Skip to content

Booksellers & Trade Customers: Sign up for online bulk buying at trade.atlanticbooks.com for wholesale discounts

Booksellers: Create Account on our B2B Portal for wholesale discounts

When Toys Come Alive: Narratives of Animation, Metamorphosis, and Development

by Lois Rostow Kuznets
Save 17% Save 17%
Current price ₹7,323.00
Original price ₹8,788.00
Original price ₹8,788.00
Original price ₹8,788.00
(-17%)
₹7,323.00
Current price ₹7,323.00

Imported Edition - Ships in 18-21 Days

Free Shipping in India on orders above Rs. 500

Request Bulk Quantity Quote
+91
Book cover type: Hardcover
  • ISBN13: 9780300056457
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • Subject: N/A
  • Publisher: Yale University Press
  • Publisher Imprint: Yale University Press
  • Publication Date:
  • Pages: 272
  • Original Price: GBP 51.0
  • Language: English
  • Edition: N/A
  • Item Weight: 545 grams
  • BISAC Subject(s): General

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.

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

Trusted for over 49 years

Family Owned Company

Secure Payment

All Major Credit Cards/Debit Cards/UPI & More Accepted

New & Authentic Products

India's Largest Distributor

Need Support?

Whatsapp Us