Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

In this "very personalized tour of the literary world of animated toys," Kuznets (San Diego State) makes no attempt at a complete survey. Instead, focusing on a few representative texts, most aimed at children, she follows "an intertextual approach" that combines the close textual analysis of New Criticism and the insights of a variety of disciplines. Early chapters depend on theories of the construction of childhood and of play, especially those of the psychologist D.W. Winnicott, as the basis for interesting analyses of such works as Winnie the Pooh, Calvin and Hobbes, and Pinocchio. Fortunately, the theoretical background that nearly overwhelms these early readings is less prominent in later chapters. Looking closely at stories featuring dolls, warriors, robots, and toys embarked on the male quest adventure outlined by Joseph Campbell, Kuznets reveals how toys in literature reflect the desires and needs of patriarchal society. Feminism is central to her provocative analyses, but Kuznets is never doctrinaire. Consequently, she succeeds admirably in forcing readers to examine the disturbing assumptions underlying texts that previously seemed innocent. Upper-division undergraduate and up. R. E. Jones; University of Alberta

Author notes provided by Syndetics

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