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). 

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.