BOBC |
Resource type: Book Chapter Language: de: Deutsch DOI: 10.1007/978-3-476-04850-9_5 BibTeX citation key: Bachmann2019c Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details |
Categories: General Keywords: "Little Orphan Annie", Adaptation, Children’s and young adults’ comics, Comic strip, Format, Intermediality, USA Creators: Bachmann, Dettmar, Roeder, Tomkowiak Publisher: Metzler (Stuttgart) Collection: Schnittstellen der Kinder- und Jugendmedienforschung. Aktuelle Positionen und Perspektiven |
Views: 33/1638
|
Attachments |
Abstract |
The ‘Big Little Books’ are a staple of American midcentury popular culture and children’s literature, “icons of a time and place for a slowly fading generation of Americans” (Lowry), yet they are largely unknown to German-language academia. Introduced in the 1930s by Whitman Publishing based in Racine, Wisconsin, Big Little Books adapted famous newspaper comic strips like Little Orphan Annie, Dick Tracy, and Mickey Mouse to a much smaller book format and juxtaposed them with facing prose adaptations. Subsequently, hundreds of these books were published in large quantities by well-known publishers of children’s literature including Saalfield and Dell. Big Little Books combine comics and prose in equal parts, resulting in what can be described as a hybrid book format. A closer look at one Little Orphan Annie-Big Little Book, as well as a comparison with the Genevan series Weltliteratur für Junge Leser. Classics with Comics (1983–1994), highlights this point. This paper argues that Big Little Books and similarly hybrid media present a challenge for studies both in the fields of children’s literature and comics, insofar as such hybrid book formats exist at the intersection of both genres and thus require approaches drawn from both fields of study.
|