Screen Adaptations and the Politics of Childhood: Transforming Children's Literature into Film: 2016

2017 | Essays

In seeing adaptation as a dialogic process that results in an intricate web of intertextuality, this book features a cutting edge approach to the study of film adaptations of literature for children and young people, and the narratives about childhood those adaptations enact. Historically, film media has always had a partiality for adaptation of literary sources, especially 'classic' literary texts for children. As economic and cultural commodities, such screen adaptations play a crucial role in the cultural reproduction and transformation of childhood and youth and are a rich resource for the examination of changing cultural values and ideologies, especially contested narratives of childhood. Focusing on a range of literary and film genres, from 'classic' texts, to experimental, carnivalesque, magical realist, and cross-cultural texts it examines various representations of childhood: as shifting states of innocence and wildness, liminality, marginalisation and invisibility.

R. McCallum (Author)