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.

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).

First single-authored monograph on screen adaptations of texts for children and young people Develops a cohesive and conceptually framed analysis of texts in a range of genres Views adaptation as a dialogic process that results in an intricate web of intertextuality

Autorentext
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). 

Inhalt

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.