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 (YA) literature featuring royal characters through a folkloric lens and shows different ways authors transform the traditional royal characters from folktales and Disney films. She shows how princes and princesses are more progressive than their predecessors through expanding gender roles. She also demonstrates how different types of abdication work to transform readers’ expectations of royals and how they reach a happy ending different from traditional folktales and Disney. Finally, employing Rudine Sims Bishop’s ideas about mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors, she explores 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 work to transform the folktale tradition. Doughty concludes with a discussion of the transformational gaps remaining in royal children’s and YA literature.