Adapting Canonical Texts in Children's Literature

Adapting Canonical Texts in Children's Literature
Author: Anja Müller
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2013-02-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1441164278

Adaptations of canonical texts have played an important role throughout the history of children's literature and have been seen as an active and vital contributing force in establishing a common ground for intercultural communication across generations and borders. This collection analyses different examples of adapting canonical texts in or for children's literature encompassing adaptations of English classics for children and young adult readers and intercultural adaptations of children's classics across Europe. The international contributors assess both historical and transcultural adaptation in relation to historically and regionally contingent concepts of childhood. By assessing how texts move across age-specific or national borders, they examine the traces of a common literary and cultural heritage in European children's literature.

Textual Transformations in Children's Literature

Textual Transformations in Children's Literature
Author: Benjamin Lefebvre
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2013
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0415509718

This book offers new critical approaches for the study of adaptations, abridgments, translations, parodies, and mash-ups that occur internationally in contemporary children's culture. It follows recent shifts in adaptation studies that call for a move beyond fidelity criticism, a paradigm that measures the success of an adaptation by the level of fidelity to the "original" text, toward a methodology that considers the adaptation to be always already in conversation with the adapted text. This book visits children's literature and culture in order to consider the generic, pedagogical, and ideological underpinnings that drive both the process and the product. Focusing on novels as well as folktales, films, graphic novels, and anime, the authors consider the challenges inherent in transforming the work of authors such as William Shakespeare, Charles Perrault, L.M. Montgomery, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and A.A. Milne into new forms that are palatable for later audiences particularly when--for perceived ideological or political reasons--the textual transformation is not only unavoidable but entirely necessary. Contributors consider the challenges inherent in transforming stories and characters from one type of text to another, across genres, languages, and time, offering a range of new models that will inform future scholarship.

Shakespearean Spaces in Australian Literary Adaptations for Children and Young Adults

Shakespearean Spaces in Australian Literary Adaptations for Children and Young Adults
Author: Michael Marokakis
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2022-07-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000617807

Shakespearean Spaces in Australian Literary Adaptations for Children and Young Adults offers a comprehensive examination of Shakespearean adaptations written by Australian authors for children and Young Adults. The 20-year period crossing the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries came to represent a diverse and productive era of adapting Shakespeare in Australian literature. As an analysis of Australian and international marketplaces, physical and imaginative spaces and the body as a site of meaning, this book reveals how the texts are ideologically bound to and disseminate Shakespearean cultural capital in contemporary ways. Combining current research in children’s literature and Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital deepens the critical awareness of the status of Australian literature while illuminating a corpus of literature underrepresented by the pre-existing concentration on adaptations from other parts of the world. Of particular interest is how these adaptations merge Shakespearean worlds with the spaces inhabited by young people, such as the classroom, the stage, the imagination and the gendered body. The readership of this book would be academics, researchers and students of children’s literature studies and Shakespeare studies, particularly those interested in Shakespearean cultural theory, transnational adaptation and literary appropriation. High school educators and pre-service teachers would also find this book valuable as they look to broaden and strengthen their use of adaptations to engage students in Shakespeare studies.

Canon Constitution and Canon Change in Children's Literature

Canon Constitution and Canon Change in Children's Literature
Author: Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2016-12-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317397029

This volume focuses on the (de)canonization processes in children’s literature, considering the construction and cultural-historical changes of canons in different children’s literatures. Chapters by international experts in the field explore a wide range of different children’s literatures from Great Britain, Germany, Scandinavia, the Low Countries, Eastern and Central Europe, as well as from Non-European countries such as Australia, Israel, and the United States. Situating the inquiry within larger literary and cultural studies conversations about canonicity, the contributors assess representative authors and works that have encountered changing fates in the course of canon history. Particular emphasis is given to sociological canon theories, which have so far been under-represented in canon research in children’s literature. The volume therefore relates historical changes in the canon of children’s literature not only to historical changes in concepts of childhood but to more encompassing political, social, economic, cultural, and ideological shifts. This volume’s comparative approach takes cognizance of the fact that, if canon formation is an important cultural factor in nation-building processes, a comparative study is essential to assessing transnational processes in canon formation. This book thus renders evident the structural similarities between patterns and strategies of canon formation emerging in different children’s literatures.

Screen Adaptations and the Politics of Childhood

Screen Adaptations and the Politics of Childhood
Author: Robyn McCallum
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2018-01-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137395419

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 the adaptation of ‘classic’ literary texts for children. As economic and cultural commodities, McCallum points out how such screen adaptations play a crucial role in the cultural reproduction and transformation of childhood and youth, and indeed are a rich resource for the examination of changing cultural values and ideologies, particularly around contested narratives of childhood. The chapters examine various representations of childhood: as shifting states of innocence and wildness, liminality, marginalisation and invisibility. The book focuses on a range of literary and film genres, from ‘classic’ texts, to experimental, carnivalesque, magical realist, and cross-cultural texts.

The Routledge Companion to Children's Literature and Culture

The Routledge Companion to Children's Literature and Culture
Author: Claudia Nelson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 776
Release: 2023-11-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000984524

Focusing on significant and cutting-edge preoccupations within children’s literature scholarship, The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature and Culture presents a comprehensive overview of print, digital, and electronic texts for children aged zero to thirteen as forms of world literature participating in a panoply of identity formations. Offering five distinct sections, this volume: Familiarizes students and beginning scholars with key concepts and methodological resources guiding contemporary inquiry into children’s literature Describes the major media formats and genres for texts expressly addressing children Considers the production, distribution, and valuing of children’s books from an assortment of historical and contemporary perspectives, highlighting context as a driver of content Maps how children’s texts have historically presumed and prescribed certain identities on the part of their readers, sometimes addressing readers who share some part of the author’s identity, sometimes seeking to educate the reader about a presumed “other,” and in recent decades increasingly foregrounding identities once lacking visibility and voice Explores the historical evolutions and trans-regional contacts and (inter)connections in the long process of the formation of global children’s literature, highlighting issues such as retranslation, transnationalism, transculturality, and new digital formats for considering cultural crossings and renegotiations in the production of children’s literature Methodically presented and contextualized, this volume is an engaging introduction to this expanding and multifaceted field.

Beowulf as Children’s Literature

Beowulf as Children’s Literature
Author: Bruce Gilchrist
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2021
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1487502702

Beowulf as Children's Literature brings together a group of scholars and creators to address important issues of adapting the Old English poem into textual and pictorial forms that appeal to children, past and present.

Translation and the Classic

Translation and the Classic
Author: Paul F. Bandia
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2024-02-08
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1003831818

Through a range of accessible and innovative chapters dealing with a spectrum of genres, authors, and periods, this volume seeks to examine the complex relationship between translation and the classic, and how translation makes and remakes (and sometimes invents) classic works for new audiences across space and time. Translation and the Classic is the first volume in a two-volume series examining how classic works fare in translation, how translation is different when it engages with classic texts, and how classic texts can be shaped, understood in new ways, or even created through the process of translation. Although other collections have covered some of this territory, they have done so in partial ways or with a focus on Greek, Roman, and Arabic texts or translations. This collection alone takes the reader from 1000 BCE up to the digital age in a sequence of chapters that encompass areas including philosophy, children’s literature, and pseudotranslation. It asks us to consider translation not just as a mechanism of distribution, but as one of the primary ways that the classic is created and understood by multiple audiences. This book is essential reading for those taking Translation Studies courses at the senior undergraduate and postgraduate level, as well as courses outside Translation Studies such as Comparative Literature and Literary Studies.

Adaptation in Young Adult Novels

Adaptation in Young Adult Novels
Author: Dana E. Lawrence
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2020-09-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501361791

Adaptation in Young Adult Novels argues that adapting classic and canonical literature and historical places engages young adult readers with their cultural past and encourages them to see how that past can be rewritten. The textual afterlives of classic texts raise questions for new readers: What can be changed? What benefits from change? How can you, too, be agents of change? The contributors to this volume draw on a wide range of contemporary novels – from Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series and Megan Shepherd's Madman's Daughter trilogy to Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones – adapted from mythology, fairy tales, historical places, and the literary classics of Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among others. Unpacking the new perspectives and critiques of gender, sexuality, and the cultural values of adolescents inherent to each adaptation, the essays in this volume make the case that literary adaptations are just as valuable as original works and demonstrate how the texts studied empower young readers to become more culturally, historically, and socially aware through the lens of literary diversity.

Television and Serial Adaptation

Television and Serial Adaptation
Author: Shannon Wells-Lassagne
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2017-01-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 131552452X

As American television continues to garner considerable esteem, rivalling the seventh art in its "cinematic" aesthetics and the complexity of its narratives, one aspect of its development has been relatively unexamined. While film has long acknowledged its tendency to adapt, an ability that contributed to its status as narrative art (capable of translating canonical texts onto the screen), television adaptations have seemingly been relegated to the miniseries or classic serial. From remakes and reboots to transmedia storytelling, loose adaptations or adaptations which last but a single episode, the recycling of pre-existing narrative is a practice that is just as common in television as in film, and this text seeks to rectify that oversight, examining series from M*A*S*H to Game of Thrones, Pride and Prejudice to Castle.