Charlotte's web site: The convergence culture of children's print and digital literature

In analyzing the narrative connection and convergence between print literature and digital media under the specific genre of children's print texts and video games, my study explores three spaces where media are converging and diverging, specifically focusing on "classic" print story adaptations, cultural assumptions transmitted across media, and textual and formal influences that produce transtexts. Using examples of transmedia story universes and technologically influenced texts, I engage narrative, gender, and race in relation to children's playable narrative vis-a-vis video games, arguing for their impact and alteration of children's print literature and vice versa.;Chapter 1 provides an introductory overview of digital and print convergence within the bounds of children's literature. Chapter 2 studies the traditional responses to video games in relationship to children's print texts: particularly adaptation and fidelity. Chapter 3 examines the reverse by studying how print texts incorporate gaming scenarios. Chapter 4 expands this discussion to transtexts and other technologically-influenced young adult fiction that engage multi-platform media, which showcases not only problematic kinds of convergence (consumerism without awareness) but also advantageous kinds of representational gender politics. Chapter 5 extends the gender discussion to include race and returns to a discussion of story adaptation across media, but emphasizes form over fidelity. Because the convergence of print and digital media is still relatively new in children's literature, seeing both the re-inscription of normative culture and also the radical potential for future texts provides a more accurate depiction of the emergent forces in children's literature that will be of interest to future writers, educators, publishers, and readers.