Shakespearean Spaces in Australian Literary Adaptations for Children and Young Adults

Shakespearean Spaces in Australian Literary Adaptations for Children and Young Adults offers a comprehensive examination of Shakespearean adaptations written by Australian authors for children and Young Adults. The 20-year period crossing the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries came to represent a diverse and productive era of adapting Shakespeare in Australian literature. As an analysis of Australian and international marketplaces, physical and imaginative spaces and the body as a site of meaning, this book reveals how the texts are ideologically bound to and disseminate Shakespearean cultural capital in contemporary ways. Combining current research in children’s literature and Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital deepens the critical awareness of the status of Australian literature while illuminating a corpus of literature underrepresented by the pre-existing concentration on adaptations from other parts of the world. Of particular interest is how these adaptations merge Shakespearean worlds with the spaces inhabited by young people, such as the classroom, the stage, the imagination and the gendered body. The readership of this book would be academics, researchers and students of children’s literature studies and Shakespeare studies, particularly those interested in Shakespearean cultural theory, transnational adaptation and literary appropriation. High school educators and pre-service teachers would also find this book valuable as they look to broaden and strengthen their use of adaptations to engage students in Shakespeare studies.

Michael Marokakis is currently the Head of English at Newington College in Sydney, Australia. In 2020 he received his PhD from The University of Sydney writing on Shakespearean adaptations. During his completion of his BA Dip Ed (Hons) at Macquarie University, he was awarded the H.W. Piper Memorial Prize and Elizabeth M. Liggins Prize, both for excellence in the English Honours program. Dr. Marokakis is a New South Wales Higher School Certificate marker for English Extension 2 and has presented at conferences, including the British Shakespeare Association Conference in 2016 and the AULLA Conference in 2013. He was also a sessional lecturer at the University of Sydney in the Masters of Education English Curriculum course in 2018.