Investigating creativity in the production of Australian children's picture books: a foundation for future research

One of the fundamental questions in the study of communication is what happens during the creation of a message? (Cobley 1). This paper will investigate a recently developed perspective of creativity in a literary context by determining how texts are produced within the various structures of children’s literature. From an analysis of the literature on creativity research over the last 60 years, this paper argues that the best approach to the examination of creativity is through a confluence approach rather than “unidisciplinary approaches” (Sternberg 12) which have traditionally been privileged in relation to understandings of creativity. Using Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s systems model of creativity in conjunction with Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of cultural production this paper will investigate how contemporary Australian picture book authors operate. The following case study of five authors of Australian children’s literature and their relationship to the notions of domain, field, habitus, agency and structure will show that creative producers operate within a recursive system where social, cultural and individual contexts shape one another.