Understanding The Hobbit

Subtitle:the cross-national and cross-linguistic reception of a global media product in Belgium, France and the Netherlands

The Hobbit franchise, as many global media products, reaches audiences worldwide. Audience members apparently consume a uniform media product. But do they? The World Hobbit Project offers a new and exciting opportunity to explore differences and similarities, for it provides us with audiences' understandings of the trilogy across languages and nationalities. In this paper we conduct a statistical analysis on differences and similarities inunderstandings of The Hobbittrilogy between Belgium, the Netherlands, and France both in what audiences do and do not feel The Hobbit films to be. Analyzing this particular region in Europe provides an extraordinary opportunity, for The World Hobbit project allows us to compare on the language level (the Dutch and Frenchspeaking Belgian regions with respectively the Netherlands and France), as well as on the level of national identities (comparing the three countries amongst each other). In doing so, we are able to further understand what informs geographical and linguistic differences in the consumption of a uniform media product. As such, this paper touches upon cultural hegemony, crossborder flows of fiction, language and cultural proximity.

Publication year:2016

Keywords:A1 Journal article

BOF-keylabel:yes

Accessibility:Open