TY - CHAP

T1 - Walt O’Disney and the Little People

T2 - Playing to the Irish-American Diaspora

AU - O'Sullivan, Emer

N1 - © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE, part of Springer Nature 2022

PY - 2022/1/1

Y1 - 2022/1/1

N2 - Darby O’Gill and The Little People, Disney’s 1959 live-action Irish-themed family film, features Irish folklore in the shape of leprechauns, banshees and other supernatural figures. The company had their eye firmly on the market of twenty million Irish Americans, and the extensive pre-publicity for this transatlantic ethnotypical film included Walt Disney embracing a diasporic Irish identity by presenting himself as ‘half Irish.’ He also claimed to have deployed actual leprechauns in the film. Through an imagological, cultural discourse analysis lens, this paper examines the paratextual and textual performances and representations of Irishness in Darby O’Gill in the context of Irish-American culture and its popular traditions. It asks why, contrary to Disney’s hopes, it did not enjoy the success of other notable US Irish-themed films of the era, and probes the Irish involvement in and reception of Disney’s ‘Irish’ film.

AB - Darby O’Gill and The Little People, Disney’s 1959 live-action Irish-themed family film, features Irish folklore in the shape of leprechauns, banshees and other supernatural figures. The company had their eye firmly on the market of twenty million Irish Americans, and the extensive pre-publicity for this transatlantic ethnotypical film included Walt Disney embracing a diasporic Irish identity by presenting himself as ‘half Irish.’ He also claimed to have deployed actual leprechauns in the film. Through an imagological, cultural discourse analysis lens, this paper examines the paratextual and textual performances and representations of Irishness in Darby O’Gill in the context of Irish-American culture and its popular traditions. It asks why, contrary to Disney’s hopes, it did not enjoy the success of other notable US Irish-themed films of the era, and probes the Irish involvement in and reception of Disney’s ‘Irish’ film.

KW - Literature studies

KW - Walt Disney

KW - Irishness

KW - Leprechauns

KW - Imagology

KW - Darby O’Gill and the Little People

UR - https://d-nb.info/1244561541

UR - https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-64625-0

UR - https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/701f3384-c601-33d0-92a9-fac6dc9d5122/

U2 - 10.1007/978-3-662-64625-0_8

DO - 10.1007/978-3-662-64625-0_8

M3 - Chapter

SN - 978-3-662-64624-3

SN - 978-3-662-64626-7

T3 - Studien zu Kinder- und Jugendliteratur und -medien

SP - 115

EP - 129

BT - On Disney

A2 - Dettmar, Ute

A2 - Tomkowiak, Ingrid

PB - J.B. Metzler

CY - Berlin, Heidelberg

ER -