Beyond Pippi Longstocking: Intermedial and International Aspects of Astrid Lindgren's Works ed. by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Astrid Surmatz (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Beyond Pippi Longstocking: Intermedial and International Aspects of Astrid Lindgren's Works ed. by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Astrid Surmatz Helene Høyrup (bio) Beyond Pippi Longstocking: Intermedial and International Aspects of Astrid Lindgren's Works, edited by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Astrid Surmatz. New York: Routledge, 2011. Astrid Lindgren's works, as classics of children's literature, take part in many types of cultural work across media and across the globe—albeit [End Page 261] with different status, functions, and trajectories of reception in different countries. In Scandinavia, Lindgren is a cultural icon of childhood as a specific state of being. Here her work for children is considered to be connected to both the dream of emancipation of the so-called cultural radicalism from the 1940s and the radically intermedial experimentation of avant-garde art. In other countries, Lindgren's works have attained quite different meanings, as this anthology amply and interestingly shows. Moreover, in national and international contexts, the authorship participates in an extended text and media landscape consisting, for instance, of translations, reillustrated versions, adaptations, and remediations. On more extradiegetical levels, her works contribute to a music tradition, a theme park at Vimmerby, and sculptural translations that play an important role in the Swedish cultural memory. As the editors of Beyond Pippi Longstocking point out, intermediality increasingly is becoming the prevalent textual condition. This is true in the mediatized Swedish national context, in which Lindgren's narrative figures are not only encountered in literary texts but also in films, music, and the so-called experience economy. The features of intermediality and internationality are today so integrally and complexly connected that texts should not only be seen to co-inhabit intertextual spaces, but also to be embedded in micro- and macro-structures of intercultural mediation: "In recent research there is a strong tendency to see intermediality or multimodality as a part of a process of intercultural mediation in a globalizing world . . . In our contemporary world, international reception cannot be imagined without intermediality, and intermediality can hardly be imagined without internationality and global connection" (5-6). A change of media systems from print culture to a more mediatized or digitally conditioned culture is here being indicated by the editors. Today, we may be experiencing a shift in the domain of literature away from a conventional media hierarchy privileging the written word and into a reappraisal of more diverse cultural and multimedial signifying processes, which we are only beginning to theorize. This shift may in turn create new understandings of how literature is and always has been related to other media and art forms, and of how each medium has specific affordances that contribute to the emergent theoretical notions of multimodality. As a whole, this rereading and appraisal of Astrid Lindgren's extended authorship is a readable and ambitious work that sheds new light on our understanding of Lindgren's authorship and, in the Scandinavian context, explores the cultural iconicity of her work. The book [End Page 262] also strives to move the study of children's classics in new directions, not least toward a combination of children's literature studies with cultural studies and with multimodality and interartistic studies. This movement may be considered a frame in need of further development, but the anthology is an important step in this direction of raising new questions regarding children's literature. With the double focus in this anthology—considering intermedial, multimodal, and interartistic aesthetics on the one hand, and the text as a culturally embedded, grounded and readapted formation on the other—the essays collected here constitute a joint perspective offering new, transdisciplinary insights on children's literature in a mediatized and increasingly digital world. The first section of the book deals with the cultural reception and impact of Lindgren's works and with processes of canon formation in the US, South Africa, and Flanders. The reception of Pippi Longstocking is studied in light of the changing ideologies of childhood in the US since the 1950s; as a formative catalyst in the emergence of a tradition of Afrikaans children's literature; and as a focal point for investigating the relationship between the phenomena of canonicity and remediation...