Owner of Thousands of Horses; Image and text Interaction in Zahhak Picturebook based on Perry Nodelman's Text-Image Theory

The picturebook is a type of the children's book in which the text and the picture are independent components, and run parallel to each other to organize the whole book. Some theorists of children literature, such as Perry Nodelman, paid more attention to the independence and the specialty of the image than the text. Nodelman assumed six functions to envisage conveying the message and relation between the words and the pictures. This applied research as a qualitative analysis follows the steps of Nodelman to seek the characteristics of the text-image link in Zahhak picturebook, illustrated by Farshid Shafiee (2016). The Zahhak book is one of the examples in which the image not only moves beyond the text, but also shapes the narration of the book, and is a favorite case to be examined. The findings of this study indicate that this book is a successful example of a visual rewriting of Shahnameh. The images of this book provide information beyond the text to the audience. They strengthen the message of the text and create new concepts to attract the modern audience. All the images in the book are set to the third category in the Nodelman classification. Five of the eleven images in the book are in the third to sixth order of Nodelman division, which means the images elaborate depicting concepts that the text cannot express. The text and images of the book have fingerprints and unique signs of the author or conventional signs which invites the audience to intertwine these visual and textual signs to receive the meaning and narration of the book. All lead the audience to read the old story of Zahhak in the context of the modern world.