Description
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.
About the Author
Robyn McCallum is an independent scholar in the area of children's and youth literature, film and culture. She taught at Macquarie University, Australia, for twenty-five years, and is author of Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction (1999), and co-author of Retelling Stories, Framing Culture (1998; with John Stephens) and New World Orders in Contemporary Children's Literature (2008; with Clare Bradford, Kerry Mallan and John Stephens).
Reviews
"Screen Adaptations and the Politics of Childhood: Transforming Children's 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 children's literature." (The Lion and the Unicorn, Vol. 43 (2), April, 2019)
Book Information
ISBN 9781137395405
Author R. McCallum
Format Hardback
Page Count 280
Imprint Palgrave Macmillan
Publisher Palgrave Macmillan
Series Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture
