Textual Transformations in Children’s Literature: Adaptations, Translations, Reconsiderations ed. by Benjamin Lefebvre (review)

Far from being exceptions, textual transformations rather tend to be the rule in children’s literature. Artistic, ideological, and, last but not least, economic considerations very often lead book publishers and the media industry to opt for adaptations, such as translations, parodies, mashups, sequels, film or computer game versions, as well as transpositions to other genres and media. The present volume assembles eleven contributions by scholars from Canada, Great Britain, Italy, and the United States. They explore an international corpus of adaptations by asking how generic aspects as well as pedagogical, ideological, social, and cultural contexts motivate and influence the aesthetics, contents, and production of textual transformations.

Three essays focus on film adaptations. David Whitley compares the animated films Pocahontas and Princess Mononoke as filmic adaptations of two narratives of origin about the conflict between nature and settlement or industrialization. He analyses how the two films employ opposing strategies to appropriate cultural otherness for Western liberal pluralism on the one hand or to respect it within a polycentric multicultural framework on the other. Emily Somer describes the culturally determined contradictions in Takahata Isao’s anime version of the Canadian classic Anne of Green Gables, Akage no An. The anime attempts to reconcile the discrepancy between the restrained language of the polite anime protagonist with the emotional actions of her novel counterpart on the visual level by translating Anne’s exuberance into overflowing floral background illustrations. Benjamin Lefebvre’s comparison of two television adaptations of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie shows that the TV versions cater to their audiences by adapting the original in respect to gender and race and simplifying the historical conflict.

Malini Roy looks at graphic novels by Campfire Press (New Delhi), which—for commercial reasons—translate and extend the postcolonial, misogynic, racist ideology of the generally English originals into the graphic idiom rather than using the popular mass medium to develop new perspectives for the younger generation. Hanh Nguyen considers English translations of orally transmitted Vietnamese folktales for third-generation immigrants to the United States. Based on the anthologies Two Cakes Fit for a King and Dragon Prince, he argues that these adaptations play an important role in passing on the Vietnamese cultural heritage to young expatriates. Monika Woźniak interprets the transformations of some of Charles Perrault’s fairytales in Polish translations as results of cultural and social transfers: Products of French absolutist courtly culture, the tales had to be adapted to the rural culture of Poland. Laura Tosi analyses how young-adult prose adaptations of Shakespeare’s dramas transform plot, character, and point of view. Lisa Migo traces the reception of the long selling girl book series Chalet School by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer in the blogosphere. The Web fan club Chaletian Bulletin Board brings the fictional characters back to life and allows for interactive fanfiction sequels to the original text. Drawing on queer theory, Nat Hurley interprets the homosexual transformations of motifs from Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, or The Wizard of Oz in Alan Moore’s and Melinda Gebbie’s The Lost Girls. In a comparative study, Andrea Mckenzie demonstrates how international book covers of L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables shape the reading and reflect the specific cultural, historic, and medial contexts of the importing country across a whole century. Maria Nikolajeva defines structural, narrative and aesthetic criteria for multivolume fiction. Elaborating on the differences between series and sequel, she shows, for example, how David Benedictus’s Return to Hundred Acre Wood misunderstands A. A. Milne’s original Winnie-the-Pooh and its sequel The House at Pooh Corner as a series, which it further extends with trite episodes.

Instead of attempting to present an all-encompassing study of textual transformations, the collected volume offers insightful case studies of selected works and their transformations into other genres, media, languages...