Children’s literature is ambiguous and contradictory, as its criticism is. They both entangle ambiguities, contradictions and important critical questions (what is literature? What is childhood? What is children’s literature?). Even if there is little agreement on how to define literature, childhood and, consequently, children’s literature, it seems, however, that children’s literature criticism now agrees on the fact that children’s literature is defined by its addressee: children’s literature is indeed categorised as such precisely by the a priori individuation of its public.
If, on the one hand, children’s literature is marginalised within literary criticism, on the other hand, children’s literature books are sold and read more than other categories of books are. The book is just one of the available cultural products addressing to children and young adults. There is, in fact, a whole global market choosing children and young adults as its target and providing them with a series of cultural products, often linked by means of quotes, retellings, adaptations, generically textual transformations. It is hence very important to analyse children and young adults’ literature within this specific economic and cultural context.
In this paper
i. I provide children’s literature with a critical framework focusing on what is at stake in dealing with children’s literature, retellings and filmic adaptations.
ii. I then analyse two specific cases of filmic retelling and adaptation, both signed by Disney: the retelling of La belle au bois dormant with the animated film Sleeping Beauty (1959) and with the more recently released film Maleficent by Robert Stromberg (2014).
By analysing the “villain” Maleficent, I browse her previous narrativizations and I focus on what is at stake both from a narrative point of view and from the political perspective the last retelling entangles: far from being revolutionary from a political point of view, Maleficent marks a moral and cultural change within the contemporary cultural system.
