Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (1984)

Abstract

Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan is an exemplary work of cultural and literary history. It takes J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan one of the most obvious and evident of cultural products, and ‘makes it strange’by taking us back through the multiple determinations that have informed its production. Rose demonstrates the impossibility of locating Peter Pan’s origins either in the ‘author’ J. M. Barrie or in any one of the numerous manifestations of the Peter Pan texts she discusses. Instead, her book sketches how Peter Pan finds its existence in relation both to commercial imperatives and educational standards. In both cases what determines the form of the text are certain conceptions of the child; it is in the question of the child and how the child is conceived by adults that Rose’s analysis finds its unifying theme. The subtitle of the book, ‘the impossibility of children’s fiction’, indicates her central argument here: that the child in ‘children’s fiction’ is always an adult fantasy.