| ||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £1.55
Trade in The Case of Peter Pan: Or the Impossibility of Children's Fiction (New Cultural Studies) for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £1.55, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Plus, get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
"Rose's searching arguments are complex and concentrated. This is the book children's literature has needed for some time. It combines scholarly examination of primary sources with historical commentary, the social history of childhood and critical theory derived from psychoanalysis... It is a challenge to critics to examine the whole range of cultural practices attached to stories for children."-London Review of Books "Everyone interested in the way in which the balance of power between adult and child in our society is expressed in the books offered by the former to the latter should read Rose's study of Peter Pan."-Times Education Supplement
Product Description
What is the meaning of Peter Pan -- not for J. M. Barrie, but for the thousands who have continued to purchase for children version after version of the story and who have faithfully attended the productions of the play? What does Peter Pan have to say about our conception of childhood, about how we understand the child's and our own relationship to language, sexuality, and death? What can Peter Pan tell us about the theatrical, literary, and educational institutions of which it is a part?
These are some of the questions this book attempts to answer. Shifting attention away from J. M. Barrie, the originator of Peter Pan, it asks instead what is the nature of our own desire or investment in this phenomenon of our culture. In the course of her investigation, Jacqueline Rose identifies behind Peter Pan a fantasy of childhood which she traces back through the history of children's fiction, forward to modern critical commentaries on children's writing, and into some of the most contemporary writers of books for children today.
Originally published in 1984, The Case of Peter Pan is now widely available in the United States for the first time. Peter Pan, Rose contends, forces us to question what it is we are doing in the endless production and dissemination of children's fiction. In a new introductory essay written especially for this edition, Rose considers some of Peter Pan's new guises and their implications. From Spielberg's Hook, to the lesbian production of the play at the London Drill Hall in 1991, to debates in the English House of Lords, to a newly claimed status as the icon of a transvestite culture, Peter Pan continues to demonstrate its bizarre renewability as a cultural fetishof our times.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
We have been reading the wrong Freud to children. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
We have been reading the wrong Freud to children. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
18 of 19 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Jacqueline Rose's book was first published in 1984, and remains the most important book on children's literature, and is also vital on childhood in general. Rose argues that 'childhood' is a category of identity which changes over time, and not some kind of 'scientific' ('psychological') 'truth' for all time. She then considers how such an idea impacts on adults writing books 'for' children, but also on the wider implications of how and why a society defines 'childhood' in the ways it does. This is not an easy book, but then this is not an easy topic, despite the frequent assumption that anything to do with children must be simple. If that were really the case, why are education and child raising such complex issues?! Rose's book goes a long way to thinking about all of this in a much more complex and thoughtful way than almost any other work I know.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book is virtually essential reading if you are doing a children's literature degree. Thought provoking and very useful!
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
6 reviews
16 of 22 people found the following review helpful
rigorous, intelligent work
31 Jan 2005
Format:Paperback
This book is a very well-written and brilliantly argued engagement with an important and under-theorized topic. If you like literary theoretical work that challenges assumptions about childhood, desire, culture, and reading, you should check the book out. On the other hand, if you aren't into psychoanalytic work, this book will not be your cup of tea. In the book Rose discusses the way in which Peter Pan has become a cultural phenomenon unto itself, and argues that the obsession with innocence and eternal childhood reveals not something about children necessarily, but rather something about the investment adults have in childhood. Rose wants to interrogate children's fiction as a phenomenon produced by adults. She is very concerned about the specter of child abuse, and this book is her contribution to understanding this phenomenon and its proliferation better. This may be a difficult set of ideas for many to understand, since her argument flies in the face of deeply-cherished assumptions about childhood (many of which indeed play a part in the deep problems our culture has in ethical relations to children). But it is precisely this phenomenon of emotional and peremptory devotion to the idea of innocence that Rose argues gets in the way of a useful understanding of how child sexual abuse operates. This book also delves into the history of Peter Pan and children's fiction in general, which is fascinating.
14 of 30 people found the following review helpful
Deocorum Please
11 Jun 2001
Format:Paperback
Jacqueline Rose has done some serious scholarship in literary criticism, but this work is dubious, at best. I'm not sure why she misses the mark so poorly in this extended essay on the link between children's fiction and the publishing industry. But the work is very un-focused and rather trite. The approach is a bit dated, and I can imagine that perhaps the book is more an extended discourse on the theoretical apparatus that she seems to be enamored with rather than a solid interpretation of Peter Pan. The book is really an odd one, and it left me feeling so disgusted that I did not wish to finish the tome. Although, the other reviewers are a bit too vituperative in their critique, this book really strikes me as somewhat immature.
10 of 24 people found the following review helpful
Odd Treatment of Old Genre
16 Oct 2000
Format:Paperback
Rose's analysis is dubious. She attempts to make the claim that Barrie created a new genre of fantasy with the publication of Peter Pan. The problem is that Barrie's books about Peter Pan are actually components of a genre well-studied and documented for hundreds of years. Even a cursory read of scholarship in folklore would have clearly demonstrated to Rose that Peter Pan is a Marchen, a genre of folklore in which a poor, obscure hero is called to complete acts of bravery in a land of fantasy and magic. There are numerous other problems with her analysis. Even reading this study as an essay on contemporary social issues is a confusing exercise, at best, because Rose's style tends to obfuscate rather than to provide any semblance of clarity. Sorry to be so critical of literary criticism, but incoherence and bad writing simply do not belong in scholarly discourse.
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
