From Darkest Peru to Contemporary Politics: The Timelessness of Paddington’s Search for a Home

Authors

Keywords:

Michael Bond, A Bear Called Paddington (1958), Paddington (2014), exile, migration, children’s classics

Abstract

This contribution suggests reading the family film Paddington (2014) as a cultural product that contains traces of its source text’s contemporary history and politics and combines a variety of temporal levels to point towards the timelessness of Paddington’s search for a home and, in turn, of the phenomenon of migration and exile in general. In a London that is characterised by contradictory temporal references, Paddington emerges as an “every-bear” who is looking for a home, while the Browns represent the timeless need for decency and compassion. 

Author Biography

Susanne Reichl is professor of contemporary English literature at the department of English and American Studies at the University of Vienna. She has taught and published on Black British and postcolonial literature (most recently on the Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah), British Cultural Studies, cognitive approaches to literature and reading, the teach-ing of literature and culture, children’s and young adult literature and stories of time travel. She is currently engaged in research on young adult literature and social reading practices. She heads the interdisciplinary research platform #YouthMediaLife at the University of Vienna and has been vice chair of the ÖG-KJLF since 2017. 

Additional Files

Published

2022-03-29

Issue

libri liberorum (Jahrgang 22/ Heft 56-57/ 2021)

Section

Artikel

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.