‘Growing up means adapting’: childhood and adaptation

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Abstract This introduction to the Special Issue on Adaptation and Childhood invites researchers to consider the critical opportunities that thinking with and about childhood can offer the field of adaptation studies. Rather than marking the limits of what is possible, this introduction invites scholars to approach the real and conceptualized child and the challenges they pose to adaptation studies theory and criticism as a site of theoretical and methodological possibility. We begin by examining how the field of children’s literature has navigated the problems posed by conceptualizing the child as audience and explore how such theorizations could aid adaptation studies in navigating its own relationship to audiences. Drawing again on work from key theorists in the field of children’s literary criticism, this introduction concludes by arguing for the child as a key ally in reclaiming adaptation’s ‘might’.