The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children's Fiction (New Cultural Studies) (Paperback)

by Jacqueline Rose (Author) "We have been reading the wrong Freud to children..." (more)
Key Phrases: Peter Pan, The Little White Bird, Alan Garner (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press; illustrated edition edition (December 1, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812214358
• ISBN-13: 978-0812214352
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 1.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #78,854 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars rigorous, intelligent work, January 31, 2005

By	another reader - See all my reviews

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.

12 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Deocorum Please, June 11, 2001

By A Customer

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.

8 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Odd Treatment of Old Genre, October 16, 2000

By A Customer

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.