For over half a century, the ‘imagining’ of the Great War in the UK has been framed by the existence of two Western Fronts, one literary and the other historical. The authors and illustrators of children’s picture books, whose work has traditionally reflected a society’s values and pre-occupations, have remained remarkably faithful to the literary construct of the war as a futile and meaningless conflict that destroyed a generation. This article analyses four children’s picture books dealing with the Christmas Truce of 1914, which has become an historical touchstone for adherents of the literary imagining. Using methods grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), visual grammar and art theory, the authors explore how text and image combine to create moving and insightful morality tales that use the particularities of an historical event to communicate a vision of humanity rather than a work of historical scholarship.
AveryG (1989) The Puritans and their heirs. In: AveryGBriggsJ (eds) Children and Their Books: A Celebration of the Work of Iona and Peter Opie. Oxford: Clarendon, 95–118.
2.
BondB (2002) The Unquiet Western Front: Britain’s Role in Literature and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
3.
BrownMSeatonS (1984) Christmas Truce. London: Pan Books.
4.
ChouliarakiL (2013) The humanity of war: Iconic photojournalism of the battlefield, 1914–2012. Visual Communication12(3): 315–340. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1470357213484422 (accessed 15 January 2020).
5.
CrockerT (2015) The Christmas Truce: Myth, Memory, and the First World War. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
6.
DinhamJ (2011) Delivering Authentic Arts Education. Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.
7.
DuffyCRobertsD (2014) The Christmas Truce. Picador: London.
8.
DyerG (1995) The Missing of the Somme. London: Penguin.
9.
FengDO’HalloranKH (2012). Representing emotive meaning in visual images: A social semiotic approach. Journal of Pragmatics44: 2067–2084.
10.
FergusonN (1998) The Pity of War. London: Penguin.
11.
FlothowD (2007) Popular children’s literature and the memory of the First World War, 1919–1939. The Lion and the Unicorn31(2): 147–161.
GregoryA (2014) The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
14.
HallidayMAK (1978) Language as Social Semiotics: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. London: Edward Arnold.
15.
HazardP (1983) Books, Children, and Men, trans. M MacKellar Mitchell. Boston, MA: Horn Books.
16.
HendrixJ (2014) Shooting Stars. New York: Abrams.
17.
KerbyM (2016) Sir Philip Gibbs and English Journalism in War and Peace. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
18.
KerbyMCBaguleyMMMacDonaldA (2019) And the band played Waltzing Matilda: Australian picture books (1999–2016) and the First World War. Children’s Literature in Education: An International Quarterly50: 91–109. DOI: 10.1007/s10583-017-9337-3.
19.
LangerS (1991) Discursive and presentational forms. In: HlynkaDBellandJC (eds) Paradigms Regained: The Uses of Illuminative, Semiotic, and Post-Modern Criticism as Modes of Inquiry in Educational Technology: A Book of Readings. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology, 415–439.
20.
LewisJPKelleyG (2011) And the Soldiers Sang. Mankato, MN: Creative Editions.
21.
HunstonS (2000) Evaluation and the planes of discourse: Status and value in persuasive texts. In: HunstonSThompsonG (eds) Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 176–206.
22.
HunstonS (2011) Corpus Approaches to Evaluation: Phraseology and Evaluative Language. New York: Routledge.
23.
JewittC (2009) The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis. London: Routledge.
24.
KerbyMBaguleyMTuppurainen-MasonE (2016) Interpreting the Anzac legacy: Reflexive accounts of artistic practice. Australian Art Education37(2): 116–132.
25.
KressGVan LeeuwenT (2006) Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, 2nd edn.Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
26.
LyTHJungCK (2015) Multimodal discourse: A visual design analysis of two advertising images. International Journal of Contents11(2): 50–56.
27.
MacCallum-StewartE (2007) If they ask us why we died: Children’s literature and the First World War 1970–2005. The Lion and the Unicorn31(2): 176–188.
28.
MartinJRWhitePRR (2005) The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
29.
Moya-GuijarroAJ (2016) The role of semiotic metaphor in the verbal–visual interplay of three children’s picture books. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies38(1): 33–52.
MyskowG (2018a) Calibrating the ‘right values’: The role of critical inquiry tasks in social studies textbooks. Visual Communication18(1): 31–54.
32.
MyskowG (2018b) A framework for analysing evaluative language in historical discourse. Functions of Language23(5): 335–362.
33.
MyskowG (2019) Appraisal in history: Construals of significance, fortune, and status. Linguistics and the Human Sciences12(1): 1–24. DOI: 10.1558/lhs.20869.
34.
OteizaT (2020) Historical events and processes in the discourse of disciplinary history and classroom interaction. In: MartinJR, et al. (eds) Accessing Academic Discourse: Systemic Functional Linguistics and Legitimation Code Theory. London: Routledge, 177–205.
35.
OteizaTPinuerC (2016) Appraisal framework and critical discourse studies: A joint approach to the study of historical memories from an intermodal perspective. International Journal of Language Studies12(1): 5–32.
TodmanD (2005) The Great War: Myth and Memory. London: Hambledon Continuum.
45.
WeintraubS (2002) Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce. New York: Penguin.
46.
WieviorkaA (2006) The Era of the Witness. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
47.
WinterJ (1995) Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
48.
ZohrabiMDobakhtiLPourEM (2019) Interpersonal meanings in children’s storybooks. Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research7(2): 39–64.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
