A century in the life of Peter Pan: James Barrie’s character and the cinematographic remediation

Abstract

In this article we analyse the different representations that the character Peter Pan, from James Barrie ’s novel Peter Pan, first published in 1911, have assumed over more than a century in movie adaptations (i.e. in 1924, 1953, 2003 and 2015). The complexity of this character, in his interior dilemmas, undergoes different metamorphoses in narrative processes of transliterary and multimodal adaptations, where the role of space in the construction of the literary character is crucial. We are interested in the potential of the character and the discursive strategies employed to represent the relationships between real worlds and worlds beyond the real, along with ways of looking at childhood and adulthood, the myth of eternal childhood and its reverse complex of loneliness. The refiguration of the character is also materialized through its affective relationships with others, partly conditioned by diverse dominant social values in the XX and XXI centuries, along with issues of gender that are present in Peter Pan’s relationships with female characters, namely Wendy, Tinkerbell, and the maternal figure.