AustLit

Contemporary Children’s Literature and Film: Engaging with Theory sets out to reveal how theory informs critical interpretations of children’s literature and film. It includes essays from both leading and emerging children’s literature scholars from around the world who examine children’s texts from a plethora of theoretical approaches: John Stephens uses cognitive poetics to demonstrate how picture books model attitudes toward significant social ideologies such as cultural diversity; Clare Bradford and Raffaella Baccolini analyze the representation of space in children’s books and films using a theoretical framework that interweaves cultural geography, postcolonial theory, and utopian studies; Elizabeth Bullen and Kerry Mallan employ cultural theories of globalization to argue that children’s texts provide evidence of a dynamic interplay between the global and the local in their depiction of modern life; Maria Takolander makes a disquieting case about the pervasive Gothic and thus inherently misogynistic construction of femininity in the animated film Monster House; Christine Wilkie-Stibbs furthers this gendered theme in her exploration of transgender subjectivity in a range of young adult fiction and in the excellent French film Ma vie en rose, using a conceptual framework that draws on the theories of Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick; David Buchbinder’s topic is adaptation theory, which he uses to illuminate the relationship(s) between an “original” text and its adaptation(s); and the book closes with Mallan’s chapter on posthumanism and its increasing relevance to children’s literature.' (Introduction)