- ChLA International Committee
CFP: Slavic Worlds of Imagination & Anglophone Television Series
--- - CALL FOR PAPERS - ---
“Slavic Worlds of Imagination 3: Metamorphoses”
23-24 September 2019
Kraków, Poland
The Children’s and Youth Literature Research Centre of the Faculty of Polish Studies and the Institute of Slavonic Philology (Jagiellonian University) are hosting the third meeting in the cycle “Slavic Worlds of Imagination.” This time we would like to focus on the potential of changes, metamorphoses, and transformations in Slavic literatures for children, youth and fantasy, along with literary work based on the Bildungsroman tradition. We invite reflections and discussion on the following topics:
metamorphoses of characters in children’s and youth literatures of Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe (metamorphoses in fairy tales, changing people into animals or plants and opposite, magical transformations)
moral metamorphoses of characters, transgressions of opposition good-evil in Slavic children’s and youth literature and in fantasy
coming through the life stages, rites of passage
Slavic Bildungsroman, narrations about the adolescence in literatures of Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe
metamorphoses of literary genres in the area of children’s and youth literature
motif of the evanescence in Slavic literature for children and youth and in fantasy
historical, social, and cultural transformations in Slavic literature for children and youth and in fantasy
generation changes in literature, generation gap
resistance to the change
changes in reception of certain literary works, changes in literary canons
changes of literary works for adults into children’s literature and vice-versa
transformations in the future (science fiction in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe)
changes in the aesthetic of children’s books in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe
Please send your application to slavic.worlds.imagination@gmail.com by 1 May 2019. For more information, see: http://www.slavicworldsofimagination.wordpress.com/
--- - CALL FOR PAPERS - ---
“Adapting Children’s and Young Adult Novels into Anglophone Television Series”
5-6 September 2019
Rouen Normandy University
Following up on its research programme exploring audiovisual serial fiction as narrative, aesthetic and ideological works of art, present on an ever-increasing number of platforms, the research project GUEST Season 2 is organizing on the 5th and 6th of September 2019, in partnership with the research laboratory ÉRIAC (Équipe de Recherche Interdisciplinaire sur les Aires Culturelles), an international conference dedicated to Anglophone television series adapted from children’s and Young Adult novels.
Serialised television adaptations of children’s literature have existed for quite some time, especially in the English-speaking world (The Famous Five, ITV, 1978-9; The Chronicles of Narnia, BBC, 1988-90; The Borrowers, BBC 2, 1992, …), providing a logical continuation to the tradition of episodic fiction by novelists writing for children and young adults. The “principle of the proliferation of narratives moving from one medium to another” is itself a natural extension of the growing trend in the world of youth literature publishing to create “hybridised transmedia products”, such as toy books or CD books and other by-products (Letourneux 2011 : § 5), a practice which contributes to showcasing the existence of the original works.
Such a tradition of novel adaptations for the small screen, which formed a substantial part of BBC programmes for young spectators, in particular up to the 1990s (Messenger Davies 2005: 131), has recently been rekindled by the contemporary craze for TV series of all kinds. The trend for « sériephilie » (Glevarec 2012) may account for the growing tendency to cater for an even wider audience by targetting young adults or mature teenagers, and attracting younger consumers who are more and more seduced by transmediated cultural products — all the more so as these material child[ren](Buckingham 2011) may be more prone than adult viewers to enjoy repetition and to feel connected to familiar characters and worlds.
Children’s literature itself has been increasingly promoted as a legitimate field of study over the past decades, and the commercial success which crowned the publication of certain huge best-sellers at the turn of the 21st century has definitely integrated children’s literature into the bulk of mass culture production as well as into its subsequent process of commodification (Zipes 1997 and 2001, Taxel 2002). Because of such a massive market expansion, children’s literature has become a privileged source of inspiration for the writing of scripts for the big screen, and today for the small screen too. As Matthieu Letourneux explains, “the majority of films meant for young spectators are based on literary narratives and the copyrights of children literature’s biggest hits are systematically bought by publishers” (2017 : 384) with a view to making the most of the “multi-exploitation” of the fictional story (Ferrier 2009).
The current boom of children’s literature being turned into television series appears to be the continuation of the phenomenon of film adaptations based upon serialised novels, whether we think of fantasy, of “bit lit” (vampire romances) or of dystopian (i.e. counter-utopian) fiction, whose impressive number of pages seem to call out for such innumerable forms of fictional “expansion” (Besson 2015). It would therefore be interesting to study series for young viewers which tend to update either the source text or the very first film or TV adaptations (as was the case with Tyne Tees Television’s new adaptation of the Famous Five by Enid Blyton in 1995-96), to perpetuate the success of a series of novels, or to compete with formerly groundbreaking film adaptations of those very same novels. We might think for example of the 13 books of A Series of Unfortunate Events by American writer Lemony Snicket (1999-2006), who clearly connected his novels with the tradition of the Victorian serial narratives. These novels have been adapted by Netflix and broadcast on its streaming platform since January 2017, after Brad Silberling made a film out of the 23 volumes in 2004. We might also refer to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (1995-2000), whose first book only was adapted for the big screen as The Golden Compass (2007), the US version of the book’s title, but whose first television season will be released by BBC1 in 2019. This follows a radio adaptation as well as a stage adaptation in 2003.
If such questions have already been addressed within the larger context of television programmes and series intended for children and teenagers, our aim with this conference is not so much to ponder on childhood and youth culture in general but to focus rather on the adaptation process at work in the shift from book to small screen.
What can we infer from this evolution from children’s classics being almost systematically adapted for the cinema to children’s classics being almost systematically adapted for television?
Can we say that these series appropriating children’s literature are a mere expansion of a phenomenon that is already characteristic of adult culture? Or should we say that there exists a specific adaptation process when target spectators are young spectators?
Does the change of medium contribute to introducing new material in the source narrative?
Can the way young viewers watch these series have an influence on the process of adaptation (depending on whether they watch these programmes alone, with their family or with friends, whether they use their mobiles, their computers or a big home screen, and whether they binge-watch the episodes in one night or in a few days, or watch them at various paces)?
Do some series try to target a wider and older audience, playing on the nostalgia of adult spectators and the obsession for youth in contemporary anglophone cultures?
Are some genres more frequently adapted than others?
Do television series testify to the difference made by Anne Besson concerning literature (2004 and 2009) between strictly repetitive “series” (as with The Famous Five) and “cycles” (as with the Harry Potter cycle) whose narratives are framed by the passing of time and the transformation this entails?
Is the current predominance of the « cycle » type a consequence of the recent boom of young adult literature?
Can we say that sequences of novels tend to be more frequently adapted to the small screen than stand-alone novels?
Can watching a series bring some viewers back to the source novel?
How can such a remediation of novels result in the densification and complexification of the original fiction world, leading spectators to reinvest and reappraise this original universe through “drilling” (Mittell 2015)?
All these questions, and others, may be addressed in papers focusing on animated or live-action adaptations of children’s and Young Adult novels into anglophone television series. Television series having given rise to novelisations may also be part of the chosen corpus.
Paper proposals (400 words maximum), in French or in English, including an explicit title and a short bio-bibliographical notice, should be sent before 10 May 2019 both to Florence Cabaret (florence.cabaret@univ-rouen.fr) and to Virginie Douglas (virginie.douglas@wanadoo.fr).
Select Bibliography
Besson, Anne. From Asimov to Tolkien, cycles and series in genre literature. Paris: CNRS Publishing, 2004.
____. "Chapter IV. From the Club of Five to Harry Potter, cycles and series in contemporary youth literature. " Nathalie Prince. The Youth Literature in question (s). Rennes: University Presses of Rennes, 2009: 117-54.
____. Constellations. Fictional worlds in the contemporary imagination. Paris: CNRS Publishing, 2015.
Besson, Anne (dir.). Series and youth culture. Robinson Papers 39 (2016).
Buckingham, David. Children Talking Television: The Making of Television Literacy. London & Washington, DC: The Falmer Press, 1993.
____. After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000.
____. The Child Material: Growing Up in Consumer Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011.
Buckingham, David, Hannah Davies, Ken Jones & Peter Kelley. Children's Television in Britain: History, Discourse and Policy. London: British Film Institute, 1999.
Buckingham, David, Sara Bragg & Mary Jane Kehily (ed.). Youth Cultures in the Age of Global Media. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Cartmell, Deborah (ed.). A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
Collins, Fiona M. & Jeremy Ridgman (eds). Turning the Page: Children's Literature in Performance and the Media. Bern: Peter Lang, 2006.
Transmedia media. Proceedings of the conference of 18 November 2014 organized by Lecture Jeunesse. Reading Young 153 (Spring 2015).
Davies, Glyn & Kay Dickinson (eds.). Teen TV: Gender, Consumption & Identity. London: BFI, 2000.
Davies, Mäire Messenger. 'Dear BBC': Children, Television Storytelling and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
____. "'Just that kids' thing': The politics of 'Crazyspace', children's television and the box of The Demon Headmaster". Jonathan Bignell & Stephen Lacey (ed.). Popular Television Drama: Critical Perspectives. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005: 125-141.
____. Children, Media and Culture. New York: McGraw Hill, 2010.
Dupont, Nathalie. "Cinematographic adaptations of youth literature". Francis Marcoin (dir.). The Great Game and the Lost Country. Robinson Papers 25 (2009): 181-93.
Eichel-Lojkine, Patricia (eds.) The narrative for youth between transpositions, adaptations and translations: what theories for a moving semiological object? PUBLIJE 1 (June 2010), <http://publije.univ-lemans.fr>
Ferrier, Bertrand. All is not literature! Romance-proof Literature for Youth. Rennes: University Press of Rennes, 2009.
Gaudreault, André & Thierry Groensteen (dir.). The Transcript. For a theory of adaptation. Literature, cinema, comic strip, theater, music video. Proceedings of the Cerisy Colloquium. Quebec: Éditions Nota bene / Angoulême: National Center for Comics and Images, 1998.
Glevarec, Hervé. The seriesphilie. Sociology of a cultural attachment and place of fiction in the lives of young adults. Paris: Ellipses, 2012.
Hollindale, Peter. "Children's literature in an age of multiple literacies". The Australian Journal of Language and Literacy. Flight. 18, No. 4 (Nov 1995): 248-251.
Hudelet, Ariane & Shannon Wells-Lassagne (dir.). From the blank page to the dark rooms: adaptation and rehabilitation in the English-speaking world, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2011.
Hutcheon, Linda with Siobhan O'Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation. (2006) Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2013.
Jenkins, Henry (ed.). The Children's Culture Reader. New York & London: New York University Press, 1998.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture. Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006.
Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford & Joshua Green. Spreadable Media. Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York University Press (Postmillennial Pop Series), 2013.
Julier-Costes, Martin, Denis Jeffrey and Jocelyn Lachane (dir.). Cult series and cult series for young people. Thinking Teen with TV Series, Laval, Quebec: Laval University Press, 2014.
Guern, Philippe, Diana Cooper-Richet and Jean-Yves Mollier (dir.). Media Cults Fan culture and cult works. Rennes: University Press of Rennes, 2002.
Lefebvre, Benjamin. "Our Home on Native Land: Adapting and Re-adapting Laura Ingalls Wilder 's Little House on the Prairie". Benjamin Lefebvre (ed.). Textual Transformations in Children 's Literature: Adaptations, Translations, Reconsiderations. New York & London: Routledge, 2013: 175-196.
Letourneux, Matthew (ed.). Media culture. Comparison. Geneva: Peter Lang, 2005.
____. "Youth Literature and Media Culture". Nathalie Prince (dir.). The youth literature in question (s). Rennes: Rennes University Press, 2009.
____. "The forms of fiction in culture for youth". Strenæ [Online], 2 | 2011 <http://journals.openedition.org/strenae/434>
____. Chain fiction. Serial literatures and media culture. Paris: Threshold, 2017.
Mackey, Margaret. Across Media Literacies: Playing the Text. (2002) 2nd ed. Abingdon, Oxon & New York: Routledge, 2007.
____. "The Case of the Flat Rectangles: Children's Literature on Page and Screen" (The Francelia Butler Reading, Children's Literature Association, June 2010 Ann Arbor, Michigan). International Research in Children's Literature, Vol. 4 No 1 (2011): 99-114.
Mallan, Kerry & Clare Bradford (eds.). Contemporary Children's Literature and Film: Engaging with Theory. Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Marie, Vincent and Nicole Lucas (dir.). Traveling on animation cinema at school. Paris: Ed. The Manuscript University, 2009.
Mittell, Jason. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York University Press, 2015.
____. Narrative Theory and Adaptation. New York & London: Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2017.
Mitterrand, Odette. "Cinema and youth literature". Isabelle Nières-Chevrel & Jean Perrot (dir.). Dictionary of the youth book. Paris: Editions of the Cercle de la Librairie, 2013: 189-93.
Moseley, Rachel. Hand-Made Television: Stop-Frame Animation for Children in Britain, 1961-1974. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Moss, Joyce & George Wilson (eds.). From Page to Screen: Children's and Young Adult Books on Screen and Video. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1992.
Müller, Anja (ed.). Adapting Canonical Texts in Children's Literature. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
Murray, Simone. The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation. London: Routledge, 2012.
Peirse, Alison. "A Broken Tradition: British Telefantasy and Children's Television in the 1980s and 1990s". Visual Culture in Britain 11: 1 (2010): 109-124.
Prévost, Christine. "Transmission of classics of youth literature and audio-visual adaptations: an interaction between media to invest didactically, the example of animation cinema". Max Butlen and Violaine Houdart-Mérot (dir.). Interpret and transmit the literature today. Amiens: Inking, University of Cergy-Pontoise, 2009.
Reimer, Mavis, Nyala Ali, Deanna England & Melanie Dennis Unrau (eds), Seriality and Texts for Young People: The Compulsion to Repeat. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Reynolds, Kim. "Telly Texts: Children's Books and the Media". Pat Pinsent (ed.). The Power of the Page: Children's Books and their Readers. (1993) London & New York: Routledge, 2012: 103-111.
Series and audiovisual culture. Reading Young 154 (Summer 2015).
Semenza, Greg M. Colón & Bob Hasenfratz. The History of British Literature on Film, 1895-2015. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.
Taxel, Joel. "Children's Literature at the Turn of the Century:" Toward a Political Economy of the Publishing Industry ". Research in the Teaching of English. Flight. 37, No. 2 (Nov. 2002): 145-197.
Thorburn, David & Henry Jenkins (ed.). Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition. Cambridge, MA: MIT. Press, 2003.
Wheatley, Helen. "Uncanny children, haunted houses, hidden rooms: Children's Gothic television in the 1970s and 80s". Visual Culture in Britain 13: 3 (2012): 383-397.
Wells-Lassagne, Shannon. Television and Serial Adaptation. New York & London: Routledge, 2017.
Zipes, Jack. Happily Ever After. Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry. New York & London: Routledge, 1997.
___. Sticks and Stones. The Troublesome Success of Children's Literature from Slovenian Peter to Harry Potter. New York & London: Routledge, 2001.