Looking Glasses and Neverlands - Lacan, Desire, and Subjectivity in Children's Literature

The texts render lucid Lacan’s theory, and the theory helps explain why the texts remain so profoundly influential in constructing a child’s sense of self.

Coats shows how our literate culture has come to define and cope with the inevitable losses and separations of childhood, and how discourses of race, gender, and desire get written on our bodies, transforming us into the subjects we are. The book offers a comprehensive introduction to Lacan’s theories of subjectivity, gender, and ethics and also extends those theories into discussions of race and the distinctions between modernist and postmodernist subjectivity.

Looking Glasses and Neverlands will be of great interest to students and scholars of children’s and adolescent literature and readers interested in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and the psychoanalytic study of culture and society.