A typology of title pages: A comparative analysis between Portugal and the United Kingdom

The peritext in some forms of children's and young adult literature is often purely decorative, however it is also commonly recognized for its contribution to the visual narrative and thus a reader's construction of meaning. It is increasingly more frequent in picturebooks, and even in illustrated books, to see the front and back covers, endpapers, title pages and dedication pages being used beyond simple beautification, the result of an illustrator working sensitively with a designer or being one and the same. Recognizing that all peritextual elements of an illustrated book have been considered in academic discussion, the focus of this paper is on the title page, a feature which has recently been examined by Sotto Mayor [1,2]. This paper shares results from a comparative analysis of a corpus containing books that have won national illustration awards in Portugal and the United Kingdom between 2000 and 2014: The Premio Nacional de Ilustracao and The Kate Greenaway Medal respectively. Taking Sotto Mayor's typology, the books were compared and the typology expanded due to the significant differences between the two sets of corpus. These results not only present an expanded, more relevant typology of title pages that will contribute to the academic field of children's literature, but also provide an insight into the development of children's book illustration in both countries, which we believe is a consequence of their distinct national histories of children's literature publication.