From Formula to Solid Food: How Media Nourishes Children's Literature

Children's constant exposure to visual media influences the way authors write literature for children and young adults. Initially, it appears nostalgic as adults reflect on the literature they encountered as children and want to share with the current generation. However, media influence children's literature through the hypermediacy consumer culture creates surrounding popular literature franchises. Marketing companies and fan communities attempt to create immediacy and reality for characters that saturate the reader. This co-mingling of media and literature creates global knowledge communities, including complex fan cultures, which continually challenge readers to participate with texts beyond initial one-time readings by considering how characters mediate themselves and how the readers can mediate themselves. Knowledge communities then want authors to join their participatory culture through transmedia storytelling, setting the stage for hypertext storytelling. This book invites parents, educators, and scholars to discover as media influence children's literature, an intelligent reader emerges, a reader who wants to understand the multiply dimensions of a story.