Abstract

This paper examines the crossover phenomenon in two of Jimmy Liao’s picturebooks and their English translations: The Sound of Colors and When the Moon Forgot, focusing on how the texts’ potential to facilitate readers’ transgression of socially prescribed reading categories relates to a specific social, economic, cultural context, and what the implications of my case study of a particular author’s work for crossover theory more generally are. Crossover here designates that a text evokes both the child readership and the adult readership. It is argued: as the expectation of and the demand put on the child reader vary in different social, economic, cultural contexts, a text’s crossover appeal is context-dependent; the significance of a specific context comes to the fore when a text is transplanted from one context into another; therefore crossover relates to a crossing of age boundaries, and more importantly, cultural boundaries.