Beyond Pippi Longstocking: Intermedial and International Approaches to Astrid Lindgren's Work 9780415883535, 9780203819265

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BEYOND PIPPI LONGSTOCKING

Children’s Literature and Culture Jack Zipes, Series Editor For a complete series list, please go to routledge.com The Making of the Modern Child Children’s Literature and Childhood in the Late Eighteenth Century Andrew O’Malley How Picturebooks Work Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott Brown Gold Milestones of African American Children’s Picture Books, 1845–2002 Michelle H. Martin Russell Hoban/Forty Years Essays on His Writing for Children Alida Allison Apartheid and Racism in South African Children’s Literature Donnarae MacCann and Amadu Maddy Empire’s Children Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children’s Books M. Daphne Kutzer Constructing the Canon of Children’s Literature Beyond Library Walls and Ivory Towers Anne Lundin Youth of Darkest England Working Class Children at the Heart of Victorian Empire Troy Boone Ursula K. Leguin Beyond Genre Literature for Children and Adults Mike Cadden

Voracious Children Who Eats Whom in Children’s Literature Carolyn Daniel National Character in South African Children’s Literature Elwyn Jenkins Myth, Symbol, and Meaning in Mary Poppins The Governess as Provocateur Georgia Grilli A Critical History of French Children’s Literature, Vol. 1 & 2 Penny Brown Once Upon a Time in a Different World Issues and Ideas in African American Children’s Literature Neal A. Lester The Gothic in Children’s Literature Haunting the Borders Edited by Anna Jackson, Karen Coats, and Roderick McGillis Reading Victorian Schoolrooms Childhood and Education in Nineteenth-Century Fiction Elizabeth Gargano Soon Come Home to This Island West Indians in British Children’s Literature Karen Sands-O’Connor Boys in Children’s Literature and Popular Culture Masculinity, Abjection, and the Fictional Child Annette Wannamaker Into the Closet Cross-dressing and the Gendered Body in Children’s Literature Victoria Flanagan

Twice-Told Children’s Tales Edited by Betty Greenway

Russian Children’s Literature and Culture Edited by Marina Balina and Larissa Rudova

Diana Wynne Jones The Fantastic Tradition and Children’s Literature Farah Mendlesohn

The Outside Child In and Out of the Book Christine Wilkie-Stibbs

Childhood and Children’s Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550–1800 Edited by Andrea Immel and Michael Witmore

Representing Africa in Children’s Literature Old and New Ways of Seeing Vivian Yenika-Agbaw

The Fantasy of Family Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature and the Myth of the Domestic Ideal Liz Thiel From Nursery Rhymes to Nationhood Children’s Literature and the Construction of Canadian Identity Elizabeth A. Galway The Family in English Children’s Literature Ann Alston Enterprising Youth Social Values and Acculturation in Nineteenth-Century American Children’s Literature Monika Elbert Constructing Adolescence in Fantastic Realism Alison Waller Crossover Fiction Global and Historical Perspectives Sandra L. Beckett The Crossover Novel Contemporary Children’s Fiction and Its Adult Readership Rachel Falconer Shakespeare in Children’s Literature Gender and Cultural Capital Erica Hateley Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature Edited by Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard Neo-Imperialism in Children’s Literature About Africa A Study of Contemporary Fiction Yulisa Amadu Maddy and Donnarae MacCann Death, Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Adolescent Literature Kathryn James Fundamental Concepts of Children’s Literature Research Literary and Sociological Approaches Hans-Heino Ewers

Children’s Fiction about 9/11 Ethnic, Heroic and National Identities Jo Lampert The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children’s Literature Jan Susina Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers Maria Nikolajeva “Juvenile” Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 The Age of Adolescence Charles Ferrall and Anna Jackson Picturing the Wolf in Children’s Literature Debra Mitts-Smith New Directions in Picturebook Research Edited by Teresa Colomer, Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, Cecilia Silva-Díaz The Role of Translators in Children’s Literature Invisible Storytellers Gillian Lathey The Children’s Book Business Lessons from the Long Eighteenth Century Lissa Paul Humor in Contemporary Junior Literature Julie Cross Innocence, Heterosexuality, and the Queerness of Children’s Literature Tison Pugh Reading the Adolescent Romance Sweet Valley and the Popular Young Adult Romance Novel Amy S. Pattee Irish Children’s Literature and Culture New Perspectives on Contemporary Writing Edited by Valerie Coghlan and Keith O’Sullivan Beyond Pippi Longstocking Intermedial and International Perspectives on Astrid Lindgren’s Works Edited by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Astrid Surmatz

BEYOND PIPPI LONGSTOCKING Intermedial and International Aspects of Astrid Lindgren’s Works

E DI T E D BY BET T I NA K Ü M M E R L I NG -M E I BAU E R A N D A ST R I D SU R M ATZ

NEW YORK AND LONDON

First published 2011 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2011 Taylor & Francis The right of Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Astrid Surmatz to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Typeset in Minion by IBT Global. Printed and bound in the United States of America on acid-free paper by IBT Global. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Beyond Pippi Longstocking : intermedial and international aspects of Astrid Lindgren’s works / edited by Bettina Kummerling-Meibauer and Astrid Surmatz. p. cm. — (Children’s literature and culture ; 77) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Lindgren, Astrid, 1907–2002—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Children’s literature, Swedish—History and criticism. I. Kümmerling-Meibauer, Bettina. II. Surmatz, Astrid, 1966– PT9875.L595Z55 2011 839.73'72—dc22 2011012412

ISBN13: 978-0-415-88353-5 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-81926-5 (ebk)

Contents

List of Figures

xi

Series Editor’s Foreword

xiii

Acknowledgments

xv

Introduction Intermedial and International Aspects of Astrid Lindgren’s Works

1

BETTINA KÜMMERLING-MEIBAUER AND ASTRID SURMATZ

PART I Different Aspects of International Reception Chapter 1

Pippi Longstocking in the United States

15

EVA-MARIA METCALF

Chapter 2

Pippi Longstocking in South Africa: Translation and Reception

35

ROLF ANNAS

Chapter 3

We Love What We Know: The Canonicity of Pippi Longstocking in Different Media in Flanders SARA VAN DEN BOSSCHE

vii

51

viii • Contents

PART II Intermedial Studies: Films Chapter 4

Remaking the National Past: The Uses of Nostalgia in the Astrid Lindgren Films of the 1980s and 1990s

73

ANDERS WILHELM ÅBERG

Chapter 5

Intermediality in Children’s Literature: Reflections of Adult Relationships in Ronia, the Robber’s Daughter

87

TOBIAS KURWINKEL AND PHILIPP SCHMERHEIM

Chapter 6

Bill Bergson: A Political Statement or a Symbol of Swedishness? A Comparison of Astrid Lindgren’s Bill Bergson Texts with the 1990s Film Adaptations

105

CORINA LÖWE

PART III Intermedial Studies: Illustrations and Picturebooks Chapter 7

Visualizing People: Multimodal Character Construction in Astrid Lindgren’s Work

125

MARIA NIKOLAJEVA

Chapter 8

Astrid Lindgren’s Picturebooks: One Text—Two Illustrators

137

AGNES-MARGRETHE BJORVAND

Chapter 9

Everyday and Exotic: Astrid Lindgren’s Co-operation with Anna Riwkin-Brick

155

HELENE EHRIANDER

Chapter 10 To Mirror the Real: Ideology and Aesthetics in Photographic Picturebooks

173

ELINA DRUKER

PART IV Intermedial Studies: Music, Sculpture, and Architecture Chapter 11 In Heaven There Is Great Joy: Folk Song Tradition in the Writings of Astrid Lindgren MAGNUS GUSTAFSSON

187

Contents • ix Chapter 12 The Sound and Music of Astrid Lindgren

201

BJÖRN SUNDMARK

Chapter 13 Disbeliefs in the Sculptural Imagination: On Theatricality and Intermediality in the Astrid Lindgren Memorials

219

JENS ARVIDSON

Chapter 14 Astrid Lindgren’s World in Vimmerby— A “Total Work of Art”?

239

HEIDRUN FÜHRER

Selected Bibliography

259

Editors and Contributors

263

Index

269

Figures

1.1

1.2

2.1

2.2

3.1

3.2

4.1 4.2 4.3

Illustration by Louis Glanzman from Pippi Longstocking, by Astrid Lindgren. Translated by Florence Lamborn. New York: Viking, 1978.

16

Illustration by Louis Glanzman from Pippi Goes On Board, by Astrid Lindgren. Translated by Florence Lamborn. New York: Viking, 1985.

32

Illustration by Richard Kennedy for the book cover of Pippi Longstocking, by Astrid Lindgren. Translated by Edna Hurup. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976.

41

Illustration by Carl Hollander from Pippie in die Suidsee, by Astrid Lindgren. Translated By Nerina Fereira. Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 2002.

42

Illustration by Carl Hollander from Pippi Langkous, by Astrid Lindgren, translated by Liesbeth BorgesiusWildschut, Amsterdam: Ploegsma, 2002.

61

Book cover illustration by Ingrid Vang Nyman, from Känner du Pippi Långstrump?, by Astrid Lindgren, Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren, 2009.

65

Film still from Lotta på Bråkmakargatan, 1992, directed by Johanna Hald.

81

Poster from the nationalistic right-wing party Sverigedemokraterna.

84

Film still from Alla vi barn i Bullerbyn, 1986, directed by Lasse Hallström.

85

xi

xii • Figures 5.1

Film still from Ronia the Robber’s Daughter (1984), directed by Tage Danielsson.

95

Film still from Ronia the Robber’s Daughter (1984), directed by Tage Danielsson.

95

Film still from Mästerdetektiven lever farligt, 1996, directed by Göran Carmbäck.

107

Illustration by Ilon Wikland for the book cover of Mästerdetektiven Blomkvist lever farligt. Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren, 1975.

109

Left page on doublespread 1 from Jag vill också gå i skolan [I Want to Go to School Too] by Astrid Lindgren and Birgitta Nordenskjöld. Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren, 1951.

148

Right page on doublespread 2 from Jag vill också gå i skolan [I Want to Go to School Too] by Astrid Lindgren and Ilon Wikland. Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren, 1979.

149

13.1

Photo of Well Astrid/Wild Rose by Berit Lindfeldt.

221

13.2

Photo of the portrait-sculpture of Astrid Lindgren by Marie-Louise Ekman.

227

13.3

Sketch of Play My Linden by Klara Kristalova.

231

14.1

The image of Swedishness. Private photo of Astrid Lindgren’s World, Vimmerby.

246

Performances of Emil i Lönneberga. Private photo of Astrid Lindgren’s World, Vimmerby.

248

5.2 6.1 6.2

8.1

8.2

14.2

Series Editor’s Foreword

Dedicated to furthering original research in children’s literature and culture, the Children’s Literature and Culture series includes monographs on individual authors and illustrators, historical examinations of different periods, literary analyses of genres, and comparative studies on literature and the mass media. The series is international in scope and is intended to encourage innovative research in children’s literature with a focus on interdisciplinary methodology. Children’s literature and culture are understood in the broadest sense of the term children to encompass the period of childhood up through adolescence. Owing to the fact that the notion of childhood has changed so much since the origination of children’s literature, this Routledge series is particularly concerned with transformations in children’s culture and how they have affected the representation and socialization of children. While the emphasis of the series is on children’s literature, all types of studies that deal with children’s radio, fi lm, television, and art are included in an endeavor to grasp the aesthetics and values of children’s culture. Not only have there been momentous changes in children’s culture in the last fifty years, but there have also been radical shifts in the scholarship that deals with these changes. In this regard, the goal of the Children’s Literature and Culture series is to enhance research in this field and, at the same time, point to new directions that bring together the best scholarly work throughout the world. Jack Zipes

xiii

Acknowledgments

Permissions Book Cover: Image of Pippi created by Ingrid Vang Nyman from the book cover of Pippi går ombord, by Astrid Lindgren. Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren, 1946. © Saltkråkan AB. Reprinted by permission of and with thanks to Saltkråkan AB. Chapter 1: Illustration by Louis Glanzman from Pippi Longstocking, by Astrid Lindgren. Translated by Florence Lamborn. Copyright 1950 by the Viking Press, Inc., renewed © 1978 by Viking Penguin Inc. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, A Division of Penguin Young Reader Group, A Member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 345 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014. All rights reserved. Illustration by Louis Glanzman from Pippi Goes On Board, by Astrid Lindgren Translated by Florence Lamborn. Copyright 1957 by the Viking Press, Inc., renewed © 1985 by Viking Penguin Inc. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, A Division of Penguin Young Reader Group, A Member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 345 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014. All rights reserved. Chapter 2: Illustration by Richard Kennedy for the book cover of Pippi Longstocking, by Astrid Lindgren. Translated by Edna Hurup. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. © Richard Kennedy 1976. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press. Illustration by Carl Hollander for the book cover of Pippie in die Suidsee, by Astrid Lindgren. Translated by Nerina Fereira. Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 2002. Reproduced by kind permission of Saltkråkan AB. Chapter 3: Illustration by Carl Hollander from Pippi Langkous, by Astrid Lindgren. Translated by Liesbeth Borgesius-Wildschut. Amsterdam: Ploegsma, 2002.© Ploegsma. Reprinted by permission of Ploegsma. Illustration by Ingrid Vang-Nyman from Känner du Pippi Långstrump?, by Astrid Lindgren. Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren, 2009. © Saltkråkan AB. Reprinted by kind permission of Carl Olof Nyman, Saltkråkan AB. xv

xvi • Acknowledgments Chapter 4: Film still from Lotta på Bråkmakargatan, 1992, directed by Johanna Hald. Poster from the nationalistic right-wing party Sverigedemokraterna. Film still from Alla vi barn I Bullerbyn, 1986, directed by Lasse Hallström. Chapter 5: Film stills from Ronja Rövardotter, 1984, directed by Tage Danielsson. Chapter 6: Film still from Mästerdetektiven lever farligt, 1996, directed by Göran Carmbäck. Illustration by Ilon Wikland for the book cover of Mästerdetektiven Blomkvist lever farligt. Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren, 1975. © Rabén & Sjögren. Reproduced by permission of Rabén & Sjögren. Chapter 8: Illustration by Birgitta Nordenskjöld from Jag vill också gå i skolan, by Astrid Lindgren. Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren, 1951. Reproduced with kind permission of Rabén & Sjögren. Illustration by Ilon Wikland, from Jag vill också gå i skolan. Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren, 1979. Reprinted by kind permission of Ilon Wikland. Chapter 9: Citations from unpublished letters by Astrid Lindgren. Reprinted by kind permission of Karin Nyman, Saltkråkan AB. Chapter 13: Photo of Astrid Well/Wild Rose by Berit Lindfeldt. ©Astrid Lindgrens Näs. Reprinted by permission of Astrid Lindgrens Näs. Photo of the portrait-sculpture of Astrid Lindgren by Marie-Louise Ekman. Reproduced by kind permission of Marie-Louise Ekman. Sketch of Play My Linden by Klara Kristalova. © Christina Knutsson, Skissernas museum. Reprinted by permission of Christina Knutsson. Chapter 14: Private Photos of Astrid Lindgren’s World, Vimmerby. Reprinted by permission of Meike Krieser.

Introduction International and Intermedial Aspects of Astrid Lindgren’s Works Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Astrid Surmatz

In 1945 an unknown Swedish author published a story about a strange girl with red braids, freckles all over her face, and a broad mouth who lived all alone with a horse and a monkey in a small Swedish town. With this book the publisher Rabén & Sjögren launched a world success and children´s classic: Pippi Longstocking has been translated into approximately eighty languages and dialects, and the author Astrid Lindgren is regarded as one of the most famous children’s book authors all over the world. Her children’s novels on Karlsson on the Roof, the Brothers Lionheart, Ronia the Robber’s Daughter, the children of Noisy Village and the Master Detective Bill Bergson, to name just a few famous characters, have been turned into plays, television versions, and fi lms—both animated as well as live fi lms. Nowadays children can choose between radio plays, comic strips, fi lm versions on DVD, and computer games, all of them based on Lindgren’s books. Her fairy tales and short stories, even chapters from Pippi Longstocking, have been published as picturebooks, illustrated by famous artists such as Ingrid Vang Nyman, Ilon Wikland, Pija Lindenbaum, Marit Törnqvist and Björn Berg. The transformation into comic strips was quite successful mainly in the 1970s both within Sweden and approximately twenty countries. Some re-editions appear, but the illustrations by Ingrid Vang Nyman remain dominant for the comic books. Moreover, Lindgren’s children’s verses have been set to music and are regarded as part of the treasury of Swedish children’s songs. Thus, Lindgren’s work has turned into a multimedia system, covering all media, from print media and audiovisual media to digital media. This intermedial converting 1

2 • Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Astrid Surmatz demonstrates the high popularity of Astrid Lindgren until the present. In addition, Lindgren’s works have had and still have a considerable impact on international children’s literature. This was due to the innovative concepts of childhood inherent in her work, but also to the variety of new topics and narrative styles which largely contribute to the demanding artistic quality of Lindgren’s children’s books. It is no wonder, then, that Lindgren received numerous awards and prizes, among them the acclaimed Hans Christian Andersen Medal, the so-called Nobel Prize for children’s literature, and even honorary doctorates from three universities. Lately, many major awards have been established that bear her name, such as the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, ALMA, sponsored by the Swedish government and awarded every year for the lifetime achievement of an author, an illustrator, or an institution related to the dissemination of children’s literature. This prize is the second highest prize in literature, after the Nobel Prize in literature, on which it was modeled. Moreover, the unique position of Lindgren was stressed by the guest professorship in memory of Astrid Lindgren at Linnaeus University at Kalmar/Växjö, Sweden, in 2007, established in honor of Lindgren’s one hundredth birthday. The aim of this guest professorship which is financially supported by Linnaeus University at Kalmar/Växjö, Vimmerby municipality, the Astrid Lindgren Research Center at Näs, and the social institution Rädda Barnen (Save the Children), is to invite prominent scholars working in various fields that are in some way linked to the life and work of Astrid Lindgren, thus covering a wide range from children’s rights, literature, film, issues regarding ethics and values, to pedagogy, as well as environmental issues. The editors of this volume were selected to hold this position in 2008 and 2010, respectively. In order to stimulate research on Astrid Lindgren they organized an international conference, held at Linnaeus University, in September 2008. The aim of this conference was to shed new lights on Lindgren’s works by investigating their international reception, on the one hand, and their intermedial impact on international children’s culture, on the other.

Aspects of Lindgren Research Although Pippi Longstocking is still the most popular novel written by Lindgren, which is additionally testified by the observation that the majority of academic studies focus on this seminal book until the present, her other famous children’s books more and more arouse scholarly interest with regard to narrative studies, cultural studies, and translation studies, to name just a few critical approaches. The unique character of Astrid Lindgren’s work as described by scholars like Vivi Edström in Astrid Lindgren: A Critical Study (Swedish original: Vildtoring och lägereld, 1992) and Eva-Maria Metcalf in Astrid Lindgren (1995) procures both the academic community and the general public with a growing

Introduction • 3 awareness of the opportunities which children’s literature is able to offer. In general, though, the multifaceted changes and developments of the media transformations of Lindgren’s works and their influence on the child’s perception have not yet been well investigated. The case in point is that nowadays the majority of children will get in contact with Lindgren’s stories by means of media transformations, especially movies. To give just an example: when discussing Pippi Longstocking with international students, they are most often astonished to acknowledge that Pippi’s horse has not a name at all in the book, whereas in the international fi lm versions the horse has a specific name, “Lilla Gubben” [Little Old Man] in Swedish; in German it is called “Kleiner Onkel” [Little Uncle]. Moreover, they are somewhat surprised about the fact that the movie is so different in comparison to the original story. On account of this one might conclude that many children have just seen the movie and that they have not read the book at all, or that at least the fi lmic impression has strongly overruled the literary one. This observation points not only to a somewhat shifting reception of Lindgren’s works, but also to the complex connection between international and intermedial reception, as was also stressed at the conference at Linnaeus University, where a strong link to the well-established intermediality research in Växjö and also at the University of Lund in Southern Sweden was established. In many countries, such as Spain, Portugal, or Estonia, Lindgren’s children’s books are mainly known through television series or movies nowadays. Although her novels and fairy tales have been translated into the respective languages, they were often not reprinted and have not yet become a significant part of the respective countries’ canonical children’s literature. Moreover, in Croatia and in Estonia, where the first edition of Pippi Longstocking has been published relatively late, in 1973 and 1968, respectively, selected chapters from the original work have been integrated into school books and primers for primary schools. Pupils therefore know the protagonist and some adventures of Pippi Longstocking, but usually not the whole book, whose editions had been out of print now and then. Another example is the former GDR where the first edition of Pippi Longstocking was published in 1975; however, many children already knew the story and the main characters, because they watched the movies on secretly received Western TV channels. Somehow, the fi lm reception seems to have triggered the book publication, as the revolutionary figure already had permeated through the first-named medium. The fact that Lindgren participated with clear ideas in the ongoing work with the fi lm scripts adds another dimension to this intricate web of intermedial construction and reconstruction. In this way, the shifting and complex reception of Lindgren’s works, caused in interaction with media transformation of her original books, is just one aspect of intermediality that governs the international perception of this author. Other relevant aspects are translation and illustration. It seems as if every country has its own version of Lindgren titles and characters, as Astrid

4 • Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Astrid Surmatz Surmatz has stated in her book (2005). As has been proved by scholars working in this field, translations were often shortened, changed, and reduced in order to adapt the respective work to the pedagogical constraints of the target culture. Thus, the translations’ restructuring of the text according to target cultural norms obviously contributes to the restricted reception of Lindgren in many European countries, such as Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Although the German translation of Pippi Longstocking mitigates some passages and puts less emphasis to convey the ironical and subversive mood, this novel had an enormous success in the Federal Republic of Germany and is still Lindgren’s most prominent work in German-speaking countries. The impression that the Swedish origin of Lindgren’s texts has to some extent been changed in translation also applies to illustration. The original illustrations of the Pippi Longstocking trilogy, created by the Danish-Swedish illustrator Ingrid Vang Nyman, were often replaced by illustrations from renowned artists of the respective countries. This is also true for other books by Lindgren, whether the Estonian edition of Bill Bergson, Master Detective with pictures by Edgar Valter or the GDR edition of Ronia the Robber’s Daughter with illustrations by Karl-Heinz Appelmann: the new illustrations obviously contribute to the reception of Lindgren’s novels as well. It is interesting to note that most often the illustrations match with the respective translation: whenever the translator attempts to adjust the original version to the pedagogical concepts of the target literature, the illustrations are accordingly adapted to the aesthetic values of the respective culture, as both Surmatz and Kümmerling-Meibauer have shown in earlier publications. The mischievous and joyful character of Pippi, her nonsensical behavior and outlook, perfectly matched by Ingrid Vang Nyman’s surrealistic and modernist illustrations, was more or less subdued in foreign editions. Whereas the Norwegian edition from 1946 with pictures by Alice Middelfart is obviously modeled on Vang Nyman’s illustrations, the subsequent newly illustrated editions chose other interpretations of Pippi. In the Spanish, the Portuguese, the first French, and most of the British versions, Pippi rather looks like a common girl, characterized by coquettish dresses and gestures. Even the German editions, illustrated by Walter Scharnweber (1949) and Rolf Rettich (1967), show a tamed, artistically more traditional version of the protagonist, especially the illustrations by Rolf Rettich which function in a different cultural context, a tradition renewed by Katrin Engelking (2007). Pippi is never depicted as even provokingly extraordinary as in the Swedish edition. Be that as it may, the history of the different illustrated Lindgren versions and the impact of the images on the reception of the respective works certainly provide new insights into intercultural and multimodal perspectives. Furthermore, intermediality is generally associated with the blurring of traditionally ascribed generic and formal boundaries through the incorporation of digital media into all forms of cultural practice, and with the presence of one or more media in the space and form of another medium, for example,

Introduction • 5 fi lmic writing in literature or the juxtaposition of literature and film in fi lm scripts. Especially film scripts are increasingly regarded as important literary genre shifting the boundaries between literature and film. The spatial and tempospatial relations between different modes have been regarded as less hierarchic in later research. In this regard, Lindgren is an interesting case in point. As named previously, she took great interest in the remediation of her books and also insisted on her right to be involved into the decision processes concerning stage, actors, and fi lm scripts. While the very first fi lm version of a children’s novel by Lindgren, Mästerdetektiven Blomkvist (Bill Bergson, Master Detective), directed by Rolf Husberg in 1947, was realized without Lindgren’s support, most of the subsequent Swedish movies and television series are based on her fi lm scripts which are preserved in the archives of the Royal Library at Stockholm. In an interview Lindgren once claimed that it was easy for her to rewrite her stories into fi lm scripts by transferring the dialogues and by thoroughly describing the locations and main figures. Moreover, Lindgren intensively collaborated with the Swedish directors of her fi lms, strictly controlling the conversion of her fi lm scripts into the fi lm versions and insisting that she should be involved in the casting of the actors. Furthermore, contemporary interdisciplinary research has made us more aware of the fact that the shifting of the domains of literature and the other arts is an ongoing process and certainly not restricted to our times. A critical analysis of specific examples of intermediality in literature, cinema, television, the digital media or the performing arts in theater, dance, and music, or any of the fields involving creative processes can lead to a more comprehensive view of the changing structure of the artistic field. In this situation it is necessary to suggest directions in which children’s literature research in general and research about Astrid Lindgren in particular is moving at present and in which it may develop further in the future. Hence, this collection seeks to contribute to the ongoing debate on the importance of Astrid Lindgren, focusing on intermedial and international aspects. And one of the goals of this volume is to enhance the necessity of new impulses for Lindgren research also within the international field, as Anglophone research has been more conservative in this way—hitherto! The fourteen chapters in the volume are mostly revised versions of papers given at the already mentioned conference that took part at Linnaeus University in 2008. Written by scholars from different countries (Belgium, Germany, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, the UK, and the US) and different fields such as literary studies, art history, musicology, fi lm studies, and intermedial studies, the chapters clearly reveal that Lindgren’s works offer excellent facilities for a deepening analysis of the intertwinement of different media versions. 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. Therefore, the focus of this book is not merely to present a section on

6 • Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Astrid Surmatz intermediality or on internationality and international transfer, but to show the variety of the international and intermedial reception of Lindgren, where actually most of the chapters included would refer to both. In our contemporary world, international reception cannot be imagined without intermediality, and intermediality can hardly be imagined without internationality and global connection. All the different media forms are interconnected in an intricate and yet self-explaining way, both spatial and temporal relations are of interest to children’s media research in a broad sense. The interaction of the interpretation of traditional meaning and iconicity will be a strong focus even in further research and help to build an exchange of ideas, thus transgressing the traditional borders of research. The international and especially the Scandinavian picturebook research is a typical multimodal and intermedial field, where impulses from children’s literature research have reached out to the more general field of intermediality research and similar modal connections with music and film are to be expected. This interconnection between different international media forms is exemplified here in relation to our core example, Astrid Lindgren’s international and intermedial impact.

International Reception The first three chapters deal with the reception of Pippi Longstocking in the US, South Africa, and Flanders (Belgium), focusing on the connection of translation and the pedagogical discourse, on the one hand, and the different remediations of the Pippi Longstocking trilogy, on the other. These studies reveal interesting aspects of the international reception and influence of a children’s classic in three continents, therefore contributing to the ongoing discussion of canon processes in the realm of children’s literature. In her stimulating chapter Lindgren expert Eva-Maria Metcalf examines the reasons for Pippi Longstocking’s rise to fame among children’s fictional characters in the US, which has much to do with a receptive cultural and educational climate for an extraordinary character. By providing insights into the representations of Pippi Longstocking in different American visual media (fi lm, television, video, and Internet) and the way Pippi is received by critics, educators, and the general public today, Metcalf argues that among all of Lindgren’s famous fictional characters only Pippi has reached limited prominence and enjoys some name recognition in the US, while Astrid Lindgren herself is virtually unknown, which stands in stark contrast to the reception of the author in Sweden and most European countries. The reception of Pippi Longstocking in South Africa, especially among Afrikaans-speaking people, is in the fore of Rolf Annas’ chapter. A survey on the history of Apartheid, the school system, and Afrikaans children’s literature highlights the overwhelming influence of Lindgren’s children’s book. By comparing the Afrikaans translation with the original work, Annas stresses the

Introduction • 7 problems of race (especially in the third volume on Pippi’s travels to the South Seas) and the adaptation to South African traditions. According to Annas, the success of the Afrikaans edition of Pippi Longstocking mostly relies on the effective translation that is distinguished by lively dialogues and the integration of colloquial speech, therefore paving the way for the establishment of modern narrative patterns and an innovative image of childhood that had a high impact on the development of children’s literature written in Afrikaans. Sara Van den Bossche’s chapter analyzes the canonicity of Pippi Longstocking in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, by referring to the seminal studies of Ronald Soetaert (2008) and Harold Bloom (1996) on canonicity and remediation. This explorative study discusses in which media the remediations of Pippi Longstocking appear, and which associations Astrid Lindgren’s target audience (primary school children aged eight to twelve) currently has with the visualization of Pippi Longstocking in each specific medium. In addition, Van den Bossche investigates whether there is a positive correlation between children’s inclining towards one of the figures of Pippi Longstocking and the type of medium in which this figure features. Therefore, different prototypes of Pippi Longstocking are distinguished that differ more or less from the original version, thus creating derivatives of the canonized figure.

Intermedial Studies: Films The next section comprises three chapters that focus on different fi lm versions of Lindgren’s books, especially The Children of Noisy Village, Bill Bergson, Master Detective, and Ronia the Robber’s Daughter, by drawing the attention to such topics as the use of nostalgic projections on a “lost” era in the Lindgren fi lms of the 1980s and 1990s, intermedial aspects relying on the representation of relationships among characters, and comparative analysis of written text and fi lm adaptation. Anders Wilhelm Åberg places the Lindgren fi lms in the context of the development of the Swedish welfare state, that is, the end of the folkhem (home of the people) era. He demonstrates that one of the attractions of the Lindgren fi lms is their nostalgic projection of artifacts, styles, and values of a now “lost” era. As contribution to a wave of “nostalgia fi lms” in the children’s fi lm genre in Sweden during the 1980s and 1990s, Lindgren’s huge impact through numerous adaptations, remakes, and reruns plays a significant role in highlighting pastoral or small town settings in the time frames of circa 1910–1925 and 1950–1965 as the privileged sites of fictionalized childhood in Sweden. Åberg therefore argues that in this respect they contribute to the shaping and circulation of cultural memories pertaining to conceptions of national identity and origin. The argumentation of the chapter written by Tobias Kurwinkel and Philipp Schmerheim is twofold. First, it is shown that Lindgren’s novel Ronia the Rob-

8 • Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Astrid Surmatz ber’s Daughter centers on the intricacy and complexity of intimate relationships, of love as well as friendship. The relationship between Ronia and Birk not only represents an instance of childhood friendship but also explores the problems pertinent in adult relationships within the context of a children’s book. In a second step the authors show how this topical complexity is preserved as well as transformed in the process of intermedial adaptation by transforming the novel’s underlying topoi from hypo-text into fi lm. The underlying concept of intermediality is derived from Kristeva’s universal-ontological category of intertextuality, thus addressing questions that are raised by the intermedial transformation from children’s literature to corresponding fi lm adaptations. Corina Löwe investigates how the 1990s movie adaptations of the children’s book Bill Bergson, Master Detective, which was seminal for the development of the detective novel for children and its popularity in Sweden, pay tribute to the text. Based on a textual analysis and on several examples from the movies Kalle Blomkvist and Kalle och Rasmus, the chapter shows how these fi lms interpret the textual model in terms of gender, upbringing of children, and story and language modifications. Finally, the values reflected in both the text and the fi lms will be reviewed in order to highlight their great impact on the concept of idealized childhood in Swedish culture, thus bridging the gap between different cultural backgrounds.

Intermedial Studies: Illustrations and Picturebooks The unique character of picturebooks as an art form and the interplay of text and image in illustrated versions of Lindgren’s works are investigated in four chapters written by experts in the field of picturebook research and/or cultural studies. Based on a multidimensional perspective, they present challenging interpretations that demonstrate the intermedial character of Lindgren’s books, ranging from the illustrated Pippi versions and picturebooks whose texts have been illustrated by different artists to the extraordinary photographic picturebooks created in co-operation with the photographer Anna Riwkin-Brick. Maria Nikolajeva’s chapter probes some aspects of word/image interaction in Lindgren’s work focusing on the character construction. Based on narrative theory and multimodal communication theory, Nikolajeva investigates how illustrations contribute to readers’ assessment of character. She shows that Astrid Lindgren frequently offers quite detailed verbal description of characters, which can both govern the illustrators’ portrayal and produce a counterpoint effect. Although the title character of Pippi Longstocking, for instance, is described with precision in the first chapter, seemingly leaving little room for the artist, Pippi’s body language expressed in the illustrations substantially enhances her inner characteristics—suggested by words: independence, selfassurance, and wit—as well as emphasizes her physical agility and dexterity.

Introduction • 9 In this regard this chapter clearly emphasizes the mutual influence of both text and image on the understanding and interpretation of characters in the respective works, thus highlighting the impact of the concept of multimodality on picture theory. The close look at three picturebooks written by Astrid Lindgren that have been illustrated twice is the starting point of Agnes-Margrethe Bjorvand’s chapter. The author focuses on the picturebooks I Don’t Want to Go to Bed (1947), I Want to Go to School Too (1951) and I Want a Brother or Sister (1954) that were fi rst illustrated by Birgitta Nordenskjöld, and later by Ilon Wikland in 1987, 1979, and 1978, respectively. Although the text remains the same, the illustrators’ individual style, choice of perspective, and arrangement of illustrations on the doublespread largely contribute to the different perception and reception of the picturebook versions. Bjorvand shows that they are influenced by both changing social constraints and gender constructions; moreover, they bear witness to newly developed images of childhood in the course of time. The next two chapters focus on the nine photo books created by Astrid Lindgren and the photographer Anna Riwkin-Brick, discussing different features and therefore complementing each other. While Helene Ehriander concentrates on the development of the series and the tight co-operation between both artists, Elina Druker underlines the ideological and aesthetic aspects of these photo books for children. In her chapter Helene Ehriander focuses on the collaboration between Astrid Lindgren and the Jewish photographer Anna Riwkin-Brick who made nine photographical picturebooks together. Published in the 1950s and 1960s, respectively, these photo books inform about the everyday life of children in different countries, such as Japan, Kenya, Thailand, Yugoslavia, and the Netherlands. Although they had a great success and were translated into many languages, they fell into oblivion after the 1970s. Ehriander stresses that the photo books are inspired by the experiences of World War II: Lindgren and Riwkin-Brick intended to have a powerful impact on children in order to improve their knowledge of other cultures, thus promoting tolerance and international understanding. Moreover, based on the unpublished correspondence between Lindgren and Riwkin-Brick, Ehriander indicates the underlying concept of the photo books that are obviously inspired by the image of childhood presented in the trilogy about the Children of Noisy Village. The aim of Elina Druker’s chapter is to discuss the importance of photographic pictures in children’s books in the realm of “objectivity” and “authenticity.” The visual aesthetics in these books is reminiscent of photojournalism, applying similar ethical and documentary approaches. Since Lindgren and Riwkin-Brick claimed to give a fair and accurate representation of children presented in both text and pictures by stressing their documentary ambition, their picturebooks nevertheless depict the children and their environment as idealized and “exotic.” By discussing both the verbal and the

10 • Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Astrid Surmatz visual narratives of these works, the photographic picturebooks are examined as a part of a historical and ideological context, thus stressing the role of ideology, representation, and constructions of childhood.

Intermedial Studies: Music, Sculpture, and Architecture While other intermedial aspects of Lindgren’s works, especially the function of illustrations and the rewriting of her novels as picturebook texts, the adaptation of her narratives into plays and their presentation on stage and the fi lm versions, have been discussed before, the impact of music, sculpture, and architecture has not yet been thoroughly investigated. Hence, the last section comprises four chapters that shed new lights on Lindgren as an author of children’s songs and on Lindgren as an inspiration source for sculptural monuments that function as memorials and even for an amusement park (i.e., Astrid Lindgren’s World at Vimmerby) that is strongly built upon Lindgren’s fictional characters and settings as they are dispersed in her children’s books. The musicologist Magnus Gustafsson emphasizes that the well-known song lyrics by Astrid Lindgren form a sizeable list and have in their turn inspired several famous Swedish composers to write equally congenial musical settings. This symbiosis of text and melody has produced songs of truly national popularity, “real” folk songs. They are songs which form a staple part of every Swedish child’s song repertoire, and which are sung in school and nurseries. However, Gustafsson’s chapter points out that there is another completely different repertoire of folk songs and rhymes hidden in Lindgren’s books: songs from her own repertoire, which she heard and learnt as a child. Another important feature is the observation that, as a result of her own investigation, she embellished her books with other typical period songs and folkloric rhymes. Björn Sundmark explores the intermedial nexus between writing and sound in Lindgren’s stories, especially focusing on music and lyrics. By a comparison of the role of song in the original written texts with enacted versions (play, TV, fi lm, sound score), the functions of song, sound, and music in these productions are assessed. Another aim is to show how the songs feed back into the original narratives by supplying additional traits and information about characters like Pippi or Emil. By a detailed analysis, Sundmark points out that these oral and aural experiences and sensations affect the reader’s and listener’s understanding and appreciation of Lindgren’s stories. Finally, the issue of internationality is brought to bear on this particular aspect of intermediality by investigating which oral and aural traits are “translated” and which are not. Jens Arvidson’s chapter starts with the remarkable statement that there has rarely been as much debate concerning a public work of art, as for the 2003 competition for the Astrid Lindgren monument in Vimmerby, the author’s birth town. Four artists were invited to compete and publicly expose their

Introduction • 11 proposals; the competition ended up with two monuments, of which one was part of the competition, due to public disputes. Arvidson outlines a thorough analysis of the three proposals that were not realized, and the two that were. Based on a phenomenological theory of modern sculpture, that is, how the sculpture as installation-oriented work stages or cinematically interacts with its viewer, topics of transmedialization (from a literary medium to a sculptural medium), narrative strategies, and intermedial relations are discussed in order to demonstrate the significance of commemorative aspects in the realm of sculptural imagination. Finally, Heidrun Führer’s thought-provoking chapter draws upon cultural studies and intermedial studies, applying these approaches to “Astrid Lindgren’s Word” at Vimmerby by claiming that this amusement park is a striking example for a “total work of art.” In a next step, she defines the main categories of a total work of art, a form that is not always constructed on a musical form derived from the Wagnerian “Gesamtkunstwerk.” The analysis is based on definitions of Otto Marquard, David Roberts, and Mathew Wilson Smith who all differentiate between different historical types of “total works of art”: on one side the model of the Greek theater, on the other side the model of a cathedral or the Crystal Palace. In the latter, different art forms are synthesized into a sensation of a commercial paradise. Führer demonstrates in her meticulous analysis that in “Astrid Lindgren’s World” characteristics of both models will be found. The entrance to this park means to enter a magic dream world, a reverse rite of passage that guarantees the visitors a particular kind of salvation. Moreover, the entrance supports the utopia of realizing an ideal childhood that reign the majority of Lindgren’s works and largely contributes to a stylized image of the author herself. In conclusion, the multiplicity of academic disciplines and the variety of topics addressed in this volume emphasize the overarching importance of Astrid Lindgren and her work on Scandinavian children’s literature and culture in particular, and on international children’s culture and the construction of new ideas of childhood in general. Until the present, Lindgren’s children’s books, whether texts for picturebooks, fairy tales, novels for children, poetry or lyrics, represent a challenging subject for scholarly research interested in the multi-faceted aspects of intermedial and international connections within the realm of children’s literature. Thus, this collection confirms that Lindgren’s children’s books are a subtle and complex art form that can communicate on many levels, hopefully stimulating further research on this demanding and exceptional author.

Part I Different Aspects of International Reception

Chapter One Pippi Longstocking in the United States Eva-Maria Metcalf

Pippi Longstocking was published in the US in 1950, five years after the appearance of the Swedish original. As Kerstin Kvint reports in her book Astrid i vida världen, connections and serendipity played a role in the discovery of the relatively unknown Swedish author and her work (Kvint 66). Lindgren’s good friend Elsa Olenius had met Annis Duff, the children’s book editor at Viking at the time, during her trip to the US in 1949, and, as a result, Pippi Longstocking was published by The Viking Press the very next year in Florence Lamborn’s translation with whacky, action-filled and cartoon-like line drawings by Louis Glanzman. By the middle of the twentieth century, the American children’s book market had exploded and had long since reached a level of self-sufficiency. Under those conditions, a book that faces the stiff odds of a costly translation and an increased uncertainty of success attributable to a public challenged by cultural differences, might not be considered for publication in the first place and, if published, might receive less promotion and fewer reviews. Throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries, the American market has presented and still continues to present extremely high barriers to any foreign-language children’s book. Citing estimates by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center in Madison, Wisconsin from 1996, Carl Tomlinson mentions that only 1.2% of the approximately 4,500 books published for children and young adults that year were translations, and most of these were picture books. Only eight of the fifty-four translations that year were books of “substantial length” (“Children’s Books” 13). Even if these numbers are not entirely verifiable and may vary slightly from year to year, the fact remains that extremely few translations are launched on the American children’s book market. 15

16 • Eva-Maria Metcalf

Figure 1.1 Illustration by Louis Glanzman from Pippi Longstocking, by Astrid Lindgren. Translated by Florence Lamborn. New York: Viking, 1978.

As Johanna Hurwitz tells us in the 1989 biography of Lindgren that she wrote for a young adult American audience, sales of Pippi Longstocking were slow in the beginning despite the fact that the reviews were good (Hurwitz 32). That fact prompted May Massee, another children’s book editor at Viking at the time, to write to Lindgren on March 30, 1951, “It does not look

Pippi Longstocking in the United States • 17 as though Pippi is going to have the enormous success she had in Sweden” (31–32). While Massee’s prediction held true, sales did pick up, and by the end of the twentieth century Pippi Longstocking had sold more than five million copies in the US (Hurwitz 32). Though impressive, these sales figures have not made Pippi Longstocking into a bestseller in the US. To put these numbers in perspective, compare them to the five million copies that were sold on the first day of issuance alone of J. K. Rowling’s fifth Harry Potter book, Order of the Phoenix, in 2003. The next volume in the Harry Potter series sold 6.9 million copies on its first day, July 18, 2005 (Hoffman and Fineman 2005), and Rowling’s publisher, Scholastic Corporation, announced on July 23, 2007 that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final book in Rowling’s bestselling children’s series, sold a record 8.3 million copies in the US on its first day (Hoffman and Fineman 2005). Pippi’s somewhat marginal but persistent presence on the American market has much to do with the fact that Lindgren eschewed promotional deals and did not allow merchandising of her fictional characters during her lifetime. Thus, it is actually surprising that Pippi Longstocking has prevailed in the promotion-driven consumer culture and quite self-sufficient market for fiction in the US. While the likeness of Harry Potter adorns writing pads, towels, and scads of other consumer goods, Pippi’s carrot-colored pigtails have almost exclusively appeared on posters and on book, video, and DVD covers. According to Kerstin Kvint, the US ranked ninth on the list of Astrid Lindgren’s top ten sources of royalties in 1996, just after France and ahead of Poland (Kvint 17). If the data were based on per capita sales, the US would most certainly be much lower down on the list. With sales amounting to 145 million copies worldwide, Lindgren’s books have not done well in the US in comparison with many countries around the globe. Translated into more than ninety languages, Astrid Lindgren holds an impressive twentythird place on the Index Translationum’s statistics on the number of translations worldwide, ahead of Tolstoy, Dickens, and Karl Marx. Incidentally, fi rst place is held by the Disney Corporation, followed by Agatha Christie in second place, William Shakespeare fourth place, Enid Blyton in sixth place, Hans Christian Andersen in ninth place, and the New Testament in thirteenth place (Index Translationum). Thanks, in part, to Lindgren’s international standing, Pippi Longstocking is today officially recognized as a modern classic in the US and is listed among the twenty-one “most important” books in the children’s literature canon as defined by Wikipedia along with such twentieth-century classics as Winnie the Pooh, The Little Prince, The Hobbit, and Harry Potter. All three books about Pippi—Pippi Longstocking (1950), Pippi Goes on Board (1957), and Pippi in the South Seas (1959)—have remained in print ever since they appeared, which in and of itself is highly unusual for foreign-language children’s books in American publishing. Austrian writer Christine Nöstlinger, for example, the first

18 • Eva-Maria Metcalf writer to win the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award (2003), saw a number of her books published in the US in the 1980s after she had received the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1984, but almost all of them had disappeared from the stores roughly a decade later. Lindgren’s other characters, Karlsson-on-the-Roof, Emil, Mischievous Meg, and even Mio and the Brothers Lionheart have not fared as well either. They are, in effect, quite unknown in the US, and most are out of print. Of the sixteen books that appeared in a recent search for Lindgren books for sale at us.penguingroup.com, eleven were books about Pippi and the remaining five consisted of The Children of Noisy Village, Christmas in Noisy Village, The Tomten, The Tomten and the Fox, and Ronia, the Robber’s Daughter (Penguin Group USA). Searches on amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com produced longer lists, including a greater variety of used books and books published in England or in other languages, but the selections offered at those sites were very similar to the selection found at us.penguingroup.com. Clearly, Pippi Longstocking is Lindgren’s one and only fictional character of fame in the US. The reception history of Pippi Longstocking that I will trace in the following is based almost entirely on the opinions of adults in their roles as critics or mediators of books and films, because adults are ultimately in control of what gets into the hands of children. I have consulted book reviews in newspapers and journals, read articles by literary critics in the academic press, and traced the representation of Astrid Lindgren in children’s literature guides. To cast a wider net, I have also browsed through blogs and customer reviews on Internet sites such as amazon.com, barnesandnoble. com, and goodreads.com to monitor some vocal representatives of the general public. Since the reception of books and fi lms is closely and irretrievably intertwined in today’s world, I will touch on the Pippi Longstocking fi lms as well. Finally, school and library Web sites have provided me with another interesting perspective on the reception of Pippi Longstocking and the ways she is used and abused in the educational setting.

The 1950s and 1960s While Pippi Longstocking had given rise to contentious debates in Sweden in the late 1940s, its reception in the US seems to have been comparatively calm—one could almost call it routine—and overwhelmingly positive, if one is to judge from the short reviews in the New York Herald Tribune Book Review, the New York Times Book Review, The Cleveland Open Shelf, The Horn Book, and Virginia Kirkus’ Service (now Kirkus Reviews). Reviewers did not notice or dwell on the subversive potential of the main character. Instead, they conveniently shelved Pippi Longstocking into the already existing genre of nonsense, fantasy, and absurdist prose for children.

Pippi Longstocking in the United States • 19 The Horn Book, the authoritative voice for children’s literature at the time, called Pippi Longstocking “a fresh delicious fantasy that children will love” (Book Review Digest 1950: 563) while The New York Herald Tribune labeled it “nonsensical” and The Cleveland Open Shelf called it “absurd and rollicking.” Labeled as nonsense or fantasy, Pippi’s outrageous behavior was not thought to present much moral danger to readers who, it was assumed, would scarcely try to identify with or imitate Pippi. To be on the safe side, however, Pippi’s foreignness and outlandishness and the book’s focus on fun and entertainment were stressed. Thus, Pippi was called “a little Swedish girl” in The New York Herald Tribune Book Review (November 12, 1950: 12), which introduced Lindgren as “a storytelling mother” and the story as “good fun” (Children’s Literature Review 39: 133). The reviewer further assuaged any potential misgivings parents or teachers might have about Pippi’s influence on readers with the following comment: “It is lucky that you can tell the children she lives not in America but in Sweden.” Double distancing—removed both geographically and into the realm of fantasy—thus rendered the main protagonist’s behavior harmless and even beneficial. In The New York Times Book Review (November 12, 1950: 28), Marian Rayburn Brown stressed the compensatory aspect of Pippi’s escapades that “exemplify many of the frustrations of normal children,” noting that “therefore Pippi will delight young readers” (Children’s Literature Review 39: 133). The reviews of Pippi Goes on Board are a little longer and more detailed than the reviews of Pippi Longstocking, but are largely along the same lines as the reviews from 1950. The New York Herald Tribune Book Review’s Margaret Sherwood Libby called Pippi Goes on Board “superior nonsense” and prescribed it as “a book for every child’s library, one that gives the most satisfying release to youngsters who are a bit more circumscribed in their everyday lives than the exuberant Pippi.” Libby also called Pippi “as absurd, funny, and tender-hearted as ever” (Children’s Literature Review 39: 147). A growing awareness of the ethical aspects of Lindgren’s writing comes to the fore in Libby’s review, as it does in Inger Boye’s review in The Library Journal, where Pippi’s absurd and hilarious adventures are “sometimes motivated by generous impulses” (Book Review Digest 1957: 555). Lavinia Davis, who praises Pippi as “gloriously uninhibited” in The New York Times Book Review, is also most outspoken about the core ethical values she finds in Pippi Longstocking, asserting, “Although this is frankly a slapstick modern tall tale, which was primarily intended to entertain, Mrs. Lindgren is far more successful in transmitting the virtues of generosity and loyalty than many more pretentious and moralistic writers” (Book Review Digest 1957: 555). In 1957, the same year when Pippi Goes on Board was published in the US, a popular American classic appeared that bears some resemblance to Pippi Longstocking and to Karlsson-on-the-Roof. That book was Dr. Seuss’s (Theodore Geisel’s) The Cat in the Hat, which was published as an easy reader by Random House, a publisher of educational books widely used in schools. This

20 • Eva-Maria Metcalf slapstick story in easy, playful verse tells about a crazy cat who, by performing amazing tricks, brings playful, exuberant chaos into the lives of a boy and a girl on a gray rainy day when mother is away and the two are left home alone. Its popularity and wide use in schools demonstrates the favorable climate for fictional excursions into a world of unfettered wild imagination that existed in the US of the 1950s and 1960s. As the first easy reader to bring madcap and fast-paced fun and entertainment into school curricula, Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat was an immediate success and had sold over seven million copies by 2000 in hard cover alone in the US (Wikipedia, The Cat in the Hat). In the 1960s, Lindgren’s books were also discussed in secondary literature aimed at teachers and educators, such as Huck and Young, Children’s Literature in the Elementary School (1961), Muriel Fuller, ed., More Junior Authors (1963), and Nancy Larrick, A Teacher’s Guide to Children’s Books (1966). Thus, one can assume that a number of primary school teachers began to integrate Pippi Longstocking into curricular or extra-curricular activities. By 1960, the number of reviews of Pippi in the South Seas appearing in major American newspapers and journals had outnumbered reviews of either of the first two Pippi books, reflecting Pippi’s rising popularity in the US as well as Lindgren’s heightened status as the recipient of the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1958. Reviewers began to dig a little deeper and were no longer unanimous in their praise of Pippi’s hilarious nonsensical behavior, the goodness of her heart, and the freedom of her spirit. Reviews in The Horn Book and The Saturday Review criticized this third book about Pippi as lacking freshness and charm. In the Library Journal, Dorothy Gary called Pippi in the South Seas “a gay, rather slapstick fantasy with a heroine who has the ability to put grownups in their place,” adding, however, that it was “[n]ot as amusing as ‘Pippi Longstocking,’ but still appealing” (Book Review Digest 1960: 825) The Saturday Review was even less pleased with Pippi in the South Seas: “In this third book, alas, [Pippi] has lost much of the charm and humor that were the essence of her personality and has become merely noisy and rude and unfunny” (Book Review Digest 1960: 825). Kirkus Reviews was harshest in its condemnation, claiming “there’s not much story here” and complaining “the prose, too, reads like a spin-off, and the format suggests a dime-store market” (Children’s Literature Review 39: 157). The avid interest in psychology and child development in the US in the 1950s and 1960s still colors the reviews in which the compensatory element of Pippi’s humor, personality, and actions is stressed. The New York Herald Tribune Book Review called the action in Pippi in the South Seas “gorgeously, sensibly absurd and a sure cure for frustrations” (Book Review Digest 1960: 825) and The Saturday Review declared Pippi to be a “rollicking symbol of nonconformity” (Book Review Digest 1960: 825). An open appreciation of the compensatory and subversive element of Pippi’s humor, personality, and actions also emerged in The Horn Book review. The Horn Book reviewer (signed M.W.B.) declared that “Pippi’s tongue is as caustic as ever, her remarks

Pippi Longstocking in the United States • 21 to adults as shocking (and as close to what many children would often like to say)” and located Pippi’s uniqueness in “the particular mixture of realism and magic.” In summing up his or her impression of all three books about Pippi, M.W.B. wrote, “Besides being so hilarious to most children, they seem to be saying something important but elusive” (Book Review Digest 1960: 825). Lindgren’s realistic prose proved to be less elusive and became an easier target for criticism on moral, ethical, and pedagogical grounds. On May 10, 1959, the New York Times welcomed Sia Lives on Kilimanjaro!, one of a number of photographic picture books published by Macmillan that resulted from the collaboration between Astrid Lindgren and photographer Anna Riwkin-Brick, as an innovative effort and a new genre in “in which real people are presented in a very slightly fictionalized narrative” (Book Review Digest 1959: 623). Sia Lives on Kilimanjaro! received the Children’s Spring Book Festival Award in 1959, and interest in this book appears to have been high to judge from the eleven reviews it received in the major journals and newspapers that are listed in Book Review Digest for 1959. Lindgren’s text was considered secondary to the photo story, which is reflected in the fact that the entries for the series of photographic picture books are fi led under the name Riwkin-Brick and not under the name Lindgren in library catalogs and in the Book Review Digest. While the pictures were received favorably and even praised, the same cannot be said about the text. The reviewer in Booklist wrote, “The story is slight and is unfortunately built on an incident of disobedience; nevertheless the book is recommended for its fine photographs . . . ” (Book Review Digest 1959: 623). The Library Journal’s Book Review Advisory Committee complained that the book “sets up unethical behavior standards” and recommended that parents and teachers “bring out [their] disapproval of Sia’s and her brother’s disobedience” (Book Review Digest 1959: 623). While overstepping boundaries was tolerated and even expected in the fantasy genre, and while Pippi could act inappropriately and romp in the realm of the forbidden with glee and without reprimand, the same did not hold true for Sia. Willful and curious Sia, who has made up her mind to attend the great royal feast without permission in order to catch a glimpse of the king, remains unpunished for her transgression by the author, but is reprimanded for her “disobedience” by the reviewer. The reviewer likely spoke for many parents and educators at the time who were looking to children’s literature for moral guidance and whose ideal well-brought-up children looked very much like Tommy and Annika or the boy and girl in Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat.

The Late 1960s and the 1970s The late 1960s and the 1970s was a stormy time when gusts of fresh air shook up stale ideas and conventions, and when a new concept of the child emerged. These decades proved very receptive to non-traditional children’s books that

22 • Eva-Maria Metcalf were breaking new ground. It was a time when the model for heroes and heroines in children’s literature shifted to independent, willful, strong, rebellious, and imaginative child protagonists who dared question authority even in realistic prose. It was a time of rediscovery and reinterpretation of the kinds of heroes that could be found in famous and infamous fictional orphans, such as Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, and in equally strong and willful female characters, such as Anne of Green Gables, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Sara Crewe in A Little Princess, Judy Abbott in Daddy Long-Legs, and Pollyanna, all of whom had served as inspirations for Pippi. Reformist ideas about childhood and children’s education that had been radically new and hotly debated before WWII—and of which Lindgren had been a strong, enthusiastic, and determined supporter—were now adopted by the progressive segment of the educational establishment and by progressive authors and children’s literature critics. In those years, a new generation of children’s literature authors created self-assured and self-assertive—and quite often female—characters as new role models, and adult educators adopted and propagated these models. Pippi served as a template for them all. It was a time when Pippi Longstocking and its sequels were discovered anew by progressive parents and educators and by critics in the US, and a time when the sales of the Pippi books increased. During the 1970s and 1980s, Pippi Longstocking was reprinted twenty-one times, and the sequels were reprinted eighteen times. Mary Ørvig beat the drum for Pippi Longstocking in articles in The Horn Book, calling it “the prime example of the anti-authoritarian book,” in which “Pippi stands for every child’s dream of doing exactly what he or she wants (regardless of any prohibitions), or feeling his or her strength and ability, and of enjoying himself or herself every minute” (Contemporary Authors NRS 117: 272). Both the gender awareness in the language and the message of this quote catch the spirit of 1968 that many progressive parents and educators shared. Children’s books with subversive and emancipatory messages and books that broke taboos won awards, as exemplified by Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy (1964), whose main character, by revealing adult secrets, was, however, too disturbingly inquisitive and frank to be acceptable to large segments of the mainstream. Such books not only won awards; they often ended up as targets for censorship either by authorities like library boards or by outraged parents. Harriet the Spy, for example, was banned because of complaints that it “teaches children to lie, spy, talk back, and curse” (“Banned Children’s Books”). Belonging to the genre of realistic books, Harriet the Spy provoked conservative readers more, because with Harriet as a realistic role model the clash in values became much more obvious. Pippi Longstocking never made the list of censored books in the US although she talks back, she lies so that her tongue turns blue, and she can curse like the pirate she aspires to be. Her outsider status and her extraordinariness—the perception of Pippi as a fantastic and foreign character—surely shielded her from being publicly censored. But in

Pippi Longstocking in the United States • 23 addition to public censorship there exists a more private and less perceptible parental censoring. Parents who raise their children in a tightly controlled environment as to the values and information to which they expose them, and parents who are used to overseeing the book-selection process from the toddler stage on up, may not approve of the free-spirited and rebellious Pippi. Admittedly, the subset of the general readership that put J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series on top of the American Library Association’s official list of “The 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books 2000–2007” on the grounds of sorcery cannot change a book’s bestseller status or enduring legacy. Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for example, has had a permanent place on lists of censored books in the US over the years because of its foul language, its representation of blacks, and its unsavory cast of characters. During the 1960s and 1970s, Lindgren received a number of awards in the US for her writing. She received the Boy’s Clubs of America Junior Book Award for Rasmus and the Vagabond in 1961, her Christmas in the Stable was on the Horn Book Honor List in 1962, and in 1970 she received the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award for The Tomten, for which she also received the Brooklyn Art Books for Children citation in 1973. In that same year of 1973—twenty-three years after its first publication—she received the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award for Pippi Longstocking. None of these awards come even close in importance to the many major prizes Lindgren received in Sweden and Europe during her lifetime, which surely reflects Lindgren’s somewhat marginal role on the US book market. I find it equally interesting that the unrepresentative and meager selection of Lindgren’s work for which she received awards in the 1960s and 1970s in the US looks very much like the selection available for sale today, since awards have a noticeable and undeniable effect on sales figures and availability. The late 1960s and the 1970s was also a time when the status of women, children, and minorities was reassessed, as was the status of children’s literature, which became more closely integrated into mainstream literature. It was a time for questioning and reevaluating traditional values and canons and establishing new ones. The new and first official canon that was conceived for children’s literature in the 1980s by Perry Nodelman in the Touchstone volumes, though impressive, only makes reference to a handful of children’s books from abroad, and Pippi Longstocking is not among them. The canon has been expanded since to include more world literature, as is evidenced by the fact that Pippi Longstocking now has a place on the children’s literature canon Web page on wikipedia.com. During the 1970s, pedagogical criteria no longer dominated the evaluation of children’s literature, and an interest in literary critical approaches to children’s books took hold. Children’s literature organizations were founded, and scholarly publications about children’s literature grew in number and size. At that time, the first scholarly articles appeared about Lindgren’s work, but articles about Lindgren were and continue to be few and far between in the US; they certainly constitute a mere trickle in comparison with the lively

24 • Eva-Maria Metcalf academic debates about Lindgren and her work taking place in Sweden and the rest of Europe. In Three Centuries of Children’s Books in Europe, edited and translated by Brian W. Alderson in 1967, Bettina Hürlimann introduced Pippi Longstocking to American children’s literature scholars and friends. In her insightful and well-crafted analysis of Pippi Longstocking, Hürlimann called Pippi “a figure to strike terror [in] grown-ups in a way that the most exaggerated comics can scarcely surpass” (Children’s Literature Review 39: 134). Laura Hoffeld also stressed the cartoon quality Pippi possesses in her perceptive article in the very first volume of The Lion and the Unicorn in 1977, asserting, “The life [Pippi] leads is pure fantasy, placed in the context of the real world. I say ‘real world’ advisedly, for it is sketched in cartoon fashion and from the child’s point of view . . . ” The true Pippi is not so comical, Hoffeld observed, comparing her to “a wild child, pagan in her joy in the fire and the night sky,” as she dances elatedly on a precariously placed board high above the street in the light of the flames after having saved the children from a house fire (Children’s Literature Review 39: 134). More works about Pippi and Lindgren appeared in the 1980s. Johanna Hurwitz’ biography of Lindgren for young adults was published by Viking Kestrel, as was Michele Landsberg’s excellent introduction to Pippi Longstocking in Reading for the Love of It: Best Books for Young Readers from 1986. Articles about Pippi by Nancy Huse, Ulla Lundqvist, and myself appeared in The Lion and the Unicorn as contributions to an emerging discussion about Astrid Lindgren and Pippi among children’s literature experts in the US. Perhaps Jonathan Cott’s insightful article about Lindgren, published in The New Yorker in 1983, had the greatest impact on making Lindgren known to a wider audience. But in the end, it is the child readers that count, not the pundits. Once they had discovered the book or seen it on the screen, American children embraced Pippi with the same kind of passion as did children around the world, ensuring her continued popularity. I was lucky to observe the passion and joy that hearing episodes about Pippi produced in my five-year-old grandson, both when I read the stories aloud and when we watched them on the television screen. And although he enjoyed listening to the stories, watching the fi lms was the far superior experience for him as it probably is for most children.

Pippi on the Screen In the 1970s and 1980s, visual culture began encroaching more and more on text-based culture. The market for children’s fi lms expanded and has grown exponentially ever since through home videos, DVDs, and the Internet. Pippi’s popularity was surely boosted by the four fi lms about her directed by Olle Hellbom. Based on Lindgren’s scripts, these fi lms certainly have the greatest claim to originality and have stood the test of time. The first of the

Pippi Longstocking in the United States • 25 four fi lms, Pippi Longstocking, dubbed into English for the American audience, was released in the US in 1973. It was followed by Pippi in the South Seas (1974), Pippi Goes on Board (1975), and Pippi on the Run (1976). All four fi lms were poorly dubbed according to Nigel J. Burrell’s article “Longstocking Superstar!!!” (Burrell 4). I am inclined to believe him, although I have not scrutinized the dubbing myself. One example of poor dubbing that struck me while watching Pippi on the Run supports his theory. It is the scene in which Pippi, Tommy, and Annika stay overnight in the hayloft of a prototypical Swedish farm. The friends have a swearing contest with the farmer’s children, which results in Pippi screaming the worst expletive she knows out into the idyllic Swedish summer nigh. In the dubbed version this is rendered as “Shut your damn cotton-picking mouth!” which is totally out of place in the Swedish visual setting. Olle Hellbom’s fi lms about Pippi became kiddie matinee favorites in the 1970s according to Burrell and are still available in the US on video and DVD. In stark contrast to their presence on European screens they are rarely performed in American movie theaters or on American children’s television today. Ken Annakin’s The New Adventures of Pippi Longstocking from 1988 could be called a home-made product in the US, an American adaptation of the original that could have successfully increased Pippi’s fame as a fictional character in the US. The fi lm was highly promoted and certainly contributed to a greater general awareness of Pippi, adorning book covers for the reprinted Pippi Longstocking series in the 1990s. Unfortunately, Annakin’s fi lm did not hold what it had promised. It not only misrepresented the character of Pippi; it was plainly not a well-made fi lm. The fi lm received lukewarm to bad reviews in the American press and did not draw huge crowds. New York Times critic Janet Maslin bemoaned the choice of “vixenish” thirteen-year-old Tami Erin as Pippi, generally bad acting, and lame special effects in her review “Childish Tricks and Facial Tics” from July 1988. Maslin considered the star’s hairdo one of the few points of interest in a fi lm that is exceedingly uninspired and boring. Pippi’s free spirit and her ability to ignore adult rules of decorum, Maslin argued, are reduced to a series of food fights. I could not agree more with Maslin’s assessment. But the Americanization of Pippi in props and setting, and staple Hollywood solutions to fun and games bring the film closer to its American audience. Despite its tired action and bad acting, the film was the most widespread American visual representation of Pippi for a decade or so until the arrival in 1997 of the animated Pippi films that were produced by Nelvana Limited and distributed on DVD in the US by Warner Bros. These animated films also aired on the pay-for-view HBO cable channel for two seasons (1997–1999), both increasing the awareness of the character of Pippi and adding yet another layer to the representation of Pippi in the US. Children’s culture in the US and the Western world is dominated by cartoons and comics. Thus, it seems a foregone conclusion that Pippi, like Heidi,

26 • Eva-Maria Metcalf Pinocchio, and the Moomin trolls before her, would some day appear in animation, especially since Lindgren endowed her character with many cartoonlike comic and slapstick elements. Director Clive Smith and his film team have smartly adapted and transformed the stories to fit the animated film format, and I believe these cartoons do justice to the wild, joyous, and fantastical elements that are at the heart of Pippi’s character. The episodes also take important cues from Lindgren’s text, which makes the animated Pippi feel “just right,” as New York Times film critic Lawrence Van Gelder remarked in his review of the film “Pippi Longstocking” in 1997 (“A little Girl”). Framing the Pippi cartoons within the context of the American popular children’s or family movie, Van Gelder continued with muted enthusiasm, “In this Canadian-Swedish-German coproduction, the perky, popular and amazingly powerful little heroine of Astrid Lindgren’s children’s novels turns up as the dauntless protagonist of a modest but tuneful, humorous and colorful ‘Home Alone’ story” (http://movies.nytimes. com). Since the bumbling robbers are given a much greater role in the story, as had already been the case in Annakin’s film, it is not surprising that these cartoons are molded and read within the context of the home-alone story that has enjoyed immense popularity in the US at least since Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat and was popularized by Chris Columbus’ film Home Alone from 1990.

The 1990s and 2000s The last two decades have been a time for celebratory revisions, retranslations, new editions, and new books about Astrid Lindgren in Sweden, Germany, and rest of Europe. The Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award instituted by the Swedish government in 2002 pays homage to the author, and the Astrid Lindgren archives at the Royal Library in Stockholm are becoming a destination for further research about Lindgren’s work and life. Numerous conferences about and in honor of Lindgren have been held, and scholarly discussions in article and book format have reached a new peak. But little in the way of celebration took place in the US. Even Tiina Nunnally’s new translation of Pippi Longstocking, illustrated by Lauren Child and published by Penguin USA in 2007, is actually the brainchild of Viking’s British partner, Oxford University Press. A small conference organized in Minneapolis by the Scandinavianists at the University of Minnesota to celebrate the centennial of Lindgren’s birth attracted Scandinavianists, students, and local children’s literature aficionados, but had little resonance in the media. A new production of “Pippi Longstocking,” a long-time favorite in the repertoire of the Children’s Theatre in Minneapolis, undoubtedly had a greater impact on raising public awareness of Pippi. Neither in the popular nor in the scholarly press in the field of children’s literature in the US was there a response even remotely reminiscent of the kind of explosion of articles and discussion about Lindgren that occurred in Europe

Pippi Longstocking in the United States • 27 for Lindgren’s last round of birthdays, her death, and the centenary of her birth. A handful of scholarly articles kept the academic discourse afloat. My book Astrid Lindgren, which appeared in 1995, remains the only scholarly book about Astrid Lindgren published in the US. Eivor Cormack’s translation of Vivi Edström’s excellent book Astrid Lindgren: A Critical Study is also available at amazon.com, but both of these books attract quite a limited readership. As was to be expected, obituaries observing Lindgren’s death appeared in The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and syndicated newspapers across the US on January 28 and 29, 2002. But compared to the generous coverage that Lindgren’s life and work received in Europe, these obituaries seem like small notes in the margins. In one of the few in-depth obituaries in the American press, Margalit Fox portrayed Pippi Longstocking in The New York Times as “fearless, ageless,” and “[a]bove all . . . deeply, outrageously, satisfyingly rude” (“Astrid Lindgren Dies at 94”). The value of “rudeness” has surely undergone a major change from its use in the damning review of Pippi in the South Seas from 1959! Rudeness is not the first quality I would associate with Pippi, but perhaps the rudeness Fox sees in Pippi is today’s protest by all those brought up with smiley faces against an American culture where cheerful friendliness is the behavioral norm. Obituaries also appeared in children’s literature journals, trade publications, and children’s literature digests. The obituary in Something About the Author, one of the primary sources of information about children’s books and authors available to scholars, teachers, librarians, and the general public, stands out on account of its brevity (approx. 150 words), which in itself seems to indicate Lindgren’s status in the American world of children’s literature. What is much more shocking, however, is the content of the obituary itself. It is clear that the obituary would focus on Pippi Longstocking, but the selection of Lindgren’s other books is perplexing, to say the least. Whereas the informed reader would expect the mention of Lindgren’s most important works, the obituary mentions Britt-Mari Opens Her Heart, which was never published in the US, and The Six Bullerby Children, which is a British edition not available in the US, where the book is called The Children of Noisy Village. The most bewildering mention, however, is that of the “Kitty” series (Something About the Author 128: 155). I have wondered what might be referred to by the “Kitty” series. Googling the “Kitty series and Astrid Lindgren” produced repeated mentions of a series of young adult vampire books by Carrie Vaughn about the fate of celebrity werewolf and late-night radio host Kitty Norville and, among other extraneous pages, a family home page with a kitten called Pippi. The same search at amazon.com produced no matches. The obituary in Contemporary Authors is considerably longer and not quite as egregious, but it too contains misrepresentations and mistakes (Contemporary Authors 204: 264). Penguin USA, Lindgren’s American publisher, has mistakenly listed 2001 (instead of 2002) as the year of Lindgren’s death on its author information page on the Web (Penguin Group USA). To be fair, the

28 • Eva-Maria Metcalf actual articles about Astrid Lindgren in Something About the Author (1971, 1986, 2002) or on the Penguin USA page do provide adequate information. Foreign-language book titles present a major challenge to editors who do not know any foreign languages themselves. Pamela L. Shelton’s contribution to volume thirty-nine of Contemporary Authors provides rich evidence of the difficulties one can encounter in working with a publisher and printer who are either unwilling or unable to use umlauts. All umlauts are transcribed as double vowels, and thus Pippi Långstrump turns into “Pippi Laangstrump.” Vi på Saltkråkan is represented as “Via paa Saltkraakan.” Occasionally, languages are mixed up, as is the case in “Fuenf automobilturer i Sverige,” in which both German and Swedish words are used (and which title is incorrectly translated as “Five Automobile Trips to Sweden”). The same mistake can be found in the bibliographic notes about Lindgren in volume 117 of Contemporary Authors. Umlauts are used, but not consistently, and editing is sloppy as is evident from entries like “Emil I LoonneBjoorn Berga” or “Mäaut;sterdetektiven Blomvist” (Contemporary Authors NRS 117: 265). Both list an arcane German picture book, Drei kleine Schweinchen im Apfelgarten, illustrated by Ingrid Joorg [Jörg?] and translated from Swedish by Karl Kurt Peters, published by Berliner Handpresse in 1972 under the heading “other” together with “Samuel August fraan Sevedstorp och Hanna i Hult (Contemporary Authors NRS 117: 270). Pippi might have welcomed the imaginative spellings and mixture of languages that exist in these bibliographies, but researchers, teachers, and librarians who rely on these sources should be less pleased. Sources like the one above show a general disregard for anything foreign that still persists in American culture today. Given the scant knowledge of foreign languages and foreign cultures overall in the US, it is not very surprising that, to this day, most who write and have written about Pippi hail from Europe or are associated with the fields of Scandinavian or European studies.

Pippi on the Internet For the general public and scholars alike, the Internet has by now become a clearinghouse of information that is most likely accessed more than collections in libraries. A wide array of sites exist about Astrid Lindgren and Pippi Longstocking, ranging from fan sites to more reliable institutional and library sites. Short but concise information in English is provided, for example, on the Swedish Web sites about Lindgren (www.sweden.se and www.alma.se). But there are also a number of “official looking” sites that are less circumspect about the information they spread. Who2.com and infoplease.com, the latter promising “all the knowledge you need,” feature identical entries about Lindgren that include the statement that “the original Pippi Longstocking . . . featured a ponytailed (rather than pigtailed) girl with superhuman strength.”

Pippi Longstocking in the United States • 29 The US Wikipedia page about Pippi is clearly put together by a Pippi fan rather than a scholar. An interesting item I found on that site, however, is a list of references to Pippi in popular culture. According to that list, Pippi Longstocking was mentioned a few times on The Simpsons, mostly by or in reference to the show’s precocious and assertive Maggie. Hence, producer Matt Groening and the writers of the show must assume some familiarity with Pippi in the audience. The fact, however, that Pippi is generally referred to by her full name of Pippi Longstocking, and not simply as “Pippi,” indicates, I believe, a greater distance to the character overall. There are dozens of reviews of the Pippi Longstocking books at amazon. com, and they are overwhelmingly positive. Among the reviewers are many parents who had read Pippi Longstocking as children and are now reading the stories to their own children, attesting to the staying power of the classic character that lives on from generation to generation. Most had identified with Pippi and remembered her fondly as well as the fun and excitement they had experienced when reading Pippi Longstocking as children. A few parents who had loved Pippi when they were young had problems with her as adults. Having reread Pippi Longstocking as a parent, ”Jackie” commented on www. goodreads.com on May 11, 2007, “I loved Pippi when I was a kid, although I was appalled at how she made cookies on her kitchen floor. I have trouble reading her now—she is really snotty to perfectly nice adults!” In the US as elsewhere, adult evaluations of Pippi depend on the reader’s conception of childhood or whether the reader assumes an adult or child perspective (or an uneasy mix of both). The idea that children should be seen and not heard, that they should behave and not speak up is still supported by a sizeable portion of the population in the US. Even in Sweden, as Birgitta Steene reports, there were calls in the 1990s for greater discipline when a contributor to Svenska Dagbladet demanded an end to “the Pippi cult” with the following arguments: “This Pippi worship has turned everything upside down—school, family, life, normal behavior. It has ridiculed order and respect, honesty and politeness. It has glorified self-centeredness, ego-fi xation, ruthlessness, and escapism” (Steene 2007). Clearly, Pippi cannot be blamed for the greedy, me-first attitude of the 1990s. In the US and around the world we could use more of Pippi’s outspokeness and generous magnanimity.

Pippi in School Nowhere is the uneasy mix of adult and child perspectives or a call for discipline and self-assertiveness more apparent than in the school setting, which becomes apparent in the interpretation and appropriation of Pippi Longstocking in the classroom. From the very beginning, Pippi upset those adult readers in Sweden and abroad who approached the text with a sober or pedagogical adult

30 • Eva-Maria Metcalf perspective. Written from the point of view of a child—a very independent child demanding freedom from and revolting against conventionality, boring routines, and what counts as common sense—the text demands to be read from the point of view of the child or from the perspective of an adult who is sympathetic to the child’s point of view or partial to the desire for unfettered freedom and a desire to revolt against conventions. In recent decades, as the view of childhood and child education in the US has shifted ever more in the direction of freer, more child-oriented education, and greater emancipation of the child, so has the attitude toward formerly avant-garde books which now represent the mainstream. Pippi Longstocking frequently appears on lists of recommended books that are assembled and published by libraries, bookstores, and educational institutions. It can, for instance, be found on the list of “Summertime favorites grades 4 to 6” recommended by the National Endowment for the Humanities to “highlight classic literature for young people from kindergarten through high school.” It is the only translated book apart from Heidi and the fairy tales by H.C. Andersen, Grimm, and Perrault among more than fifty “domestic” books, which include Anne of Green Gables and Harriet the Spy (National Endowment for the Humanities). Pippi Longstocking also occupies twelfth place on the www. heart4teaching list for fourth graders published at www.amazon.com. By now, Pippi Longstocking has also found her way into grade school curricula in the US, which definitely guarantees close scrutiny and institutional approval of its content and message. On the Web, grade school teachers can find information about the author, lesson plans, discussion questions, and even a ten-minute play, “Pippi Goes to School,” originally adapted from Pippi Longstocking for radio broadcast by Viking in 1950 (Lindgren, “Pippi Goes”). Radio plays like this had won new audiences for Lindgren’s books not only in Sweden, but also in the US at that time. Acceptability by the educational establishment, however, comes at a price. One can reasonably assume that much of the creative and subversive potential of a book will be lost or channeled in a direction that favors the institution once it has been adopted for class reading. A case in point is the 2003 collaborative class project involving grade schools in Wisconsin and New Jersey organized by Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA, using the Internet as a platform. Based on comments found on the Web page, it is used as inspiration and model by a number of teachers. The project, although imaginative in approach, asks students to list reasons “[w]hy Pippi should go to school” and to correct Pippi’s spelling in the invitation to her birthday party that she sends to Tommy and Annika, reporting results that everyone in class agreed that Pippi should go to school and learn to spell (Virginia Commonwealth University). Squeezed into an institutional setting that follows core curriculum content standards, the outcomes of this kind of project are unlikely to reflect Pippi’s superhuman and fantastic qualities, her

Pippi Longstocking in the United States • 31 non-conformity, her emancipatory spirit, and her wildness and rudeness that have been both criticized and praised by reviewers and critics in the US during the past six decades. I do not think, however, that we have anything to fear from any didactic uses or abuses of Pippi in the schools. Pippi’s continued popularity with young readers and a young audience is proof enough. A fourth grader knows very well what is expected of her or him and what to answer on worksheets handed out by teachers. Reading Pippi Longstocking without adult supervision, however, can resemble an exciting joyride for the child reader that is neither moralizing nor didactic. After all, it is for this reader that Lindgren has written her books, and Pippi’s roots in the American popular culture of vaudeville and cartoons have made it easier for American audiences to identify with her. Her positive outlook, her self-assertiveness, and her irrepressible demands for freedom and fun are values Americans share and ideals American children respond to. The ultimate recipe for her success in the US could lie in the construction of her character, for Pippi is as funny, crazy, and invincible as any cartoon character, as powerful as Superman, and, in addition to that, she reliably remains the reader’s best friend. The complexity of Pippi’s cartoon-like character has allowed for a variety of interpretations and representations of Pippi Longstocking over the decades that mirror shifts in attitudes and ideologies in the US at large and specifically in its children’s literature community. The 1950s view of Pippi as an absurd, funky, funny, and fantastic entertainer merged in the 1950s and 1960s with the Freud-inspired psychological interpretation of her compensatory qualities, to which the discovery of Pippi’s emancipatory qualities was added in the 1970s. Visual representations of Pippi Longstocking in print remained constant throughout these decades, dominated as they were by Louis Glanzman’s classic illustrations. Since the 1980s, however, the visual representation of Pippi has changed a number of times, at least on book covers, the most recent being Lauren Child’s interpretation. On screen, Olle Hellbom’s cast of characters gave way to Ken Annakin’s retelling of Pippi in the 1990s. Annakin adapted the story to American tastes and to tropes of the American popular fi lm genre for children, as he incorporated elements of the popular homealone story, a feature that also persists in the most recent cartoon version. Since L. S. Bechtel greeted Pippi in her review of Pippi Longstocking in 1950, “Welcome to Pippi, Once Met—Never to Be Forgotten,” Pippi has proven her staying power in the US (Book Review Digest 1950: 563). She has survived fierce competition in the marketplace of popular entertainment while providing rich fodder for those of us approaching her analytically. What has made Pippi Longstocking the international—and consequently the American—classic it has become, and what affords Pippi her moderate position of prominence against all the odds in the US may in the end be the “sensibly absurd” and “elusive” qualities attributed to her by reviewers already in 1959.

32 • Eva-Maria Metcalf

Figure 1.2 Illustration by Louis Glanzman from Pippi Goes On Board, by Astrid Lindgren. Translated by Florence Lamborn. New York: Viking, 1985.

Appendix Lindgren, Astrid (Ericsson) 1907–2002 OBITURARY NOTICE Born November 14, 1907, in Vimmerby, Sweden; died January 28, 2002, in Stockholm, Sweden. Author. Lindgren was best known for her children’s

Pippi Longstocking in the United States • 33 books, especially her stories about a fearless, red-headed girl named “Pippi Longstocking.” Lindgren wrote her first book, Britt Marie Opens Her Heart, in 1944. She wrote Pippi Longstocking as a present for her daughter’s tenth birthday. It was published in 1945. Other popular books include the “Kitty” series and the Six Bullerby Children. Lindgren received many awards for her work, including the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1958 and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award for Pippi Longstocking in 1973. Lindgren was an avid defender of children’s rights and animal welfare. In 1998, Astrid Lindgren’s Children’s Hospital opened. There is a theme park devoted entirely to the author and her stories in her hometown in Sweden. (Something About the Author 128: 155)

Bibliography “Banned Children’s Books.” 2000–2009 Pearson Education Inc. www.teachervision.fen.com/ literature/censorship/1608.html (accessed April 4, 2009). Bechtel, L. S. “Welcome to Pippi - once met, never to be forgotten!” Review of Pippi Longstocking. The New York Herald Tribune Book Review 12 (November 1950): 12. Burrell, Nigel J. “Pippi Longstocking Superstar!!!” kiddiematinee.com. Copyright Nigel J. Burrell 2003. http://www.kiddiematinee.com/pippi.html (accessed April 6, 2009). Children’s Literature Review 39. Detroit: Gale Group, 1996. Contemporary Authors: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide to Current Writers in Fiction, General Nonfiction, Poetry, Journalism, Drama, Motion Pictures, Television, and Other Fields New Revision Series 39. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1992. Contemporary Authors 204. Farmington Hills, MI: The Gale Group, Inc., 2003. Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series 117. Farmington Hills, MI: The Gale Group, Inc., 2003. Cott, Jonathan. “The Astonishment of Being.” The New Yorker 28 February 1983: 46. Edström, Vivi. Astrid Lindgren: A Critical Study. Translated by Eivor Cormack. Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren, 2000. Davis, Virginia. “Gloriously Uninhibited.” The New York Times Book Review 2 (17 November 1957): 36. Fox, Margalit. “Astrid Lindgren, Author of Children’s Books, Dies at 94.” The New York Times 29 January 2002, section B. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/29/books/astrid-lindgrenauthor-of-children-s-books-dies-at-94.html (accessed April 10, 2009). Goodreads.com. Reader reviews. www.goodreads.com/book/show/359083.PippiLongstocking? page=3 (accessed April 6, 2009). Heart4teaching Grade 4 Literature. http://www.amazon.com/Grade-4-Literature/lm/ R1F26WXLBCZRR/ref=cm_lm_byauthor_title_full (accessed April 6, 2009). Hoffeld, Laura. “Pippi Longstocking: The Comedy of the Natural Girl.” The Lion and the Unicorn 1.1 (1977): 47–53. Hoffmann, Katie and Josh Fineman. “Harry Potter U.S. Sales Set Record, Scholastic Says.” Bloomberg Press (updated April 8, 2009). http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/ news?pid=20601103&sid=ac3DhcAD8.ZQ&refer=news (accessed April 8, 2009). Hürlimann, Bettina. “Fantasy and Reality: Nonsense from Peter Pan to Pippi Longstocking.” In Three Centuries of Children’s Books in Europe, edited and translated by Brian Alderson, 76–92. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. Hurwitz, Johanna. Astrid Lindgren: Storyteller to the World. New York: Viking Kestrel, 1989. Index Translationum. Statistics on whole Index Translationum database. UNESCO. 12 March 2009. http://databases.unesco.org/xtrans/stat/xTransStat.a?VL1=A&top=50&lg=0 (accessed April 6, 2009). Kerstin Kvint. Astrid i vida världen. Sannsagan om Astrid Lindgrens internationella succé. En kommenterad bibliografi. Stockholm: Kvints, 1997. Landsberg, Michele. “First Novels: Pippi Longstocking,” in Reading for the Love of It: Best Books for Young Readers, 66–67. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1986.

34 • Eva-Maria Metcalf Libby, Margaret Sherwood. “Jolly Pippi, Gnomes and a Leprechaun.” New York Herald Tribune Book Review 17 November 1957: 24 and in Children’s Literature Review 39 (1957): 147. Lindgren, Astrid (Ericsson) 1907–2002 “Obituary Notice” in Something About the Author 128. Farmington Hills, Michigan: Gale Group, 2002. “Lindgren Astrid 1907–,” in Something About the Author 2. Detroit: Gale Research, 1971. “Lindgren, Astrid (Ericsson),” in Something About the Author 38. Detroit: Gale Research, 1985. Lindgren, Astrid. “Pippi Goes to School.” Adapted for Reader’s Theatre from Pippi Longstocking, 1950. http://bms.westport.k12.ct.us/mccormick/rt/rtscripts/rtspippi.htm (accessed April 6, 2009). Maslin, Janet. “Childish Tricks and Facial Tics.” Film review of The New Adventures of Pippi Longstocking. The New York Times 29 July 1988. http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?r es=940DE0DD123CF93AA15754C0A96E948260 (accessed April 6, 2009). Metcalf, Eva-Maria. Astrid Lindgren. New York: Twayne, 1995. National Endowment for the Humanities. Summertime Favorites Grade 4–6. http://www.neh. gov/projects/summertime-4to6.html (accessed April 4, 2009). Nodelman, Perry. Ed. Touchstones: Reflections on the Best in Children’s Literature 1. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 1995. Penguin Group USA. Authors link for Astrid Lindgren. http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Author/ AuthorPage/0,,1000019822,00.html (accessed April 6, 2009). Penguin Group USA. Timeline for Astrid Lindgren. http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Search/ QuickSearchProc/1,,Astrid%20Lindgren,00.html?id=Astrid%20Lindgren (accessed April 6, 2009). Rayburn Brown, Marian. “The Amazing Pippi.” The New York Times Book Review 12 November 1950: 28, and in Children’s Literature Review 39 (1950): 133. Riley, Carolyn and Ann Block. Eds. Children’s Literature Review 39. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1996. Steene, Birgitta. “Astrid Lindgren’s Legacy.” 4 November 2007.