Maus: a multimodal perspective and the use of biography in children’s and young adult literature

The main aim of this paper is to point out the multimodality of Art Spiegelman´s book Maus (2003) in connection with current trends in biography in children´s and young adult literature. The first is allegorical (visual) multimodality: Spiegelman uses basic relationships from the animal kingdom to portray interpersonal relationships during World War II. The second strand of multimodality is relational: through the story, the author tries to find answers to questions about his relationship with his father. The third strand is genre multimodality: we believe that Maus cannot be clearly defined in terms of genre; we can only state that its overarching form is comics.