The Case of the Flat Rectangles: Children's Literature on Page and Screen The Francelia Butler Lecture, Children's Literature Association, June 2010 Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Children's literature has long been dominated by the flat rectangle of the page, and more recently, of the screen. It is easy to assume that the recent flood of literary-related commodities and collectibles represents something very new. But popular culture has spawned a similar industry of multimodal materials for well over a century, and children's authors such as Beatrix Potter and L. Frank Baum mastered the art of the spin-off and the collectible in the very early days of the twentieth century. This article investigates questions about changes in children's literary culture through the lens of past, present, and future, and explores a shifting future world where texts become ever more hybrid, porous, slippery, and unfinished. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]