When Toys Come Alive: Narratives of Animation, Metamorphosis, and Development - Rilegato

Kuznets, Lois Rostow

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0300056451 ISBN 13: 9780300056457

Casa editrice: Yale Univ Pr, 1994

Riassunto

Since the eighteenth century, toys have had an important place in European and American stories written for children and adults, often taking on a secret, sensual, even carnivalesque life of their own. In this ground-breaking work, Lois Rostow Kuznets studies the role of toy characters in works ranging from older classics like Pinocchio, Winnie the Pooh, and The Velveteen Rabbit, through modern texts like The Mouse and His Child and the popular comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, to the latest science fiction featuring robots and cyborgs.
Using a variety of intertextual critical approaches, including feminist theory, neo-Freudian Winnicott play analysis, structuralism, and neo-Marxism, Kuznets focuses on how toy characters, like children's play, can be associated with deep human needs, desires, and fears. Anxiety about being "real" - an autonomous subject rather than an object - permeates many of the texts Kuznets analyzes. Toy fantasies also raise existential issues of power: what it means either to dominate or to be dominated by more powerful beings, and what dangers might lie in the transformation of a toy into a living being - an act of human creativity that represents a challenge to divine creation. Kuznets concludes that although many of these texts subvert conformity on an individual level, they also tend to evoke a romantic nostalgia that supports the underlying values and hierarchies of a patriarchal society.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Lois Rostow Kuznets is professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University.

Product Description:

Book by Kuznets Lois Rostow

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Yale Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0300056451
• ISBN 13: 9780300056457
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 272