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When toys come alive : narratives of animation, metamorphosis, and development / Lois Rostow Kuznets.
Author
Kuznets, Lois R.
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Format
Book
Language
English
Published/Created
New Haven : Yale University Press, ©1994.
©1994
Description
xiii, 257 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
Availability
Available Online
JSTOR DDA
Copies in the Library
Location
Call Number
Status
Location Service
Notes
Firestone Library - Stacks
PN56.M53 K89 1994
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Details
Subject(s)
Metamorphosis in literature
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Toys in literature
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Children's literature
—
History and criticism
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Fantasy literature
—
History and criticism
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Children
—
Books and reading
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Getty AAT genre
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Summary note
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.
Bibliographic references
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents
An introduction to my world of literary toys
Toys : their first ten thousand years
On the couch with Calvin, Hobbes, and Winnie the Pooh
Coming out in flesh and blood
Where have all the young men gone?
The doll connection
Magic settings, transitional space
The animal-toy league
Beyond the last visible toy
Life(size) endowments : monsters, automata, robots, cyborgs.
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Other title(s)
Narratives of animation, metamorphosis, and development
ISBN
0300056451 ((alk. paper))
9780300056457 ((alk. paper))
LCCN
93040849
OCLC
29313122
Statement on language in description
Princeton University Library aims to describe library materials in a manner that is respectful to the individuals and communities who create, use, and are represented in the collections we manage.
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When toys come alive : narratives of animation, metamorphosis, and development / Lois Rostow Kuznets.
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