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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 groundbreaking 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.
ASIN : 0300056451
Publisher : Yale University Press
Publication date : June 22, 1994
Edition : First Edition, First Printing
Language : English
Print length : 272 pages
ISBN-10 : 0274735032
ISBN-13 : 978-0300056457
Item Weight : 1.3 pounds
Dimensions : 9.53 x 6.35 x 0.91 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #5,269,056 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #21,065 in Literary Criticism & Theory #32,999 in Literary Movements & Periods #172,920 in Teen & Young Adult Books
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