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Oh, What a Novelty! The Paradoxical Pop-Up Book https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.117365 Coates, Jodie Jaques, Zoe In this thesis, I argue that the familiar novelty of the pop-up book, in the century since its invention, has become the most vivid icon of ‘children’s literature’ in contemporary Anglo American culture – a recognisable shorthand for the book made for the child, the childlike or childish story, or the book as it is experienced from a child’s perspective. This thesis provides a critical analysis of how one particular book format achieved such a profound status in children’s media culture, by examining the under-researched phenomenon of the remediated pop-up book: the pop-up book that is reimagined within, and dispersed across, non book media. I employ Bolter and Grusin’s theory of remediation to demonstrate how the historic ‘remediating power’ of the pop-up book has been effectively inverted in an age of media convergence, as the pop-up book surfaces, increasingly frequently, beyond the boundaries of the book-object. To explore the curious space occupied by the pop-up book in a nostalgia drenched, yet forward-looking, media landscape, I investigate where, how, and to what end the pop-up book has been remediated in a diverse range of educational, commercial, and artistic contexts. In my investigation, I have compiled a corpus of toys, advertisements, animated film and TV, music, art trails, theatre productions, museum exhibitions, and virtual reality experiences, which all feature a remediated pop-up book. By approaching this seemingly eclectic corpus of texts as a unified group, I expose how the remediated pop-up book presents a valuable tool for researchers to mark and track how creatives have recalibrated the figure of the child in changing times by invoking children’s unique relationship with ‘media made-for-children’ via the disruptive, yet choreographed, pop-up book. Abstracted from the affordances of paper and the confines of the book-object, the remediated pop-up book behaves differently. The pop-up book’s expected performative script is rewritten, and the relationship between its perceived ‘magic’ and engineered ‘mechanics’ is caricatured within its new material, virtual, or hybrid configuration. The elasticity of a new media logic allows the pop-up book to be reinvented in a plethora of ways – as an extension of a character’s inner lifeworld, a traversable ‘bookscape’, a punchline, a violent battleground, a puppet, dangerous propaganda, a living being, a manifestation of spirituality, a weapon, a perfect birthday gift, a theatrical song-and-dance stage, or a portal to another world – often capitalising on the pop-up’s proclivity to anchor the user’s imagination to tactile, sensory experiences. To critically examine the aesthetics and altered scriptive invitations of these remediated pop-up books, I investigate the chain of remediation that takes place prior to the release of the final product, highlighting how groups of creatives – paper engineers, fabricators, animators, auteurs, composers, performers, writers, and so on – reshape each other’s work during various stages of collaboration on remediated pop-up book projects. I argue that analysing the creative, multi-step process of remediation exposes how creatives attempt to actively generate an ‘authentic’ experience of the pop-up book to the user – whether as an immersive, transportive vessel or hypermediated, confronting artefact, or both simultaneously. The pop-up book is a contradictory object. It is nostalgic and novel, flat and three-dimensional, and resistant to – but often reliant upon – machinic and digital technologies. I conclude by discussing how these inherent tensions, and other ‘pop-up paradoxes’, can be exploited and amplified by creatives, within any given medium, to utilise the remediated pop-up book as a self-reflexive site of resistance that places ‘the child and their media’ as the centrepiece of a wide variety of discourses – particularly regarding the progression of ‘the digital age’. By moving away from the study of the physical movable book object and its readers, I ensure that vastly diverse inter-media experiences of the pop-up book offered to both children and adults are not excluded from movable book history. Instead, I forefront these remediated pop-up experiences as a means to re-evaluate the substantial cultural importance of what might be otherwise overlooked as one of many popular novelty book formats. Childhood is a concept riddled with contradictions: a truth that the pop-up book – in all its remediated forms – captures with playful eloquence. University of Cambridge 2024-12-08 Thesis Doctoral Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) eng The Pigott Fund https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/382665 embargo 2029-04-21 https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/2f530fe6-f1bf-42e7-9a7f-cc5fe87ba21c/download a176749805abdb249677a4eee5629dd5 https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/c1ef50b0-4eca-45d8-9c75-a7ed1c35a1d8/download 87eda9de84448d1f82354d60eee3eb5f http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved Movable Books Remediation Pop-Up Book Animation Disney Children's Literature Film Museum Play Paper Engineering Advertising Music Virtual Reality Materiality Performance Puppetry