016) and Margaret Wild and Ron Brooks’s Fox (2006).