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Patrick C. Fleming, "Animating the Victorians: Disney's Literary History" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)
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Pete Kunze
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Pete Kunze
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Podcast Host Intro/Outro
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Pete Kunze
Welcome to New Books in Film, a podcast series on the New Books Network. I'm your host, Pete Kunze. My guest today is PC Fleming, the author of Animating the Victorians, Disney's Literary History. The book was published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2025. Hello, PC how are you doing today?
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PC Fleming
I'm doing great, Pete. Thanks a lot for having me. I appreciate it.
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Pete Kunze
No, I'm super excited to talk about this book because initially I was like, oh, okay, like a book about Disney adapting the Victorians. But I think you draw some really exciting parallels that I hadn't seen in earlier Disney work. And I'm glad we have a chance to talk about them as we get started. Can you tell readers a little bit about your background and your training?
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PC Fleming
Sure. I'm a former English professor. My training was in British literature, specifically Victorian studies, children's literature. Earned tenure at Fisk University in 2020. Left Fisk that same year to take a job with the National Endowment for the Humanities. And there I was working with programs across the humanities and across the country. So, um, it was in that period while I was working for NEH that I that I finished this book. So underscoring it is sort of all these other ways of thinking about the humanities that brought me outside of my British literature training a little bit, made that made that exciting and then not my professional background. But you know, I also have a family that likes Disney and we go to Disney World sometimes and I have a 9 year old who especially, you know, enjoys it. So there's a little bit of the personal in this book as well.
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Pete Kunze
Absolutely. Research is always me. Search, Right?
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PC Fleming
Yeah.
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Pete Kunze
So can you tell us a little bit more about this convergence of your academic training in Victorian Studies and your personal interest and family love for Disney media? How did you bring these two together for this project? Yeah, I mean, what you realize is a book.
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PC Fleming
Yeah, yeah. I mean, really, it emerged from a course, actually. I was teaching at the time at Rollins College, which is in Orlando near Disney World. I was sort of tasked to do an upper division English seminar. And so I came up with this idea, which was really a title, Disney's Victorians. I figured, like, all right, I'll do some children's literature. I'll do some Victorian stuff. We'll do Oliver Twist, Alice in Wonderland. Students will dig it. Kind of like an advertising pitch. And so that was scheduled for the fall. And then that previous summer, I was out doing a seminar with NEH out in California on Dickens and adaptation, and we had a couple days set aside where to do some archival work. And so I was like, well, Disney archives are in California. I drove down from Santa Cruz to Burbank and ended up connecting with some of the archives, Stephen Vagnini, who happened to have gotten his MBA at Rollins. So I had an in that I didn't realize. And so Stephen pulled some stuff for me in the archives, and I was like, I'll kind of prepare for this course. It'll be fun. But the stuff there was super cool. They had these research reports from the 1930s, Disney animators being like, all right, what's our next film going to be? Here's some deep research. Alice in Wonderland. Maybe we'll do that. And it was just fascinating. And the book kind of emerged from looking at those materials and then thinking about how they connected.
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Pete Kunze
Yeah, absolutely. And we should note for listeners, and I say this as a beleaguered Disney historian, that's not access that people can readily get anymore. So you had a really amazing opportunity here to do this project, as you note in your book, um, at the outset of it, though, you. You stage, and then you complicate the tension between those who create and those who critique. Can you tell us more about that? Yeah.
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PC Fleming
So the first chapter starts. There's this anecdote about Fr Levis and Walt Disney and the specifics of this debate about, you know, creators and critique and artists and critics that's, of course, like, not unique to them, such as back through T.S. eliot and Oscar Wilde and Matthew Arnold and all these people who are interested in that. But part of what I wanted to do in that introduction was to show how these two concepts, like Disney and the Victorians emerge at the same moment. So the Walt Disney Company comes into being and becomes famous. Around the same time that English departments are flourishing, Victorian Studies is becoming a field. The Victorian Studies Journal is launched. And so putting those two together was really to kind of emphasize that. I mean, the whole book is based on this assumption that literary periods matter. William Hazlitt called it the spirit of the age, if we're in 19th century sense. So it was important to me to think about these two seemingly really different people. This very staid British academic, FR Leavis, and this American cartoonist who purportedly doesn't care about professors, and then just bring them together to show that actually these ideas are all kind of in the ether at the same time. And Disney literary studies, not just a coincidence that they appeared at the same time. There's like some deeper connection there.
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Pete Kunze
Yeah. And some people might not realize that early Disney was actually widely admired by intellectuals. You talk about Sergei Eisenstein, the Soviet filmmaker who greatly admired what Walt Disney was doing. We can also think about how art historians, art critics, film scholars, even more kind of public intellectual types really admired him. And it wasn't until kind of later in his career that he kind of became this schmaltz corn kind of guy, right?
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PC Fleming
Yeah, absolutely.
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Pete Kunze
There's a complicated reception history here that your, your book is really kind of tapping into.
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PC Fleming
I along those lines. You know, I think a lot about Dickens and Disney together. Their names sound similar and they had similar careers. And so there's this moment right in the, in the early 20th century where Dickens is kind of on the downfall. He's like, ah, popular kids literature. Nobody wants to read Charles Dickens. Whereas Disney, as you were saying, is this like high art Obvious people are interested in him. So looking at those two together, whereas now people are like, oh yeah, Dickens sort of classic, important writer and kind of Disney dismissed. But you're right, like those, those, those flip flop sometimes that critical history is different.
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Pete Kunze
And certainly Disney would not have embraced himself as a, a children's entertainer or a guy who was making movies for children. Right. I mean, even in his lifetime he's very actively pushing against this. And you kind of gestured towards that too with, you know, even the way that Diane Disney Miller, his daughter, kind of is trying to shape her father's reception. I mean it's really kind of rich for this kind of reception history and complicated nature of how certain texts get taken up.
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PC Fleming
Right, yeah, exactly. Exactly. And that reception history kind of angle, that was what I was really interested in. Much of the books.
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Pete Kunze
Yeah, for sure, for sure. You know, you mentioned how the rise of Walt Disney productions and Victorian studies are kind of concurrent. Right. But you're also getting us to think about the way that Victorian content, to use a contemporary term, Victorian material, Victorian culture, Victorian literature is being adapted by Disney. A Victorian sensibility, even. So can you talk a little bit more about how that era kind of shapes Disney's output? Because you have a really striking statistic where you point to, like, you know, an overwhelming majority of Disney adaptations are adaptations of Victorian materials. Right. What do you think was appealing to Victorian material in particular? Right, yeah.
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PC Fleming
So you mentioned Diane Disney Miller. She had this quote that was sort of perfect for me where she's like, oh, mom and dad love the Victorian period. I first read that, I was like, oh, did they? Okay. But I think it's also a lot of it is sort of generational and the proximity of the Victorian period to the like, especially the early 20th century. You know, Walt Disney is born in 1901, which is the same year Queen Victoria dies. And so I think for a lot of the 20th century, especially as literary studies is kind of coming into being, the Victorian period feels kind of close. You know, the modernists are all, like. A lot of them are still alive. And so it's almost like the Victorian period was like, oh, that was just the previous generation. And it's also, you know, in practical terms, it's also some of the newest texts that are out of copyright, so Disney can adapt them without having to, like, wrestle with the author rights and all that stuff. So I think that's a big part of the moment. And it's. The interest in the Victorians is not limited to Disney, of course, in the 20th century. Right. Fr. Levis actually complains about this. He's like, oh, there's this vogue for the Victorians. Everyone wants to talk about the Victorians, even though they're not, like, high art or whatever, which for Levis was important for Disney. He was like, well, everyone's talking about the Victorians. I guess I'll make some movies.
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Pete Kunze
Yeah. There's so many factors. I mean, just as someone who studied Disney, though, I could imagine being here. Right. Like, Disney's kind of turned towards a conservative politic in the 40s and the 50s, but also there's all this money he makes in England in the 1940s. That he can't pull out of the country, so he has to make movies there. And that's more the live action stuff that he does.
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PC Fleming
Like Treasure Island. Exactly. The first one he does there. Yeah.
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Pete Kunze
Yeah. So obviously I'm a Disney dork, but so can you help me to understand as a Victorianist, what does this kind of turn to Disney? How does that kind of operate within the field and both respond to how Victorian studies has been done in the past versus where Victorian studies is at now?
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PC Fleming
Yeah, yeah. So I think, you know, Victorian studies was so central to, like, English departments in the 20th century, probably because it was like, it was still. It seemed fairly modern. I can remember when I was in graduate school hearing a professor talk, can you believe that we're farther from T.S. eliot than T.S. eliot was from Dickens? I was like, well, I was like, yes, I can. But like, someone of a different generation, you know, thought of himself as close to Elliot, whereas now they're kind of both, you know, a long time ago. And so I think there's been a shift in the field of Victorian studies, trying to more self consciously make the period relevant in a way that I think for a lot of sort of the history of literary studies, the Victorian period, which is assumed to be relevant because it was close, it was modern, it was similar to us. And now that work is a little more self conscious. And so some of the best work right now in Victorian studies is taking kind of like modern concept, critical race theory, environmental criticism, and finding its origins in the Victorian period and, you know, extraction and imperialism and drawing these connections. And I think that's where some of the best work is done. And so I think what I'm doing with this book is quite different from that, because part of what I'm interested in is why we thought the Victorians were so special for so long. And. And then also to link them to something that, like, maybe is more interesting to people outside of, like, the world of literary studies, in this case, Disney. And I think those are, like, kind of connected goals. Right. Part of the reason that Victorians retain some of their cachet is because they were so Central to the 20th century, like media landscape. Not just Disney, but other places too. Yeah. And so I think, like, bringing those two together is where I see myself pushing the Victorian studies side.
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Pete Kunze
Yeah. Can we take that a step further? I'm wondering, how does studying Victorian literature potentially complicate or enrich our understanding of Disney entertainment? Right. I mean, is there things you're noticing as you're reading work on Disney? It's like, oh, if you understood Victorian culture a little bit more, it might help you to get that. Or in linking Disney's vision, his aesthetic, his themes to Victorian culture, you see these affinities that maybe hadn't been sussed out enough. I guess part of what I'm flirting with here is you really kind of talk about this tendency to either recuperate Disney as like, the greatest entertainer and artist of our time, or this tendency to see Disney as this kind of, you know, the greatest brainwasher, you know, this shill for capitalism that's just been indoctrinating our children. Right. Coming out of this kind of ersat's Frankfurt School critique. So where do you see how does Victorian studies kind of help you to situate but also complicate the way Disney is studied and understood?
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PC Fleming
Yeah, yeah. I mean, in terms of breaking down that band, I think the Disney scholarship seems more binary than Dickens scholarship or, you know, Thackeray, I don't know, other Victorians scholarship. And so I think just treating Disney in the way that we would treat another major figure is a first step. Right. And understanding Disney as another player in a historical artistic marketplace and so subject to the same historical pressures and changes over his career that like any other artist or writer or creator would. Would. Would be. Yeah. So in terms of, like, navigating those two. Those two extremes, I think that was kind of the approach I took.
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Pete Kunze
Yeah, I. I like this phrase you used, artistic marketplace, because it reminds us that Disney is always a business and always culture. Right. And I think that some of that binary that you're identifying is often people who maybe want to keep those things apart more than they should and can't. And we can think about how that's a kind of romantic legacy, too, but that's another issue. But another scholar, another book. But to think about. One of the things I really appreciated in thinking about how you're historicizing Disney is you're making the case for how the Walt Disney Company is coming to fruition in a moment. I should say Walt Disney Productions at this time, but Walt Disney Productions is coming into a moment that was set up by the Victorian era. Right. And you're thinking about this not only in terms of culture, but also in terms of law. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? And technology, for that matter? So how is Walt Disney Productions, and arguably Hollywood as we know it coming out of a Victorian moment in this kind of quote unquote, artistic marketplace?
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PC Fleming
Yeah, yeah. I mean, much of what I do in the first chapter Is like, here's an introduction to, like, Victorian entertainment culture and the Victorian period. So that was some of the most, for me, some of the most fun to write because, like you said, there's this industry that's emerging over the course of the Victorian period where we get popular entertainment, right? We have the circus master in Dickens Hard Times, right? The people must be amused, which is a great sort of moment. And that's tied to new technologies. Right in the beginning of the century, we get, like, wax figures being exhibited and we have the panoramas, these sort of great Victorian, like, photographs that you would walk into. And then we get like, photography and film. So all these are coming together and then being leveraged as like, new entertainments to, like, both for, like, sort of scientific demonstrations, but also ways to like, bring people together and entertain them. And Disney inherits that as well as some of the sort of corporate structures there are. Like, especially once you get film and photography or like a panorama. Like, those require capital investments in a way that some other art forms didn't. And so Disney inherits, like, some of those. Some of those structures. And then you mentioned law, right? This is the period where we get international copyright agreements and cross media copyright agreements. You know, I have these anecdotes from Gilbert and Sullivan sort of struggling to secure copyright for their performances in different countries. Dickens of, um, his plays are sort of plagiarized on stage, like before he's even finished writing them in many cases. Um, so those are things that 19th century creators had to deal with. By the 20th century, some of those legal frameworks are warmed, are worked out, and so an artist can step in and say, well, I'm gonna make my version of this.
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Pete Kunze
Yeah, I, I'm having a dork moment here. Is it the Pirates of Penzance that is kind of Gilbert and Sullivan's response to piracy in the US Or. I, I thought that they kind of brought it into their work, didn't that. That they were getting frustrated with how their work was being essentially bootlegged. Right?
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PC Fleming
Exactly. Yeah. No, yeah, it's the Pirates of Penzance that they. They tried to, like, time it. So it premiered at the same time in England and America. So they, like, coordinated the English production, came over to America, and then they were like, all right, it's December 8th or whatever it is, let's go. So they could secure the COVID at the same time because they were so angry about what had been done with HMS Pinafore, right, which had familiarized and, you know, it was running in two different theaters at the same time and only one of them was Gilbert and Sullivan and the other one taking their costumes and got around copyrights in different ways. So yeah, that stuff's fascinating.
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Pete Kunze
Yeah, for sure. For sure.
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Pete Kunze
And it's also interesting that we're talking about this the day after Disney announces a deal with AI because that's all about Disney trying to protect its copyright. Right. And, you know, you could do a fascinating book on copyright law in the United States versus and how it's developed in line with Disney's, you know, corporate priorities. Right. Especially around Mickey Mouse. A lot of legal scholars have written around.
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PC Fleming
Right. That's always in the joke, right. That, like, copyright changes whenever Mickey Mouse is about to come.
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Pete Kunze
Yeah, absolutely.
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PC Fleming
In the public domain.
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Pete Kunze
So you mentioned theater and performance culture, and I'm hoping you can kind of pull that out a bit more, because I think that when people think about the golden age of children's literature, especially outside of Victorian studies, they often think about the great books. Right. But this is also an important moment in the construction of the child, in the creation of culture on stage. Right. I mean, Peter Pan is a stage play that gets novelized. So can you talk a little bit more about how understanding this relationship between the Victorians and Walt Disney and his studio requires us to understand what's happening in theater and performance culture in the 19th century?
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PC Fleming
Yeah. The Victorian theatrical world is just. Is just fascinating and exciting. And I think that's also where a lot of kind of new research is done there. At the start of the Victorian period, there's censorship laws that limit spoken drama to. You only perform a play at certain licensed playhouses in London. And so theater managers come up with all these ways to get around that, because what they're doing is not a play.
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Pete Kunze
Right.
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PC Fleming
It's not spoken drama. So there's, of course, like, music and dance, but then you get, you know, Shakespeare productions on horseback. You get fully staged naval battles, all these ways. And then they. Those, like, originally designed to get around censorship, and then they, like, become art forms in themselves and the melodrama. And so Disney's inheriting that, inheriting that tradition. And Peter Pan's a great example. Right. Barry is drawing from all these different theatrical and literature traditions that play sort of like a combination of different forms. And that's part of what life is. So fun.
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Pete Kunze
Yeah, absolutely. And so this also draws attention to how this book is coming out of adaptation studies. Right. Victorian studies and Disney studies. Wasn't Enough. There also is your contribution here to adaptation studies. And I'm hoping you could talk a bit about how theoretical debates and methods in adaptation studies is helping you to think through this relationship, but also kind of avoid some of the common pitfalls that people use when they talk about adaptation without kind of approaching it from a more kind of nuanced or complex perspective.
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PC Fleming
Yeah, I mentioned the NEH seminar that kind of gave rise to this. Sharon Weltman was the scholar who led that and she's a brilliant scholar of Victorian theater and adaptation studies. So a lot of this I was introduced to through her. And for me, what I loved about adaptation studies, it sort of starts with a limitation. I think built into the kind of like genesis of adaptation studies is it's not that interesting to just compare a book to a movie. So if we don't do that, what else can we do? And that was actually like a really exciting sort of limitation or question for me. And so there are always other ways of looking at the industry and other other factors that shape adaptation. Theater was a, was a, a really big one. Like, I think I learned fairly early on that an adaptation of a novel, a film adaptation of a novel is very rarely actually a film adaptation of the novel. More likely it's a film adaptation of the, the culture text. Right. How, how, how that story exists in the wider culture. And often the play is more impactful than the book in terms of making a movie of it, partly because there's often like a ready made script. And so there's all these sort of intertexts in that way that made it really exciting for me. And I think adaptation studies kind of open, opened my eyes to like some of those, some of those features and other ways of looking at that.
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Pete Kunze
So we've been talking about the big picture. Let's do a case study or two. Um, and I'm biased, so I want to talk about the Little Mermaid. Um, and you know, a purist might be like PC, the Little Mermaid was written by a Dane and you're a Victorianist. What are you doing? Um, so. But you make a case for why that's a kind of unnecessarily rigid approach to Victorian studies. Um, so what is it about the Little Mermaid that kind of speaks to the larger culture of the Victorians? And how do you see it get in getting taken up by the Walt Disney Company in the 80s when they make the Little Mermaid?
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PC Fleming
Yeah, while I was writing this book, I would present different parts at a conference and I definitely presented the Hans. Hans Christian Andersen section or material from it at a Victorian study. It's called the Victorian Institute. And I think my argument, the whole argument of that paper was like, no, Hans Christian Andersen is a Victorian. And you know, this. Most of this vanity of the chapter, he's like, hanging out with Charles Dickens. He stays several weeks with Charles Dickens.
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Pete Kunze
He notoriously so. Right. Like, exactly.
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PC Fleming
Yeah.
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Pete Kunze
There's famous letters about how they. How annoying he was.
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PC Fleming
Yeah, yeah. Overstayed is welcome, I think. And it's interesting, some of the, like, comments I've gotten about this from Anderson scholars are like, you're being too unfair to Anderson. Like, Dickens really didn't. So some people have different investments in that. In that visit. But he's also rubbing elbows with the Brownings in Italy, you know, George Eliot refers to the Ugly Duckling very sort of like, assuming readers know, of course, exactly what the Ugly Duckling is in Middlemarch. So Anderson is already, like, immersed. Or the Victorian world is very, like, enamored with Anderson. So I felt like I had to make the argument, but also, I believe it. Right. Anderson belongs among the Victorians. And then as far as selecting the Little Mermaid at that moment.
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Pete Kunze
Yeah.
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PC Fleming
I don't know. It's a great story. And Disney has. I mean, this is part of what the argument the chapter makes. Right. From its earliest years, the Walt Disney Company has been connected to Anderson, had been making Anderson adaptations, probably because they were investing in fairy tales. And his fairy tales are some of the most exciting. And partly because there was a moment where Walt Disney and Samuel Goldman are thinking about collaborating on making sort of a biopic about Hans Christian Andersen. We eventually get that Danny Kaye movie, which I kind of love. So in the 1980s, when the Walt Disney Company is thinking of making the Little Mermaid, they've already got a lot of sort of, like, archival materials to work with and draw on. And people have been thinking about that for a while. So I think that's part of what plays into that decision is, like, that internal corporate history and the sense of, like, well, we have been doing this for, like, we. A company kind of taking ownership of it.
- [28:46]
Pete Kunze
Yeah. And then, so what do you see happening with the Little Mermaid in terms of what's happening on screen versus what was happening with the Anderson version? I mean, you kind of reject Fidelity as a. A useful framework. Right. But, you know, what do you see in. In Anderson, aside from this kind of whimsicality that really kind of extends the Disney version, to use Richard Chickles term? Or maybe the other question is, how does Disney Mobilize the Little Mermaid to kind of fit into this. I mean, we can't say there's a singular vision in Disney. Right. There's multiple artists, there's multiple eras, but for lack of a better term, how do they Disney fy the Little Mermaid?
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PC Fleming
Yeah, I mean, it has this. It has sort of a narrative, this very kind of. You have a clear. You have a clear villain, it's got a love story built into it. So all the sort of narrative components that Disney would want are built into that story. But also, you know, in Anderson's version, it has, I think, a seriousness to it and a darkness to it that, I don't know, Disney is maybe less or it gets. It gets into that film in different ways. Right. The Ursula scene is kind of scary. And I think that is something that they draw from Anderson. And a lot of what I talk about in the chapter is Anderson's sexuality and his sort of non normative sexuality and the sense that there doesn't have to be only one way of doing things. And so this movie that sets up this binary of good and evil and Ariel and Ursula at the same also kind of breaks down some other stereotypes and expectations or can be seen that way. I think so, yeah. I don't know. I don't know if this is a clear answer to your question, but.
- [30:45]
Pete Kunze
No, I think you're kind of pointing to the ways in which both the use, but also the response has been more complicated. Right. I mean, I'm sure you've seen in fan culture and even in scholarship in more recent years the way that trans audiences and folks in trans studies have taken up the Little Mermaid and not in a negative way, but actually in a generative way.
- [31:04]
PC Fleming
Right.
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Pete Kunze
This desire for. To correct the body, the desire to be who one is rather than. Or to become who one is, I think has been kind of fascinating and in some ways does service to Anderson's kind of discomfort, for lack of a better term or feeling of alienation.
- [31:23]
PC Fleming
Yeah. Sean Griffin has that great book about that, about sort of queerness in the Disney era. And you know, he notes, points out, you know, like, having Howard Ashman involved made a big difference in that movie. And then of course, Ursula is based on Divine, this sort of famous drag performer. So that's built into the production of the movie as well, for sure.
- [31:45]
Pete Kunze
And let's talk about Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, because I think some folks think like, oh yeah, the movie from the 50s, but Disney has a much more complicated and longer history with Alice as a character. So what makes Alice kind of of good material for Disney and what does the company do with it?
- [32:05]
PC Fleming
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The whole chapter about that. And it's at different moments. I love Alice in Wonderland. It's one of my favorite books. My son's middle name is Carol, spelled like Lewis Carroll. But it's a tough book to like, wrap your head around. I don't think I've ever successfully taught it in a classroom, partly because it you just give to students and like, look at this weird and wonderful thing. And I feel like Disney was kind of doing that too. The earliest cartoons in the 1920s, the Alice comedies, are sort of based on this gag, right? Here's this live action girl interacting with these characters. And so just like the premise of Wonderland allows for that and especially with the early cartoons, allows that the sort of cartoon form to play up all these gags and jokes. And then Disney really wants to make a full length feature after Snow White. That's kind of where their investments are. And Alice is a full length book. It's two books. It seems like, okay, yeah, this is going to be an easy narrative. But I think that the tension in Alice in Wonderland, it's such an episodic book. It just relies on these jokes and scenes. I think they really struggled to make that into a narrative. So the argument I make in the book is I give all these examples of how they tried. Mary Pickford would come in and she would be Alice and they'd have it. And then that never got to fruition. Aldous Huxley comes in and writes a script for them and then that never gets produced. And then they get this mediocre movie in 1951 that then just gets recycled as theme park rides and advertisements when they're back to just playing up the episodes. So I think that's what makes Alice such a good story, especially for Disney, is that it allows them to have these individual scenes that are part of a larger narrative, but don't depend on the larger narrative. You listen to Ariel singing under the Sea. You kind of have to know the arc of the story. Whereas you're at the Mad Tea Party. It doesn't really matter how Alice got there. She's just. She's there and it's fun.
- [34:14]
Pete Kunze
Yeah. I think if we wanted to film studies it, right? Like Ariel is more of a goal oriented protagonist, right? She has something she wants. That's what Howard Ashman and Alan Menken helped to do, right. Is use the songs to kind of push her forward. But, you know, maybe I'm being Reductive here, but it's almost like things happen to Alice. She bears witness to them. And it almost follows. I don't want to say the picaresque, because the picaresque is usually a rogue hero who's kind of, you know, wandering around, but it is a very kind of like, wander around and see different stuff. Right. But that whole conceit of a normal, ostensibly normal person in a. In a world gone mad. Right, yeah. It just works really well in animation. Right. Because you can have these eccentric characters, but in some ways, Alice. Alice is the foil character in her own story or is almost just kind of like she's just there to remind us how eccentric they are.
- [35:10]
PC Fleming
Exactly, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, that's fair.
- [35:14]
Pete Kunze
So a big question, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts on, you know, aside from everyone, who are you hoping will read this book and what kind of work do you hope might come out of it or what other studies do you see? Are you hoping it'll kind of enable others to do?
- [35:31]
PC Fleming
Yeah, well, for people who are interested in Disney, I hope it sort of gives them a sense of the sort of historical texture of what the company is producing and sort of of make some of those works, films or songs or theme park attractions do, like, a little more. A little more interesting. And then I also think it's a book that appeals to students and that could be used in a classroom and if. Sort of an ideal situation. Right. If it helps a student connect from, like, oh, I really like that movie as a kid or as an adult to, like, the scholarship and scholarly debates in particular fields, whether it's film studies or adaptation studies or Victorian studies provides that kind of entry point. That would be like, an ideal impact, I think.
- [36:20]
Pete Kunze
Yeah, I agree. Excellent. So what are you working on now? Are you thinking about similar things in relation to Victorian culture and contemporary culture? Are you thinking about Disney still? What kind of questions are. Are inspiring you these days?
- [36:37]
PC Fleming
Yeah, well, you know, partly. You know, as I was writing this book, I was also working on another book, A Companion to 19th Century British Children's literature, which, you know, came into print around the same time. And so I'm still thinking about, you know, 19th century British children's literature. That's where my training is. And especially lately, like all parents, I'm interested in children sleeping and getting children to sleep. And so thinking of stories like, you know, Kipling's Just so stories. He originally wrote those to, like, help put his daughter to sleep. And then, you know, goodnight Moon. Is this sort of epitome of children's literature, there's this assumption that, like, oh, children's books put kids to sleep. Right. We have this book my son likes. It's called the Bug book. It's just like a bunch of pictures of bugs, but it still ends with like, a bug goes to sleep. So I think there's something about the children's book form that takes sleep as, like, really important. And so that's that. That's the. The research project I've been working on. It's very nascent. But in. In those, in those worlds, when you read books about sleep science, they always say, you know, humans sleep and they eat and they reproduce. And we know a lot about eating and reproduction, not a lot about sleep. Like humanities, there's food studies, there's sexuality studies. I think there's like, maybe the beginnings of a sleep study, culture of sleep kind of humanities work. But that's kind of, you know, that's what I've been interested in lately.
- [38:03]
Pete Kunze
Yeah. And it's also interesting to think about how those books kind of stage a reception practice. Right. Like they're. They're intended not for the child to explore on their own, but the child to. To hear or to be co. Read. Right. So I think there's a lot to be done with that. That's super interesting.
- [38:18]
PC Fleming
Yeah, absolutely.
- [38:19]
Pete Kunze
Well, I really appreciate your time today, PC. It's been great to talk with you. The book is Animating the Disney's Literary History, available now from the University Press of Mississippi and other online booksellers. This is Pete Kunze, and this has been New Books and Film on the New Books Network. Thank you for listening and we hope you'll join us again next time.
- [38:40]
PC Fleming
Thanks, Pete.
- [38:41]
Pete Kunze
Thank you.