Blow notes that at the age of seven, Barrie suffered and grieved because his older brother (David, nearly 14 years old) was killed in a skating accident. "The bond of sorrow" brought James and his mother closer together than they had been, and part of that bonding included the two reading books to one another, Blow explains (Blow, 1957, p
Berrie advancing "…a pedagogy that disrupts drives toward normalizing conventional racial categories…" as one of the essayists asserts in the book (Pharand, p. 226)? Or is the novel actually approaching whiteness and racial issues at the turn of the 20th Century from another angle entirely? On the subject of racial categories, Mary Brewer's scholarly article in the Cambridge University Press takes the position that the story of Peter Pan embraces "…the amorphous status granted to whiteness in the text," which lends it "cultural authority" (Brewer, 2007, p
The book has a beautiful illustration (made by Barrie) of the Kensington Gardens, with his own fictional venues prominently displayed. There is the Fairies' Winter Palace, the Bird's Island, the Fairies' Basin and, of course, X marks the spot where "Peter Pan landed" (Johnstone, 1998, pp
4). On the subject of his brother dying, author Anthony Lane writes in the New Yorker that James' brother David was killed when a fellow ice-skater hit him and David fell backwards and "cracked his skull" (Lane, 2004, p
Peter Pan Is Peter Pan really only a children's story -- or is it, as Michel W. Pharand states, "…also a surprisingly -- often shockingly -- adult story" (Pharand, 2007, p
392). In her book Now or Neverland: Peter Pan and the Myth of Eternal Youth -- a Psychological Perspective on a Cultural Icon, author Ann Yeoman expresses what critics and scholars know very well, that as readers "…we have license to propose a number of possible developments" for the characters Berrie has created in the book (Yeoman, 1998, p
Barrie…is something even more rare" than a genius. He is "a child who, by some divine grace, can express through an artistic medium the childishness that is in him" (Beerbohm)
"Our dreams are nearer to us than our childhood," he explains, and it is "natural" that Peter Pan "should remind us more instantly of our dreams than of our childish fancies" (Beerbohm). Among the scholarly research into methodologies in Berrie's novel, Holly Blackford seems to have hit on a thorny one: the "parallels" between Wuthering Heights and Peter Pan "are intensely revealing" (Blackford, 2005)
That said, an examination into the methodologies that scholars and intellectuals have already conducted is a worthy rationale to embrace on the path to a more thorough understanding of the book. Literature Review of Methodologies Does anyone in the scholarly literary critique business really understand why Berrie made the provocative comments -- purportedly to the five sons of his friends Arthur Llewellyn Davies and Davies' wife Sylvia du Maurier -- in his initial dedication of his book? Berrie claims he "made Peter Pan" through a process of "rubbing the five of you violently together, as savages with two sticks" to "produce a flame"? (Maslin, 2009)
The methodology that is employed by Berrie, according to Richard Rotert, is psychologically based. The "barred window excludes Peter as a participant" in the mother-child nursery scene, according to critic Rotert (Rotert, 1990)
Literature Review of Methodologies Does anyone in the scholarly literary critique business really understand why Berrie made the provocative comments -- purportedly to the five sons of his friends Arthur Llewellyn Davies and Davies' wife Sylvia du Maurier -- in his initial dedication of his book? Berrie claims he "made Peter Pan" through a process of "rubbing the five of you violently together, as savages with two sticks" to "produce a flame"? (Maslin, 2009). Critic Ann Wilson explains that Berrie's methodology in building the story was through an "anxious and nostalgic" rejection of modern industrial society (Wilson, 2000)