From Struwwelpeter to Peter Rabbit, from Alice to Bilbo—this collection of essays shows how the classics of children’s literature have been transformed across languages, genres, and diverse media forms. This book argues that translation regularly involves transmediation—the telling of a story across media and vice versa—and that transmediation is a specific form of translation. Beyond the classic examples, the book also takes the reader on a worldwide tour, and examines, among other things, the role of Soviet science fiction in North Korea, the ethical uses of Lego Star Wars in a Brazilian context, and the history of Latin translation in children’s literature. Bringing together scholars from more than a dozen countries and language backgrounds, these cross-disciplinary essays focus on regularly overlooked transmediation practices and terminology, such as book cover art, trans-sensory storytelling, écart, enfreakment, foreignizing domestication, and intra-cultural transformation.

Anna Kérchy is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Szeged, Hungary. She has published widely on children’s literature, fantastic fiction, and fairy tales, including the monographs Alice in Transmedia Wonderland (2016), Body-Texts in the Novels of Angela Carter (2008), and the edited collections Postmodern Reinterpretations of Fairy Tales (2011) and The Fairy-Tale Vanguard (2019).

Björn Sundmark is Professor of English Literature at Malmö University, Sweden. He has published numerous books and articles on children’s literature, and is the author of the study Alice in the Oral Literary Continuum (1999), and the editor of The Nation in Children’s Literature (2013) and Child Autonomy and Child Governance in Children’s Literature (2019).