From Remembrance in Fiction to Recreation in Film Representations A Transmedial Approach to the ‘Hidden Adult’ in Children’s Fantasy Narratives

Abstract

This thesis identifies the ‘hidden adult’ as a dominant speaking subject in children’s fantasy narratives. It argues that the adult’s voice present in the shadow text constructs in a double layered narrative inconsistent images of childhood with moralising associations. The narrative duality in children’s literature in particular causes textual ambivalence that can, however, be subverted to liberate its language. The remaining surface text voices the child’s polyphonic self in its I-other dimension to express an inherited cultural memory of the hidden adult. With its dialogical implications and structural otherness, the inherited memory can travel in two axes: vertically for a transtextual return to medievalism and horizontally for a transmedial revision of the hidden adult while maintaining a textual identity for each narrative version