Royalty in Twenty-First Century Children’s and Young Adult Literature: Reshaping the Folktale and Disney Tradition

Doughty examines contemporary children's and young adult literature featuring royal characters through a folkloric lens, exploring how authors transform traditional royal characters from folktales and Disney films, expand gender roles, and offer new mirrors for children and young adults through queer and color royals.

Format: Hardback
Length: 172 pages
Publication date: 15 November 2023
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Doughty's study examines contemporary children's and young adult (YA) literature featuring royal characters through a folkloric lens, highlighting how authors transform traditional royal figures from folktales and Disney films. She demonstrates how princes and princesses are more progressive than their predecessors by expanding gender roles, and explores how different types of abdication work to transform readers' expectations of royals and lead to happy endings that differ from traditional folktales and Disney stories. Additionally, Doughty employs Rudine Sims Bishop's ideas about mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors to examine how queer royals and royals of color offer new mirrors for children and young adults. Each chapter presents a typology of royal books related to the topic and explains how they transform the folktale tradition. Doughty concludes by discussing the transformational gaps remaining in royal children's and YA literature.

Weight: 463g
Dimension: 236 x 158 x 20 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781793627001