The Lands of Escape: The Manipulation of Adult Linear Time in British Children's Literature Fantasy Worlds of the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries

Abstract

The time-stop story emerges in England in 1865 with the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Time-stop novels share many qualities with their sister genre, the time-slip novel. Where time-slip novels focus primarily on heritage and national identity, time-stop novels deal with issues of time and growing up, or more specifically, not growing up. In this thesis, I focus on examining four authors' time-stop works: Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, and Philippa Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden. These secondary worlds reveal the attitudes about time and the conflict between childhood and adulthood of the authors who created them, as well as how childhood is culturally constructed at the time the novel was written.