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Transforming Text, Tradition and TV: The Magic of Prøysen’s Pepperpot
Malmö högskola, Faculty of Education and Society (LS), Department of Culture, Languages and Media (KSM).ORCID iD: 0000-0002-2818-3414
2013 (English)Conference paper, Oral presentation with published abstract (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

It is certainly true that newer media “imitate and absorb” as well as invigorate older media. The thesis that I propose here, however, goes further. I shall argue that newer media may sometimes even lead to a translation and transformation of certain cultural practices. In the case of Norwegian children’s author Alf Prøysen’s book Teskjekjerringa (Mrs Pepperpot, 1957), its remediation in the Swedish TV-series series Gumman som blev liten som en tesked from 1967 prompted further books and stories about Mrs Pepperpot, some of which were published in Swedish even before they came out in Norwegian. One can also argue that the series successfully imitates and absorbs the qualities of the original book, the verbal as well as the visual. Yet, the translation – which in this case is at the same time linguistic, cultural and medial – also adds to the original narrative while obscuring other dimensions of it. Even more importantly, the success of the TV series did lead to a transformation of the Christmas calendar tradition as a whole. From having been a traditional cultural/religious practice focused on images of the nativity, the advent calendar came to be a predominantly televised, secular cultural form of mass communication. Teskedsgumman, moreover, became the gold standard against which all TV Christmas calendars continue to be compared. The success of the televised Teskedsgumman ensured that the calendar tradition became a permanent TV feature in Sweden, and of children’s media culture. The paper has an ethnographic and mediastudies-inspired approach, and investigates the ways in which Prøysen’s books were remediatized for TV, how the series was received, and, how it affected and reinstated the Christmas calendar tradition in Swedish children’s culture.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2013.
National Category
Humanities and the Arts
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-11729Local ID: 22013OAI: oai:DiVA.org:mau-11729DiVA, id: diva2:1408773
Conference
21th Biennial Conference of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature on Children’s Literature and Media Cultures, Maastricht University, The Netherlands (2013)
Available from: 2020-02-29 Created: 2020-02-29 Last updated: 2022-06-27Bibliographically approved

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http://shcyhome.org/2012/09/childrens-literature-and-media-cultures-conference/

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Sundmark, Björn

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CiteExportLink to record
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Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
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