Character's voice in worldless picture books

Abstract

Wordless Picturebooks tell stories exclusively through pictures. This paper explores the reasons for the absence of written texts and focuses on the characters trying to answer the following questions: Why do the authors create Wordless Picturebooks? Is ¡it because the characters in these picturebooks do not need to talk? Or is it simply because they cannot do ¡t? Are their voices silenced because what they say is irrelevant? Or do the characters communicate with other non-linguistic codes? A corpus of 351 Wordless and Almost-wordless Picturebooks has been analysed to try to answer all the above questions. This paper presents a typology according to the voice of the characters and identifies four different types: silent, silenced, imago-speaking and unintelligible.