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Emotion in Texts for Children and Young Adults: Moving stories
Edited by Karen Coats and Gretchen Papazian
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 13] 2023
► pp. 18–41

Chapter 1
Shades of feeling

Brightness, dramatic irony, and risk in A Perfect Day and Grandpa Green

This chapter discusses how author-illustrator Lane Smith manipulates formal aesthetic elements to activate involuntary emotional responses that influence meaning. Specifically, it works with systems neuroscience to discuss the unease in A Perfect Day and the ways the emotional impact of risky content gets flattened in Grandpa Green. Systems neuroscience examines processes that underlie and inform conscious thought and offers a complementary approach to the investigation of emotional meaning in picturebook illustration. Rather than addressing concepts of mental imagery, self-awareness, language, or mental activity that are the bedrock of normative analysis, the neuroscience of the visual system allows us to view picturebook narratives from a different perspective, and to discover significances that might not be evident by way of conceptual analysis alone.
Keywords: visual neuroscience, aesthetics, mood, relative brightness, primary emotions
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Universals and light
  • Brightness on a need-to-know basis
  • Brightness, emotion, and narrative mood
  • Relative brightness
  • Relative brightness and dramatic irony: Lane Smith’s A Perfect Day
  • Risk and relative brightness: Lane Smith’s Grandpa Green
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 January 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/clcc.13.01lam
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