Screen Adaptations and the Politics of Childhood: Transforming Children's Literature into Film [Hardcover]

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. 

1. Introduction: Palimpsestuous Intertextualities and the Cultural Politics of Childhood.- 2. The Imperial Child and the Romantic Child: Film Adaptation as Cultural Capital.- 3. The Dream Child and the Wild Child: Adapting the Carnivalesque.- 4. Flapping Ribbons of shaped Space-Time: Genre Mixing, Intertextuality and Metafiction in Fiction and Film Adaptation.- 5. Angels, Monsters and Childhood: Liminality and the Quotidian Surreal.- 6. Invisible Children: Representing Childhood across Cultures.- 7. Epilogue.

Screen Adaptations and the Politics of Childhood: Transforming Childrens Literature into Film is an exciting contribution to the area of adaptation studies. & This book should be of particular interest to scholars working in film adaptation studies, and especially to those whose research addresses the filmic adaptation of childrens literature. (The Lion and the Unicorn, Vol. 43 (2), Aprló4