Bargain Book: Never-ending Stories: Adaptation, Canonisation and Ideology in Children's Literature

Never-ending Stories: Adaptation, Canonisation and Ideology in Children's Literature (Ginkgo Series) by Sylvie Geerts (Editor) and Sara Van den Bossche (Editor) has had a significant price drop to $17.37 this morning from it's usual $30 range. That's now 62% off the $46 list price for those wanting simple math. And that's for a paper edition--it's not even available in ebook to my knowledge.

This is definitely an academic tome with the accompanying academic language not aimed at the masses. Just read that description below. But if you are interested in folklore adaptations in children's literature, it sounds like a good read. And it's a collection of papers, so I imagine some content is more casually readable than others.

I posted much more about the book upon its release this past June. So if you are interested, read that post. There's Disney and other goodies within, but that table of contents still eludes me for sharing here.

Book description:

The roots of children’s literature are commonly known to lie in adaptation. The texts most frequently adapted for a child audience are either canonised literary works for adults or children’s books which have acquired a high status of their own. In both cases, the stories are adapted to fit the needs of new readers in other contexts. This volume frames adaptation in children’s literature against a broader socio-cultural background, focusing on the ideological implications of the process. Emphasising both diversity and evolution, it deals with oppositional forces and recent trends informing adaptation. At its core are issues of transmediality and new reader roles, adaptations' orientation towards the ideology associated with the pre-text, as well as canonisation of the pre-texts and of the adaptations themselves. The volume is characterised by a broad international and diachronic spread, with topics ranging from traditional Western fairy tale adaptations to retellings of South African oral stories and Persian myths. The evolution discernible in the cases presented neatly illustrates how the process of adaptation allows canonical texts to develop into never-ending stories.