Materialities and the creation of realities: representations of "little red riding hood" through different media

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5007/1807-9288.2026.e111861

Keywords:

Little Red Riding Hood, Media, Materiality, Reality

Abstract

Mirroring the reality, fairy tales have been used to teach specific ways of understanding the world to members of some societies. The way we tell these stories is always changing, not only in an ideological sense, but also in how we materialize them. From the analysis of a narrative event from the tale of Little Red Riding Hood, this article seeks to compare three storytelling experiences offered by different media: a picturebook, a smartphone application, and a virtual reality video game. The analysis aims to clarify how the media variation impacts the creation of different fictional reality regimes for the same story. Based on studies on transmedial narratology and embodied/distributed cognition, it is argued that these different experiences of fictionality change the ways in which we transpose knowledge from fiction to the understanding of our immediate reality.

Author Biography

Thales Estefani, University of Coimbra

Thales Estefani é doutorando em Materialidades da Literatura na Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Coimbra (Portugal) (bolsa FCT); mestre em Artes, Cultura e Linguagens pela Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora (bolsa CAPES) e bacharel em Comunicação Social com ênfase em Produção Editorial pela Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Foi editor executivo da revista MATLIT: Materialidades da literatura (2018-2021) (https://impactum-journals.uc.pt/matlit/); atualmente colabora com o MATLIT LAB: Laboratório de Humanidades (https://matlitlab.uc.pt/); o Grupo de Pesquisa CNPq Literatura e Design de Artefatos para Crianças e Jovens no Mundo Digital (UFSC) (https://lijdigital.com/) e é membro da Association for Studies in Fiction and Fictionality (SIRFF/ASIFF). Seus principais temas de pesquisa são narrativas em diferentes mídias, histórias tradicionais, artes visuais e cultura material. https://thalesestefani.com/

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Published

2026-09-03

Issue

Vol. 22 No. 01 (2026): Leitura literária digital infantojuvenil em contexto pedagógico

Section

Dossiê

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