This book features a cutting edge approach to the study of film adaptations of literature for children and young people, and the narratives about childhood those adaptations enact. Historically, film media has always had a partiality for the adaptation of ‘classic’ literary texts for children. As economic and cultural commodities, McCallum points out how such screen adaptations play a crucial role in the cultural reproduction and transformation of childhood and youth, and indeed are a rich resource for the examination of changing cultural values and ideologies, particularly around contested narratives of childhood. The chapters examine various representations of childhood: as shifting states of innocence and wildness, liminality, marginalisation and invisibility. The book focuses on a range of literary and film genres, from ‘classic’ texts, to experimental, carnivalesque, magical realist, and cross-cultural texts.

How do religious traditions create strangers and neighbors? How do they construct otherness? Or, instead, work to overcome it? In this exciting collection of interdisciplinary essays, scholars and activists from various traditions explore these questions. Through legal and media studies, they reveal how we see religious others. They show that Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and Sikh texts frame others in open-ended ways. Conflict resolution experts and Hindu teachers, they explain, draw on a shared positive psychology. Jewish mystics and Christian contemplatives use powerful tools of compassionate perception. Finally, the authors explain how Christian theology can help teach respectful views of difference. They are not afraid to discuss how religious groups have alienated one another. But, together, they choose to draw positive lessons about future cooperation.

In recent decades, age studies has started to emerge as a new approach to study children’s literature. This book builds on that scholarship but also significantly extends it by exploring age in various aspects of children’s literature: the age of the author, the characters, the writing style, the intended readership and the real reader. Moreover, the authors explore what different theories and methods can be used to study age in children’s literature, and what their affordances and limits are. The analyses combine age studies with life writing studies, cognitive narratology, digital humanities, comparative literary studies, reader-response research and media studies. To ensure coherence, the book offers an in-depth exploration of the oeuvre of a single author, David Almond. The aesthetic and thematic richness of Almond’s works has been widely recognised. This book adds to the understanding of his oeuvre by offering a multi-faceted analysis of age. In addition to discussing the film adaptation of his best-known novel Skellig, this book also offers analyses of works that have received less attention, such as Counting Stars, Clay and Bone Music. Readers will also get a fuller understanding of Almond as a crosswriter of literature for children, adolescents and adults.

Scholars of cultural, gender, film, literary, and adaptation studies will find this collection innovative and thought-provoking.

Just as a work of self-reflexive 'metafiction' - and the experience of reading it - differ from other types of literature, the work and the experience of viewing films that adapt metafiction are distinct from those of other films, and from other film adaptations of literary works. This book explores the adaptation of children's metafictions, including works such as Inkheart, The Invention of Hugo Cabret and the Harry Potter series. Not only are the plot devices of books and reading explored on screen in these adaptations, but so is the nature of transmedial adaptation itself - the act of representing one work of art in another medium. Analysing the 'work' done by children's metafiction and the experience of reading it, Casie E. Hermansson situates the adaptations of these types of books to film within contemporary adaptation criticism.

This open access edited volume invites transdisciplinary scholars to re-vision science education in the era of the Anthropocene. The collection assembles the works of educators from many walks of life and areas of practice together to help reorient science education toward the problems and peculiarities associated with the geologic times many call the Anthropocene. It has become evident that science education—the way it is currently institutionalized in various forms of school science, government policy, classroom practice, educational research, and public/private research laboratories—is ill-equipped and ill-conceived to deal with the expansive and urgent contexts of the Anthropocene. Paying homage to myopic knowledge systems, rigid state education directives, and academic-professional communities intent on reproducing the same practices, knowledges, and relationships that have endangered our shared world and shared presents/presence is misdirected. This volume brings together diverse scholars to reimagine the field in times of precarity.

As striking, counter-intuitive and distasteful as the combination of children and anxiety may seem, some of the most popular children's classics abound in depictions of traumatic relationships, bloody wars and helpless heroes. This book draws on Freudian and Lacanian anxiety models to investigate the psychological and political significance of this curious juxtaposition, as it stands out in Golden Age novels from both sides of the Atlantic and their present-day adaptations. The stories discussed in detail, so the argument goes, identify specific anxieties and forms of anxiety management as integral elements of hegemonial middle-class identity. Apart from its audacious link between psychoanalysis and Marxist, feminist, as well as postcolonial ideology criticism, this study provides a nuanced analysis of the ways in which allegedly trivial texts negotiate questions of individual and (trans)national identities. In doing so, it offers a fresh look at beloved tales like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz and Peter Pan, contributes to the dynamic field of adaptation studies and highlights the necessity to approach children's entertainment more seriously and more sensitively than it is generally the case.