Children’s Literature across Media: Film and Theatre Adaptations of Roald Dahl’s ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’

Children's literature is a complex and wide field that has been changing over the centuries: narratives for children and teenagers have been transforming into different arts that go beyond the written page to reach crossmediality. Cinema, theatre, musicals, videogames, apps, and many other forms of narration clearly refer to the canon of children's tradition but re-shape it to address contemporary audiences and make the most out of technological, cultural, and artistic opportunities. Therefore, children's narratives do not stand on their own but are characterized by continuous overlaps, references, interactions, recurrent archetypes through different codes. In this broad, evolving context, adaptations - and mainly transmedia adaptations - may be considered one of the most significant forms of narration since they pervade and outline children's contemporary production. The present book wants to analyse the process of adaptation from a specific literary medium - the novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl - to different codes such as cinema and theatre, so as to understand through a specific case study how children textual fiction evolves across different art forms that characterize contemporary storytelling.