I Dream of Hobbes
Document Type
Panel Presentation
Start Date
23-4-2021 10:45 AM
Keywords
Animals, Children's Literature
Biography
Kristin Maynard is a graduate student in the Department of English.
Major
English
Advisor for this project
Nicole Lawrence
Abstract
The persistence of the toy animal as a companion to humans in various media (particularly children’s books) is an interesting one spanning back to the early twentieth century with William and Nicholson’s The Velveteen Rabbit and Milne’s Winne the Pooh. These portrayals depict the animal as being living yet inanimate – as conscious stuffed toys. This depiction was not static in its development however, with the toy/imagined companion peaking with Waterson’s Calvin and Hobbes. In my essay on the Imagined and Imaginary Animal, I will pursue the idea of the development and portrayal of the toy animal as simultaneously animal and human and these pseudo-living creature’s relationships with human characters and other toys along a chronological and thematic timeline as the toy develops into a being neither real nor stuffed, autonomous nor owned, human nor animal, yet still psychologically aware and independent from the human that gives them life.
I Dream of Hobbes
The persistence of the toy animal as a companion to humans in various media (particularly children’s books) is an interesting one spanning back to the early twentieth century with William and Nicholson’s The Velveteen Rabbit and Milne’s Winne the Pooh. These portrayals depict the animal as being living yet inanimate – as conscious stuffed toys. This depiction was not static in its development however, with the toy/imagined companion peaking with Waterson’s Calvin and Hobbes. In my essay on the Imagined and Imaginary Animal, I will pursue the idea of the development and portrayal of the toy animal as simultaneously animal and human and these pseudo-living creature’s relationships with human characters and other toys along a chronological and thematic timeline as the toy develops into a being neither real nor stuffed, autonomous nor owned, human nor animal, yet still psychologically aware and independent from the human that gives them life.
