When Toys Come Alive – Narratives of Animation, Metamorphosis & Development: Narratives of Animation, Metamorphosis, and Development - Hardcover

Kuznets, Lois Rostow

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300056451 ISBN 13: 9780300056457

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1994

Synopsis

In this extraordinary book, 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. He examines how toys can often take on a secret, sensual, even carnivalesque life of their own and how they tend to evoke a romantic nostalgia that supports the underlying values and hierarchies of a patriarchal society.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

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.

About the Author:

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

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0300056451
• ISBN 13: 9780300056457
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272