J.M. Barrie

In order to gain a deeper understanding of contemporary literary, comic book, film, or TV series references to "Alice," "The Wizard of Oz" and 'Peter Pan" (...), the enduring fame of these works, and the role they have played in the past and continue to play today, it is essential to refer both to the content of the originals and to other, often overlooked in professional reflection, manifestations of their presence in our imagination. The main goal of the book is to describe how the classics of children's literature (...) have functioned and still function in the cultural imaginarium (...). The study of this imaginarium – miraculous, but to some extent also real – can be carried out by studying the fate of sense-making figures and significant texts in order to determine the ways in which ideas about them circulate in the collective consciousness (...). Therefore, the studies contained in the monograph concern not only literary works understood as finished stories closed between the pages of books, but also the "long life" of Carroll's duology, Baum's cycle, and Barrie's works in various cultural media, registers, and genres (...). The important questions are what the individual stories said and still say about human fears and dreams; what childhood and adulthood, children's and adult literature, reality and fantasy used to be and what they are today for the Western world; what we culturally remember about Carroll, Baum, and Barrie and what we have forgotten. (from the "Introduction", trans. by the author of the book – MS).

Children are lightening rods for feelings of dispossession.  As Freud argues in “Family Romances,” there is a ubiquitous fantasy among children that they have been displaced from their “real” parents and cast into a family to whom they don’t belong.  While this fantasy underlies a great number of fictional texts about children, I consider the problem from the opposite perspective: the fantasy the adult has that the child is not his or her own, that it is fake, a changeling, a counterfeit.  Drawing on insights from queer theory, psychoanalysis and philosophy, I analyse “the counterfeit child” in the disparate fields of children’s literature (through J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and his memoir of his mother) and the contemporary horror film, Orphan.  What, I ask, does the counterfeit child do?  How does it skew our official relationship to the vexed category of childhood?  What position does the counterfeit enforce in regard to sentimentality, and how can it help us to think (differently) about current theoretical impasses regarding children and futurity?

This essay maintains that child-centered art was integral to Anglo-American mass culture in the period from 1880 to 1920 and argues for a redefinition of this “cult of the child.” Rather than limiting our focus to English authors and making gender and sexuality the central terms of our analysis, scholars of literature, drama, and film should regard the cult as a transgeneric, transatlantic phenomenon that coincided with the rise of consumer capitalism and registered a wide array of contemporary anxieties, including concerns about class stratification and racial tension. The allure of crowd-pleasing child protagonists such as Little Lord Fauntleroy, the Little Colonel, and Peter Pan often derives not from their perfect purity, but from their ability to oscillate between identity categories and, in so doing, help others more “set in their ways” to follow suit and become less committed to the norms and prejudices belonging to their sociocultural position.

Antarctica hosts access to the tangible past, with ice-cores working as an archive of the earth’s climate memory. However, our constructed cultural memories of Antarctica are more difficult to read, and our records of the past were written with an eye to their legacy for the future. Rebecca Hunt’s 2014 novel, Everland, critiques Antarctic exploration legacy as a way of remembering and learning from the past. Her novel juxtaposes two expeditions, set a century apart, and depicts time as frozen through the use of repetitions and doppelgängers. I contend that this challenge to cultural memory is connected specifically with Robert Falcon Scott’s legacy, and particularly the link between Scott and J. M. Barrie’s eternal youth, Peter Pan. Scott is represented as a Lost Boy of the Neverland of Antarctica, and this problematic conception of Antarctica itself as a Neverland of the Victorian Imperial era is part of our cultural memory of the continent. While exploring the problematisation of legacies of the past raised by Hunt’s novel, I assert that the book exhibits the present historically, pointing to our own legacy left for the future, and indicates the dangers of intentionally ignoring or misremembering the present. I argue that by confronting our cultural memories of Antarctica, we are re-evaluating both Antarctica’s past, and its future.

When The Admirable Crichton, a play in four acts by J.M. Barrie, was first produced in 1902, England’s horizon was endless. Tropical climes and questions of social Darwinism would have been buzzing in the ballrooms, as it certainly was in the theatre. "The Admirable Crichton" creates a forum for discussing Society through the reversal of Crichton’s caste as a butler with his paramour Lady Mary’s caste as a lady according to the system of British peerage. It also allows for a discussion of gender roles and expectations, as well as providing entertainment and maintaining a safe comedic distance from reality. Though Crichton is no longer the butler and Lord Loam is no longer a lord, the hierarchy on the deserted island remains the same. For the purpose of this discussion, a lens is focused on both the British Island and Crichton’s island, the lack of change in the women’s circumstances, and the way in which women are oppressed based on the mere happenstance of gender.