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An exploration of Paddingon the Bear as an international cultural phenomenon
In 1958, a little marmalade-loving brown bear from Peru named Paddington was introduced to the post-war British public. Inspired by his creator Michael Bond's memories of displaced Jewish children in the United Kingdom during World War II, Paddington became a symbol of how to treat refugees with kindness. Author Bond was clear from the outset about Paddington's refugee status. Nearly sixty-five years later, the bear's legacy has evolved into a transmedia phenomenon; his once marginalized image has now been licenced to numerous British organisations -- such as Barbour and Marks & Spencer -- and more recently, even become a symbolic figurehead of national mourning following Queen Elizabeth II's death in 2022.
Please Look After This Bear analyzes the titular character's transformation from displaced Peruvian bear to member of a wealthy, upper-class West London family, raising questions about migration, assimilation, tolerance, and national identity. The first of its kind to trace the publication history of the Paddington stories, this cutting-edge, critical text not only offers a unique sociocultural biography on the series' origins and background, but looks closely at its contemporary adaptations and afterlives, citing its emergence as a British cultural symbol across the globe. To date, Paddington books have been translated into forty languages (including Latin) and have sold more than 35 million copies worldwide.
Told in poignant, incisive prose, this book reveals how Paddington evolved from an unassuming Peruvian bear on the printed page to an international transmedia phenomenon and icon of Britishness. With thoughtful nods both to nostalgia and to national identity, this book traces the character's dramatic change across the ever-changing British historical and political landscape of the past nearly-seven decades.
List of contents
- Introduction: The Unbearable Weight of the Good Immigrant Narrative
- Chapter 1: The Bear Facts: Paddington's Origins
- Chapter 2: Paddington, the Good Immigrant
- Chapter 3: Paddington goes global
- Chapter 4: Bear? Where? Locating Paddington in the British social landscape
- Chapter 5: Paddington, agency and Authority
- Chapter 6: Brexit, Pursued by a Bear
- Conclusion: Ursa Major
- Bibliography
- Index
- Acknowledgements
About the author
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold is a Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor in Children's and YA Literature Studies at the University of Glasgow, and the editor of Cambridge University Press' Young Adult Publishing and Book Culture book series. Her book
Inclusive Young Adult Fiction: Authors of Colour in the United Kingdom, 2006-2016, was published by Palgrave in 2019. She co-authored
The Publishing Business: A Guide to Starting Out and Getting On (Bloomsbury, 2018).
Aishwarya Subramanian is an Associate Professor of English at O.P. Jindal Global University in Haryana, India. Her research encompasses popular and genre fiction, children's literature, spatiality and postcolonial nationalisms. She serves on the editorial board of the journal
Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures. Some of her recent work can be found in
Comparative Critical Studies, The Lion and the Unicorn, and
Space and Culture, and she co-edited a special issue of International Research in Children's
Literature, "Curating National Literatures", in 2019.
