Screen Adaptations and the Politics of Childhood

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).

“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)

• 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.