Frokostseminar: "The girl in the yellow raincoat: Thunberg as picture book practice and agent"

Climate fiction for children and young adults is a new trend in the book market. Greta Thunberg is a common theme in this genre. In this presentation, we examine how the reader is encouraged to deal withsome climate related issues in two books about Greta Thunberg, and how agency – both the reader's and Greta's – is depicted in text and pictures. Our study is based on books in the German, French, English, Danish, Italian and Swedish book markets. The books are interpreted in terms of their appearance and the to-do lists that the genre often includes. The verbal textual elements are analysed using systemic-functional grammar and the illustrations using rhetorical image analysis. Based on this, we ask: how is the agency of Greta and other children expressed?