Aujourd'hui, grace aux evolutions technologiques, la video sphere s'empare du patrimoine des contes. Le cinema, le dessin anime, la serie televisee et le jeu video offrent de larges possibilites de " transmedialite ". Les etudes ici rassemblees soulignent que ces differentes transpositions ont le merite de garder le genre du conte vivant permettant aux jeunes contemporains de decouvrir un patrimoine fondamental de l'humanite. Elles ont cependant d'autres buts en rapport avec le souci pregnant de rentabilite de notre societe de consommation ou avec la manipulation sociale d'un jeune public malleable. Il n'en reste pas moins que la plupart des createurs ont a coeur de mettre en scene le chemin initiatique emprunte par leurs heros afin de proposer a leurs spectateurs, auditeurs ou lecteurs des histoires pour grandir.

Jennifer Griffiths's At Risk: Black Youth and the Creative Imperative in the Post-Civil Rights Era focuses on literary representations of adolescent artists as they develop strategies to intervene against the stereotypes that threaten to limit their horizons. The authors of the analyzed works capture and convey the complex experience of the generation of young people growing up in the era after the civil rights movement. Through creative experiments, they carefully consider what it means to be narrowed within the scope of a sociological "problem," all while trying to expand the perspective of creative liberation. In short, they explore what it means to be deemed an "at risk" youth. This book looks at crucial works beginning in 1968, ranging from Sapphire's Push and The Kid, Walter Dean Myers's Monster, and Dael Orlandersmith's The Gimmick, to Bill Gunn's Johnnas. Each text offers unique representations of Black gifted children, whose creative processes help them to navigate simultaneous hypervisibility and invisibility as racialized subjects. The book addresses the ways that adolescents experience the perilous "at risk" label, which threatens to narrow adolescent existence at a developmental moment that requires an orientation toward possibility and a freedom to experiment. Ultimately, At Risk considers the distinct possibilities and challenges of the post-civil rights era, and how the period allows for a more honest, multilayered, and forthright depiction of Black youth subjectivity against the adultification that forecloses potential.

Contributions by Cynthia Neese Bailes, Nina Batt, Lijun Bi, Helene Charderon, Stuart Ching, Helene Ehriander, Xiangshu Fang, Sara Kersten-Parish, Helen Kilpatrick, Jessica Kirkness, Sung-Ae Lee, Jann Pataray-Ching, Angela Schill, Josh Simpson, John Stephens, Corinne Walsh, Nerida Wayland, and Vivian Yenika-Agbaw Children, Deafness, and Deaf Cultures in Popular Media examines how creative works have depicted what it means to be a deaf or hard of hearing child in the modern world. In this collection of critical essays, scholars discuss works that cover wide-ranging subjects and themes: growing up deaf in a hearing world, stigmas associated with deafness, rival modes of communication, friendship and discrimination, intergenerational tensions between hearing and nonhearing family members, and the complications of establishing self-identity in increasingly complex societies. Contributors explore most of the major genres of children's literature and film, including realistic fiction, particularly young adult novels, as well as works that make deft use of humor and parody. Further, scholars consider the expressive power of multimodal forms such as graphic novel and film to depict experience from the perspective of children. Representation of the point of view of child characters is central to this body of work and to the intersections of deafness with discourses of diversity and social justice. The child point of view supports a subtle advocacy of a wider understanding of the multiple ways of being D/deaf and the capacity of D/deaf children to give meaning to their unique experiences, especially as they find themselves moving between hearing and Deaf communities. These essays will alert scholars of children's literature, as well as the reading public, to the many representations of deafness that, like deafness itself, pervade all cultures and are not limited to specific racial or sociocultural groups.

Contributions by Miranda A. Green-Barteet, Kathleen Kellett, Andrew McInnes, Joyce McPherson, Rebecca Mills, Cristina Rivera, Wendy Rountree, Danielle Russell, Anah-Jayne Samuelson, Sonya Sawyer Fritz, Andrew Trevarrow, and Richardine Woodall Home. School. Nature. The spaces children occupy, both physically and imaginatively, are never neutral. Instead, they carry social, cultural, and political histories that impose-or attempt to impose-behavioral expectations. Moreover, the spaces identified with childhood reflect and reveal adult expectations of where children "belong." The essays in Containing Childhood: Space and Identity in Children's Literature explore the multifaceted and dynamic nature of space, as well as the relationship between space and identity in children's literature. Contributors to the volume address such questions as: What is the nature of that relationship? What happens to the spaces associated with childhood over time? How do children conceptualize and lay claim to their own spaces? The book features essays on popular and lesser-known children's fiction from North America and Great Britain, including works like The Hate U Give, His Dark Materials, The Giver quartet, and Shadowshaper. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach in their analysis, contributors draw upon varied scholarly areas such as philosophy, race, class, and gender studies, among others. Without reducing the issues to any singular theory or perspective, each piece provides insight into specific treatments of space in specific periods of time, thereby affording scholars a greater appreciation of the diverse spatial patterns in children's literature.

Contributions by Miranda A. Green-Barteet, Kathleen Kellett, Andrew McInnes, Joyce McPherson, Rebecca Mills, Cristina Rivera, Wendy Rountree, Danielle Russell, Anah-Jayne Samuelson, Sonya Sawyer Fritz, Andrew Trevarrow, and Richardine Woodall Home. School. Nature. The spaces children occupy, both physically and imaginatively, are never neutral. Instead, they carry social, cultural, and political histories that impose-or attempt to impose-behavioral expectations. Moreover, the spaces identified with childhood reflect and reveal adult expectations of where children "belong." The essays in Containing Childhood: Space and Identity in Children's Literature explore the multifaceted and dynamic nature of space, as well as the relationship between space and identity in children's literature. Contributors to the volume address such questions as: What is the nature of that relationship? What happens to the spaces associated with childhood over time? How do children conceptualize and lay claim to their own spaces? The book features essays on popular and lesser-known children's fiction from North America and Great Britain, including works like The Hate U Give, His Dark Materials, The Giver quartet, and Shadowshaper. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach in their analysis, contributors draw upon varied scholarly areas such as philosophy, race, class, and gender studies, among others. Without reducing the issues to any singular theory or perspective, each piece provides insight into specific treatments of space in specific periods of time, thereby affording scholars a greater appreciation of the diverse spatial patterns in children's literature.

When Hansel and Gretel try to eat the witch's gingerbread house in the woods, are they indulging their "uncontrolled cravings" and "destructive desires", or are they simply responding normally to the hunger pangs they feel after being abandoned by their parents? Challenging Bruno Bettelheim and other critics who read fairy tales as enactments of children's untamed urges, Maria Tatar argues that it is time to stop casting the children as villains. In this book she explores how adults mistreat children, focusing on adults not only as hostile characters in fairy tales themselves but also as real people who use frightening stories to discipline young listeners. After examining how fairy tales were converted into children's literature, the author investigates the acculturation of heroines in such stories as "Cinderella" and "Beauty and the Beast", and concludes with meditations on violence, cannibalism and conflicts between parents and children. Since the cultural stories we read to children in their "formative years" have a powerful influence on their lives, Tatar emphasizes the importance of interrogating and reinterpreting these bedtime tales.

Didactics and the Modern Robinsonade examines modern and contemporary Robinsonade texts written for young readers, looking specifically at the ways in which later adaptations of the Robinson Crusoe story subvert both traditional narrative structures and particular ideological codes within the genre. This collection redresses both the gender and geopolitical biases that have characterized most writings within the Robinsonade genre since its inception, and includes chapters on little-known works of fiction by female authors, as well as works from outside the mainstream of Anglo-American culture.

Conversations with Madeleine L'Engle is the first collection of interviews with the beloved children's book author best known for her 1962 Newbery Award-winning novel, A Wrinkle in Time. However, Madeleine L'Engle's accomplishments as a writer spread far beyond children's literature. Beginning her career as a literary novelist for adults, L'Engle (1918-2007) continued to write fiction for both young and old long after A Wrinkle in Time. In her sixties, she published personal memoirs and devotional texts that explored her relationship with religion. At the time of her death, L'Engle was mourned by fans of her children's books and the larger Christian community. L'Engle's books, as well as her life, were often marked by contradictions. A consummate storyteller, L'Engle carefully crafted and performed a public self-image via her interviews. Weaving through the documentable facts in these interviews are partial lies, misdirections, and wish-fulfillment fantasies. But, when read against her fictions, these ""truths"" can help us see L'Engle more deeply-what she wanted for herself and for her children, what she believed about good and evil, and what she thought was the right way and the wrong way to be a family-than if she had been able to articulate the truth more directly. The thirteen interviews collected here reveal an amazing feat of authorial self-fashioning, as L'Engle transformed from novelist to children's author to Christian writer and attempted to craft a public persona that would speak to each of these different audiences in meaningful, yet not painfully revealing, ways.