Textual Transformations in Children's Literature: Adaptations, Translations, Reconsiderations (Children's Literature and Culture) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0415509718 ISBN 13: 9780415509718

Publisher: Routledge, 2012

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Benjamin Lefebvre is a Visiting Research Fellow at the TransCanada Institute at the University of Guelph and a Research Associate at the Centre for Research in Young People's Texts and Cultures at the University of Winnipeg, Canada.

Review:

"Strengths of the work are its inclusion of genres little known to a North American audience (Indian graphic novels, Vietnamese folktales, Polish versions of Cinderella, or the Chalet School series), and its diversity of critical approaches (cultural identity, "otherness," queer theory, postcolonial theory, among others). The contributors underscore how these stories help readers develop a burgeoning social consciousness. Summing Up: Recommended." - V. A. Murrenus Pilmaier, University of Wisconsin Sheboygan in CHOICE

"A strong collection. . . . Lefebvre has found an admirable mixture of studies situated - like the contributors themselves - in a variety of cultural contexts, and at many productive points within adaptation studies and children's literary studies. His eclectic approach celebrates the expansion of a field in the act of leaping across traditional borders." - Paul Tiessen, Wilfrid Laurier University in Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures

"With this volume, Lefebvre . . . provides a rich starting place for children's literature scholars to enter existing interdisciplinary discussions about how stories evolve across cultures and genres in this age of rapid globalization. . . . The essays . . . provide an introduction to translating adaptation theory into practice in new and exciting ways that can serve as models both to experienced scholars who seek to think beyond fidelity criticism and to students who are just starting to think about the implications of adaptation across history, genre, and culture." - Lisa Rowe Fraustino, Eastern Connecticut State University in Children's Literature

"Lefebvre focuses this collection on the various ideologies encouraged by and concealed within the cultural translations required by adaptation. Considered together, these eleven thought-provoking essays thus begin to provide a global, transformational account of the ways in which textual transformations for children must comprehend and contend with difference, marginality, borderlands, migration, alterity, and other cultural collisions." - Balaka Basu, University of North Carolina at Charlotte in Children's Literature Association Quarterly

"A solid and varied study on textual transformations as they relate to gender, historical context, and cultures. . . . Textual Transformations in Children's Literature is a book that represents an impressive and wide range of works, which provide a foundational and introductory framework for a conceptualization of the relationship between the text and its transformative forces." - Maria Fernandez-Lamarque, Texas A&M University-Commerce in International Research in Children's Literature

"The considerable intellectual creativity, freedom, and attention to diversity demonstrated in Textual Transformations opens a much-needed forum on adaptation in children's literature studies. . . . Chapter after chapter demonstrates how a clearer understanding of adaptation theory furthers our understanding of even our most familiar texts." - M. Tyler Sasser, University of Southern Mississippi in The Lion and the Unicorn

"Both children's literature and adaptation studies are well served by this collection. Besides providing many stimulating critical discussions, virtually every contribution in Textual Transformations is imaginative, highly informative, and well written. It is likely to inspire many a student of children's literature." - Larissa Rudova, Pomona College in The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0415509718
• ISBN 13: 9780415509718
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240
• Editor: Lefebvre Benjamin