James Kincaid, Peter Pan & Grimm's Tales

"By insisting so loudly on the innocence, purity and asexuality of the child, we have created a subversive echo: experience, corruption, exoticism." This statement from James Kincaid's work on Victorian children's literature would be later expanded and ramified to provide the central thesis for Kincaid's study Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting, a work which inquires into the cultural investment that contemporary mainstream American culture has in the idea of "childhood innocence." I would like to examine Kincaid's thesis a little more closely, then I would like to apply it to three proof-texts: James Barrie's Peter Pan and the stories of Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood as they appear in the versions collected by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm. It is my hope to show that the antagonists in these stories seem defined by Kincaid's "subversive echo" of the cultural...
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