Beyond Pippi Longstocking: Intermedial and International Aspects of Astrid Lindgren’s Works (review)

Astrid Lindgren’s work, especially her most famous novel, Pippi Longstocking, has been widely translated: not only into over seventy languages, but also across the spectrum of media, from traditional print versions of her picture books and middle-grade novels to radio plays, comics, films, TV series, and video games. Moreover, her image, stories, and characters take on three dimensions in the form of dolls and play sets, sculptural models, and actors in the amusement park Astrid Lindgren’s World. This widespread dissemination not only makes her one of the most famous authors in the world, but also affords scholars the opportunity to treat her work as a case study for investigating various aspects of intermediality and its relationship to internationality. Kümmerling-Meibauer and Surmatz have each held the Astrid Lindgren Guest Professorship at Linnaeus University at Kalmar/Växjö, established to honor the author’s commitment to children’s rights and environmental issues as well as her contributions to children’s literature and culture. They assert that the study of intermediality and internationality are integrally linked: “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). This insightful connection raises provocative theoretical questions, many of which are taken up in the fourteen essays which this volume comprises.

The essays are divided into four sections. The first concerns international reception of Lindgren’s work, focusing on the United States, where she is perhaps less well-known than she is elsewhere; South Africa, where the success of the translation of Lindgren’s work was highly influential in the development of children’s literature written in Afrikaans; and Flanders, where the various remediations of Pippi invoke different receptions among child viewers. What’s instructive about the essays in this section is not only the content they convey, but the diverse methodological strategies they employ in their reception studies. Eva-Maria Metcalf charts the reception and notoriety of Pippi Longstocking and its sequels chronologically through reviews, tracking how Lindgren’s antiauthoritarian characters have fared in the context of changing views of children and pedagogy in the US since 1950. Rolf Annas takes a different approach, looking specifically at the language used by the Afrikaans translator, who managed to deal successfully with issues of race within the context of the sociopolitical situation of South Africa in the 1970s. Sara Van den Bossche then tests the theoretical postulations of Harold Bloom and Ronald Soetaert regarding canonicity and remediation, by talking to children about which version of Pippi they prefer or perceive as most authentic.

The next section focuses on different film versions of Lindgren’s books. Two of the essays here focus specifically on the ways in which the adaptation of Lindgren’s texts to a filmic medium creates an opportunity to reinforce an idealized version of Swedish childhood. Particularly interesting are Anders Wilhelm Åberg’s emphasis on the inclusion of nostalgic artifacts and values reflective of the folkhem (Sweden as an ideal home of the people) era. Combined with the insights of Corina Löwe’s analysis of the movie adaptations based on the book Bill Bergson, Master Detective, a clear picture emerges of how Lindgren’s work has proved definitional for the Swedish cultural imagination regarding notions of childhood, national identity, and home. While Tobias Kurwinkel and Philipp Schmerheim focus more on the blurring of distinctions between adult and child relationship dynamics in their interpretation of the camerawork in the film version of Ronia the Robber’s Daughter, that sense of essential Swedishness is still a marked concern in their essay as well.

The third section turns readers’ attention to illustrations and picture books. Pippi, of course, though well described in Lindgren’s text, has been reimagined...