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Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan of the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 1992 [1984]), p. 1. For a discussion of the problems of assuming an opposition or hierarchy between ‘sociology’ and the ‘literary’ see: Stephen Thomson, ‘The Instance of the Veil: Bordieu’s Flaubert and the Textuality of Social Science’, Comparative Literature, 55: 4 (Autumn, 2003), 275-292. See for my extensive discussions on this kind of misunderstanding of Derrida’s textuality especially: Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child (Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1994), although all my work engages with the problems of such misunderstandings in thinking about childhood, gender and disability, as referenced in note 6 below. Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), p. 355. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 2008 [1989]), p. 3. See for my previous arguments about the misreading or ignoring of Rose: ‘The Psychopathology of Everyday Children’s Literature Criticism’, Cultural Critique, 45, Autumn 2000, 222-42; ‘Childhood, Queer Theory, and Feminism’, Feminist Theory, 11:3, December 2010, 309-21; ‘Introduction: Voice, Agency and the Child’ in Karín Lesnik-Oberstein (ed.), Children in Culture, Revisited: Further Approaches to Childhood (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2011), pp. 1-18; and for my further arguments around the ignoring of Haraway as well as a wider critique of neuroscience: ‘Motherhood, Evolutionary Psychology and Mirror Neurons or: “Grammar is Politics by Other Means”’, Feminist Theory, 16:2, May 2015, 171-187, doi: 10.1177/1464700115586514 David Rudd and Anthony Pavlik, ‘The (Im)Possibility of Children’s Fiction: Rose Twenty-Five Years On’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 35:3, Fall 2010, 223-229, 225. Gabrielle Owen, ‘Queer Theory Wrestles the “Real” Child: Impossibility, Identity, and Language in Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 35:3, Fall 2010, 255-73, 256-7. The beginning of such an interest can – and has – been located at many different points, ranging from nineteenth-century ideas of heredity and phrenology, to Charles Darwin’s writings in and of themselves, to developments in evolutionary psychology of which Hilary Rose and Stephen Rose wrote in 2000 that they had ‘grown dramatically’ ‘[o]ver the last ten years’ (Hilary Rose and Stephen Rose, ‘Introduction’ to Hilary Rose and Stephen Rose (eds), Alas Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology (London: Vintage, 2001), pp, 1-14, p. 1), to Jonathan Kramnick’s observation that the ‘[a]cademic year 2008–2009 was something of a watershed moment for literary Darwinism, marked by the twin publication of Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (New York, 2009) […] and Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Cambridge, Mass., 2009).’ (Jonathan Kramnick, ‘Against Literary Darwinism’, Critical Inquiry, Winter 2011, 315-47, 315). There have been heated debates about literary criticism that draws in evolutionary psychology (sometimes called ‘Literary Darwinism’); see, for instance, Thomas Karshan, ‘Evolutionary Criticism’, Essays in Criticism, LIX:4 (October 2009), 287-301 and Jonathan Kramnick, ‘Against Literary Darwinism’. Neil Cocks, unpublished manuscript, February 2012 (quoted by kind permission); Cocks’s formulation here echoes Rose’s critique of the child and the unconscious as not ‘something separate which can be scrutinised and assessed’ (The Case of Peter Pan, p. 13). For Cocks’s wider critique of cognitivism, neuroscience and evolutionary psychology see: Neil Cocks, Student-Centred: Education, Freedom and the Idea of Audience (Ashby-de-la-Zouch, 2009) and Karín Lesnik-Oberstein and Neil Cocks, ‘Back to Where We Came From: Evolutionary Psychology and Children’s Literature and Media’, in: Elisabeth Wesseling, (ed.) Reinventing Childhood Nostalgia: Books, Toys, and Contemporary Media Culture, Studies in Childhood: 1700 to the present (London: Routledge, 2017). Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, p. 9. Sandra Dinter, ‘The Mad Child in the Attic: John Harding’s Florence & Giles as a Neo-Victorian Reworking of The Turn of the Screw’, Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies, 5:1 (2012) 60-88. Dinter, 63-4, referencing Marie-Luise Kohlke, ‘Neo-Victorian Childhoods: Re-Imagining the Worst of Times’, in Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben (eds.), Neo-Victorian Families: Gender, Sexual and Cultural Politics (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2011), pp. 119-147, p. 144 (original emphasis), and p. 128. Sue Walsh, ‘Child/Animal: It’s the “Real” Thing’, The Yearbook of English Studies, Special Issue on ‘Children in Literature’, 32, Children in Literature (2002), 151-162, 162. See for reviews of how different disciplines engage with the child ‘Childhood and Textuality: Culture, History, Literature’ in Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, Children in Culture: Approaches to Childhood (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), pp. 1-28 and Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, ‘Introduction: Voice, Agency and the Child’. Dinter, p. 64. Dinter, p. 62. Dinter, p. 64. Dinter, p. 71. Dinter, p. 70; my italics. Dinter, p. 67. Dinter, p. 67. Walsh, ‘Child/Animal: It’s the “Real” Thing’, 158, referring to: Marian Scholtmeijer, Animal Victims in Modern Fiction: From Sanctity to Sacrifice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993). In claiming that this applies to ‘all children’s literature’ I mean that if this framework is not upheld, then whatever would be going on would necessarily be understood not to be ‘children’s literature’ but something else. Dinter, p. 68, referencing Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, p. 3. Dinter, p. 84. Shoshana Felman, ‘Turning the Screw of Interpretation’ in Shoshana Felman (ed.), Literature and Psychoanalysis. The Question of Reading: Otherwise (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1982 [1977]), pp. 94-208. Dinter, p. 64. Dinter, p. 66. Dinter, p. 77. Dinter, p. 82. Felman, ‘Turning the Screw of Interpretation’, pp. 106-7 (italics in original). Haraway’s position is different in this respect at least, for while I read Haraway as agreeing with Rose and Felman on the status of perspective and language, psychoanalysis is for Haraway not the explicit grounding that it is for Rose and Felman. Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, p. 12. Felman, ‘Turning the Screw of Interpretation’, p. 110 (italics in original). Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, pp. 12-3. Jacqueline Rose, ‘The Return of Peter Pan’, in Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan of the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 1992 [1984]), pp. ix-xviii, p. x. Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2012), p. xvii. I am quoting here the title of the article by the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, ‘Confusion of Tongues between Adults and Child’ (in Michael Balint (ed.), Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psychoanalysis, trans. E. Mosbacher, London: Hogarth Press, 1955 [1933], pp. 156-68) which is also referred to by Jacqueline Rose in the sub-title of her third chapter of The Case of Peter Pan (see p. 66 and p. 148, note 3). Jenny Bourne Taylor, ‘Between Atavism and Altruism; the Child on the Threshold in Victorian Psychology and Edwardian Children’s Fiction’, in Karín Lesnik-Oberstein (ed.), Children in Culture: Approaches to Childhood (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), pp. 89-121, p. 91. Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, pp. 90-1. See for a thorough critique of evolutionary psychology’s theories about autism: Helen Ainslie, ‘Perspectives and Community: Constructions of Autism and Childhood’, in Karín Lesnik-Oberstein (ed.), Children in Culture Revisited. Further Approaches to Childhood (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2011), pp. 90-107. Vittorio Gallese, Luciano Fadiga, Leonardo Fogassi and Giacomo Rizzolatti, ‘Action Recognition in the Premotor Cortex’, Brain, 119 (1996), 593-609. Yu-Kuan Chen, ‘Objects of Vision: Text, Colour, Gesture’, Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Reading, 2012, p. 270. Not coincidentally, Chen herself is inspired in turn by Jacqueline Rose’s Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 2005 [1986]). My thanks to Yu-Kuan Chen for helping me to develop my reading of the mirror-neuron claims. For a thorough discussion of the centrality of intentionality to ideas of ‘affect’ as well as a thorough wider critique of affect, see Ruth Leys, ‘The Turn to Affect: A Critique’, Critical Inquiry, 37 (Spring 2011), 434-72. John Cartwright, Evolution and Human Behaviour. Darwinian Perspectives on Human Nature (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008 (second edition)), p. 142. Carlo Salzani, Review of Joseph Carroll, Reading Human Nature: Literary Darwinism in Theory and Practice (New York, 2011), Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature, 9:2 (Fall 2011), accessed on 30th December 2012 at: http://www.brynmawr.edu/bmrcl/BMRCLFall2011/Reading%20Human%20Nature,%20Literature%20after%20Darwin.htm Hilary Rose and Steven Rose, ‘Introduction’ to Hilary Rose and Steven Rose (eds), Alas Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology, London: Vintage, 2001 [2000], pp. 1-14, p. 1. Rose and Rose, ‘Introduction’, p. 1. Rose and Rose, ‘Introduction’, p. 8. Dorothy Nelkin, ‘Less Selfish than Sacred? Genes and the Religious Impulse in Evolutionary Psychology’, in Hilary Rose and Steven Rose (eds), Alas Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology, London: Vintage, 2001 [2000], pp. 14-28. See for an excellent wider critique of the mirror neuron research from a related, but different perspective to my own, Ruth Leys, ‘“Both of Us Disgusted in My Insula”: Mirror Neuron Theory and Emotional Empathy’, Nonsite.org, issue 5, March 18th 2012, 1-25, accessed on: 11/04/2013 20:51, at: http://nonsite.org/article/“both-of-us-disgusted-in-my-insula”-mirror-neuron-theory-and-emotional-empathy. Leys is also puzzled at the ongoing popularity of mirror neuron theories and their resistance to both scientific and theoretical critiques, but does not make this question the focus of her article, concluding only that ‘Simply put, the network of presuppositions and methods associated with the Basic Emotions View is too attractive and the laboratory methods too convenient to be given up.’ (6). Salzani, “Review of Joseph Carroll, Reading Human Nature,” quoting from Carroll, Reading Human Nature, p. 78. Jonathan Kramnick, ‘Literary Studies and Science: A Reply to My Critics’, Critical Inquiry, 38:2 (Winter 2012): 431-460, 432. Julian Henriques, Wendy Hollway, Cathy Urwin, Couze Venn and Valerie Walkerdine, ‘Foreword’, in Julian Henriques, Wendy Hollway, Cathy Urwin, Couze Venn and Valerie Walkerdine, Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity, London: Vintage, 2001 [2000], pp. ix-xix, p. xviii. Julian Henriques, Wendy Hollway, Cathy Urwin, Couze Venn and Valerie Walkerdine, ‘Introduction: The Point of Departure’, in Julian Henriques, Wendy Hollway, Cathy Urwin, Couze Venn and Valerie Walkerdine, Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity, London: Vintage, 2001 [2000], pp. 1-9, p. 1. Henriques et al, ‘Introduction: The Point of Departure’, p. 2. Henriques et al, ‘Introduction: The Point of Departure’, p. 2. Shoshana Felman, ‘Foreword to Yale French Studies Edition’, in Shoshana Felman (ed.), Literature and Psychoanalysis. The Question of Reading: Otherwise (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1982 [1977]), p. 4. Henriques et al, ‘Foreword’, p. x. Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, p. 11. Rose and Rose, ‘Introduction’, p. 3. Felman, ‘Foreword to Yale French Studies Edition’, p. 4 (italics in original).