Rules and Rhizomes: A Mary Poppins Sampler

Authors

  • Margaret Mackey University of Alberta, Canada

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21153/pecl2016vol24no1art1108

Keywords:

Mary Poppins, Disney, P.L Travers, cultural schemas, adaptations, phase space, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, rhizomes, Saving Mr Banks

Abstract

When the Disney movie of Mary Poppins was released in 1964, I was a teenager and far too cool to watch it under the aegis of my own identity. But as a long-term devotee of the books I was keen to see what Disney had made of this adaptation, so I borrowed the children of some family friends as camouflage and headed for the cinema. To my dismay, Julie Andrews was too pretty, too sweet, too twinkly, and too insipid to suit my sense of the stern nanny, and I found the story diminished as a consequence.

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Author Biography

  • Margaret Mackey, University of Alberta, Canada

    Margaret Mackey is Professor Emerita at the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alberta, currently phasing into retirement. She teaches and researches in the area of print and other literacies among young people. Her most recent book is One Child Reading: My Auto-Bibliography, published by the University of Alberta Press in 2016; it is a study of the print and media materials with which she herself became literate, as a child growing up in St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada, in the 1950s and early 1960s. Her newest research project involves an exploration of the role of landscape and setting on developing literacies.

References

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Published

2016-01-01

Issue

Vol. 24 No. 1 (2016)

Section

Articles

How to Cite

“Rules and Rhizomes: A Mary Poppins Sampler” (2016) Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature, 24(1), pp. 1–29. doi:10.21153/pecl2016vol24no1art1108.