CHILDREN'S CHILDREN LITERATURE

Children Picture Books Appeal Equally to Adults

Children Picture Books Appeal Equally to Adults

After years of being stuck in the backwaters of the academy, adaptation studies is on the move. A decade's worth of pioneering work by Brian McFarlane, Deborah Cartmell, Imelda Whelehan, James Naremore and Sarah Cardwell on the relation between film adaptations and their literary antecedents culminated in the publication of Robert Stam's three volumes on adaptation, two of them co-edited with Alessandra Raengo, in 2004 and 2005. The monumental project of Stam and Raengo sought to reorient adaptation studies decisively from the fidelity discourse universally attacked by theorists as far back as George Bluestone to a focus on Bakhtinian inter-textuality—with each text, avowed adaptation or not, afloat upon a sea of countless earlier texts from which it could not help borrowing—and this attempt was largely successful. If Stam and Raengo had any notion of settling the fundamental questions of adaptation studies, however, they must have been surprised to find that their impact was precisely the opposite. Instead of redrawing the field, they have stirred the pot, provoking a welcome outburst of diverse work on adaptation. This essay seeks to map this latest round of work in four categories: collections of new essays, textbooks, monographs focusing on the relation between adaptation and appropriation and more general monographs on adaptation.

Hutcheon is most forward looking in the arguments and assumptions she rejects: the emphasis on book-to-film adaptations, the aesthetic hierarchy that establishes children literature as both the source of adaptations and the measure of their value and the definition of adaptations as a collection of products. She shares these positions with most recent writers on adaptation but sees their implications more clearly. If adaptation is not simply a series of transcriptions or imitations, what is it? Hutcheon defines it alternatively as a creative process and, in parallel with Sanders, as a receptive process whereby adaptations are recognized and enjoyed as adaptations by audiences who are constantly invited to shift back and forth between their experience of a new story and their memory of its progenitors.

Much of this latest work, as might be expected of writers on adaptation, is not wholly new. Ever since its inception half a century ago, adaptation studies has been haunted by concepts and premises it has repudiated in principle but continued to rely on in practice. The most obvious of these is prominently on display in the title of anthology by Cartmell and Whelehan, The Cambridge Companion to Children literature on Screen. What, we might ask, is children literature on screen? If it is on screen, is it still children literature? If it is children literature, how can it be cinema as well? And why would anyone want to claim that it is both?

Contemporary critics of adaptation who enshrine children literature at the heart of their subject increasingly find themselves grappling with the consequences of that decision. Cartmell and Whelehan assert in their Introduction that 'it's vital that children literature and film be distinguished from children ...