Econormative Childhoods in Wimmelbooks on the Four Seasons: Analysis of Central European Wordless Informational Picturebooks

More and more informational picturebooks on environmental topics have been published in recent years, many focusing on the inevitable climate change. Conversely, there is still a tendency in contemporary picturebooks to represent the climate traditionally, irrespective of actual climate change. A particularly interesting case is the representation of the seasons, especially in books aimed at the youngest ‘readers’, such as wimmelbooks. Not only are they crucial for developing emergent and visual literacy, but they also contain normative images that constitute a prototype for the child. The ‘norms’ picturebooks present are based on the authors’ ideologies that constitute all informational picturebooks as their authors interpret facts. Hence, this article aims to analyse the visual strategies used and the ideologies expressed by wimmelbooks from Poland and Germany in representing the seasons (Marcin Strzembosz’s Jaki to miesiąc? [2002] and Ali Mitgutsch’s Mein Wimmel-Bilderbuch: Frühling, Sommer, Herbst und Winter [2007], among others). The preliminary research shows that the authors seem to propose traditional, idyllic, ecologically normative images of the environment, which I propose to call econormative (inspired by the word ‘aetonormative’), such as snowy winters, sunny summers, etc.; hence, wimmelbooks seem to assent to stereotypical depictions of the seasons associated with the notion of ideal childhoods set in econormative environments.