Book Description
An analysis, critical but not unfriendly, of the works of Barrie. Discusses the intent as well as the implications of Barrie's writings. Includes lengthy discussions of several of his works as well as an extended analysis of the man and of his philosophy as an author.

THIS TITLE IS CITED AND RECOMMENDED BY:Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. ... Read more

Book 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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

rigorous, intelligent work
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.

Deocorum Please
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.

Odd Treatment of Old Genre
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.

Worst Book Ever
I am a high school student and I am not ashamed to say that i have an affinity for children's literature, particularly english, such as Alice inWonderland, Harry Potter (all of them), and especially PETER PAN.Thisliterature contains a magic that this author proceeds to bash at everychance she gets.I mean, are children supposed to read about oil spillsand war?Preserve the magic of childhood people!

Agreed -- Don't Read It
The book is absurd.Rose reifies "culture," assuming that it is a property of "children" or "adults."As a result, she fails to recognize that the process of enculturation is actually a sharingof cultural resources rather than a colonialist imposition of culturalhegemony. Furthermore in using Freudian psychoanalysis, she undermines hercounterhegemonic cultural critique, as Freud, himself, maintained a viewthat "the child" is less than the civilized adult.As a resultof these two fatal errors, her analysis is bogus. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Magnificent work, if...
Actually, it is the first issue that I have to say with satisfaction. This work is extremely considered as one of the best case study of one literature should be rendered. Though, it is too much with mythology and those explanatory stuffs contained at the first part which I didn't recognize if it works with the whole system of this book. However, the most fascinating part is still living inside the psychological approach to Peter Pan and how it was organized by its ambiguous characterization. Crucially, that's the chapter that you couldn't have missed.

Not for the layman
According to my therapist I have an issue with the "puer eternus" archetype.

I decided to acquaint myself with my puer. I found Ann Yeoman's book to be rather too terse, scholarly, academic and specialist for my purposes. I think one would have to be very familiar with Jungian analysis to really be able to derive something useful from the book. I am simply too unfamiliar with the concepts and the vocabulary and as such have found it to be a frustrating struggle.

I am waiting for Marie-Louise Von Franz' work on the same topic which I expect will be much more accessible based on the sample chapters I have been able to read of Miss Von Franz' other books.

I am sure this is a good book, but think about who you are and what you need before ordering it.

Now or Neverland
In "Now or Neverland," Ann Yeoman invites her readers to explore the complex world of the archetype of the eternal boy (puer aeternus) through her lively psychological analysis of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan.Yeoman's book is an outstanding example of interdisciplinary scholarship. She intelligently integrates the work done in such seemingly diverse fields as Mythological Studies (Eliade, Campbell, Kerenyi), Literary Criticism (Frye, Calvino, Armitt), and Analytical Psychology (Jung, Hillman, von Franz). Her use of literature, both poetry (Coleridge, Auden, Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley) and fiction (Dostoyevsky, Joyce, Melville), to illuminate various dimensions of puer psychology is outstanding and speaks highly of her as a literary scholar. Her cultural contextualization of Peter Pan in history (Edwardian England, the current Information Revolution, the British public school system) presents a provocative analysis of the collective psychology of the times. Finally, her reinterpretation and elaboration of earlier (1970s) studies of puer psychology and psychopathology by analytical (Jungian) psychologists, makes her one of the foremost authorities on the psychology of what popular culture has called the "Peter Pan Syndrome". There is little doubt that Now or Neverland will become a classic and take its place alongside Hillman's "Puer Papers" and von Franz's "The Problem of Puer Aeternus."

A New Persective on the Peter Pan Myth
Peter Pan was always a childhood favorite of mine. Now, having read Ann Yeoman's "Now and Neverland. Peter Pan on the Myth of Eternal Youth",I will approach the story and its characters with a new and, dare I say it, "grown-up" (sorry Peter) perspective.

Ms.Yeoman's writing style is clear and a pleasure to read. She presents uniqueand interesting insight into the hero, Peter Pan in an easy to followmanner and hence facilitates an "deeper" understanding of themyth and how it relates to us all.

I highly recommend it!

<I>Now or Neverland</I> : Peter Pan, Enigmatic Messenger
I've just finished reading Ann Yeoman's stunning Jungian book, Now or Neverland Inner City Books, 1998, ISBN 0-919123-83-X. 191 pp.)I'm going to read it again quite soon, as it is so packed with new information and living ideas a single reading can't do it justice.I picked it up because I'm interested in the Divine Child and the Puer Aeternus archetypes, which I believe are very closely related, and I thought Peter Pan might have something to say on the matter.He does, but it's backward -- he is a strangely subversive and disruptive figure, refusing to settle into any one role -- hovering at the window of Barrie's England (its stuffy ideals still very much a part of our own social history and psyche), but equally uncomfortable in the Neverland to which he always escapes, no matter how much he crows and manipulates an enthralled Wendy, her brothers and the Lost Boys and the rest of Neverland.He is, this Peter Pan, an enigmatic, often dark figure, related to gods like Mercurius, Pan, Dionysus, and an astonishing lot of others (Icarus, Prometheus, Lucifer and Narcissus are mentioned, I think quite correctly).

I shall certainly never read PETER PAN the same way again -- forget Mary Martin or that Disney fraud.Forget Robin Williams too.

I wanted to read this book because Ann Yeoman is combining a career at New College, University of Toronto, where she is Dean of Students with teaching Jung and literature courses and a small practice as a Jungian analyst.What I hadn't expected was her brilliant concluding chapter, in which she compares Neverland and the Internet. She is certainly the first Jungian analyst I've found who is addressing the kinds of problems that have been concerning me for the past five years.So we may find out something about Peter Pan's dilemma from cyberspace -- I have certainly met lost boys (and lost girls) floating around, scarcely remembering where home is, and heard more than one ticking crocodile. There's more to come from this Peter Pan -- we have not heard the last word from him or from Ann Yeoman.

From the concluding chapter - "Peter Pan provides a metaphor for the unknown new - rootless consciousness is the dis-ease of contemporary society as it faces an uncertain future.The radical uncertainty of our future finds its own metaphor in our rapidly evolving electronic technology. In many ways, the elusive promise embodied in Peter Pan is the promise also of cyberspace.The new electronic era invites us to enter an indeterminate virtual realm where, it seems, everything and anything is possible, where we may create ourselves as we desire, where freedom and creativity know no bounds.Yet the very metaphors we use to describe this virtual zone are ambiguous. Netscape, Web, Internet, Windows, Paths -- images of boundless potential, but also metaphors for entrapment and delusion. On the one hand, Internet users access a seemingly unlimited network of information; on the other, the value and structure of that same information must be questioned, if one is not to run the risk of having one's mind made up for one, as an unwitting adherent of, to quote Derrick de Kerckhove, a 'collective, techno-cultural morality' which generates an 'average and averaging psychology.' Who are we when flying in the Neverland of cyberspace?" (pp. 175-6)

Sir James Barrie (who gave us both play and novel) and his creation Peter Pan are both a bit uncanny, unsettling. What message do they bring us today, as we fly toward the sill of the new Millennium? ... Read more

Book Description
Walt Disneyis Peter Pan: The Sketchbook Series features the preliminary sketches used to create the Disney animated classic Peter Pan (1953) and contains more than 150 black-and-white sketches done by such Disney greats as Milt Kahl, Frank Thomas, and Ollie Johnston. In addition this sketchbook contains 12 color reproductions of original background studies done by David Hall and Mary Blair used in styling the film. Each book is a collectoris edition limited to 2,500 copies, and contains a numbered certificate of authenticity. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Disney's Sketchbooks - Great Resource for Artists!
This fine addition to the Disney Sketchbook series has many of the wonderful sketches done by Disney's animation department for Peter Pan, including many pieces from the storyboards, and several sketches of scenes that never made it into the final film.

Artists that would like to study the Disney style of drawing and animation should find this volume a terrific addition to their collection despite its rather high price. As a student of art, and a fan of the Disney style, I highly recommend any of these books for your library.

A Beautiful Book
This is an exquisitely made book and if you are at all interested in animation or disney art, this or any of the sketchbook series books are a must.Each character has it's section where various sketch drawings are shown.There are also some background pictures. No text, but a delight to flip through.Beautifully designed and packaged. ... Read more