{"id":{"repo_id":"cambridge","oai_identifier":"oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/382665"},"canonical_url":"https://search.dev.ndltd.org/etd/cambridge/oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/382665","repository":{"repo_id":"cambridge","name":"Cambridge University","base_url":"https://api.repository.cam.ac.uk/server/oai/request"},"display":{"title":"Oh, What a Novelty! The Paradoxical Pop-Up Book","abstract":"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.","abstract_html":"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.","abstract_has_math":false,"creators":["Coates, Jodie"],"institution":"University of Cambridge","degree_name":"Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)","degree_level":"Doctoral","degree_discipline":null,"degree_department":null,"school":null,"contributors":[],"advisors":["Jaques, Zoe"],"committee_chairs":[],"committee_members":[],"year":2024,"date_issued":"2024-12-08","date_published":"2024-12-08","updated_at":"2026-07-22T22:24:21Z","subjects":["Movable Books","Remediation","Pop-Up Book","Animation","Disney","Children's Literature","Film","Museum","Play","Paper Engineering","Advertising","Music","Virtual Reality","Materiality","Performance","Puppetry"],"languages":["eng"],"rights":[],"rights_urls":["https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/c1ef50b0-4eca-45d8-9c75-a7ed1c35a1d8/download","http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved"],"identifier_entries":[]},"links":{"outbound_url":"https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.117365","outbound_label":"DOI","outbound_source":"dc:identifier.doi"},"metadata_groups":[{"id":"people","label":"People","entries":[{"key":"dc:contributor.advisor","label":"Advisor","values":["Jaques, Zoe"]},{"key":"dc:contributor.sponsor","label":"Sponsor","values":["The Pigott Fund"]},{"key":"dc:creator","label":"Author","values":["Coates, Jodie"]}]},{"id":"academic_context","label":"Academic Context","entries":[{"key":"dc:date.issued","label":"Date","values":["2024-12-08"]},{"key":"dc:publisher.institution","label":"Dc Publisher Institution","values":["University of Cambridge"]},{"key":"dc:relation.isreferencedby.uri","label":"Dc Relation Isreferencedby URI","values":["https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/382665"]},{"key":"dc:type","label":"Dc Type","values":["Thesis"]},{"key":"dc:type.qualificationlevel","label":"Dc Type Qualificationlevel","values":["Doctoral"]},{"key":"dc:type.qualificationname","label":"Dc Type Qualificationname","values":["Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)"]}]},{"id":"subjects_keywords","label":"Subjects and Keywords","entries":[{"key":"dc:subject","label":"Dc Subject","values":["Movable Books","Remediation","Pop-Up Book","Animation","Disney","Children's Literature","Film","Museum","Play","Paper Engineering","Advertising","Music","Virtual Reality","Materiality","Performance","Puppetry"]}]},{"id":"language_rights","label":"Language and Rights","entries":[{"key":"dc:language","label":"Dc Language","values":["eng"]},{"key":"dc:rights","label":"Dc Rights","values":["https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/c1ef50b0-4eca-45d8-9c75-a7ed1c35a1d8/download","http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved"]},{"key":"dc:rights.embargodate","label":"Dc Rights Embargodate","values":["2026-04-11"]},{"key":"dc:rights.embargotype","label":"Dc Rights Embargotype","values":["embargo"]}]},{"id":"identifiers","label":"Identifiers","entries":[{"key":"dc:identifier.doi","label":"DOI","values":["https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.117365"]},{"key":"dc:identifier.uri","label":"Identifier URI","values":["https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/2f530fe6-f1bf-42e7-9a7f-cc5fe87ba21c/download"]}]},{"id":"additional","label":"Additional Metadata","entries":[{"key":"dc:description.abstract","label":"Abstract","values":["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."]},{"key":"dc:format.checksum.md5","label":"Dc Format Checksum Md5","values":["a176749805abdb249677a4eee5629dd5","87eda9de84448d1f82354d60eee3eb5f"]},{"key":"dc:title","label":"Title","values":["Oh, What a Novelty! 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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. 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