Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent unused condition. No notes or highlighting. No dustcover so sold as good condition instead of very good. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> I studied and wrote about Edwardian author and toy collector Kenneth Grahame whose early essays and stories often brought forth marvelously intricate descriptions of toys. Although I noted Grahame’s toys as evocatively charming they did not attract my principal attention for they were rarely animated in a viable narrative of their own. They paled beside the woodland creatures he created in The Wind in the Willows. In the fall of 1986 however about the time I was finishing my study of Grahame I was invited to give a talk at the opening of the Elizabeth Ball Collection of Children’s Books at the Lilly Library of Indiana University I discovered that among the treasures of the Ball Collection were many toy books and harlequinades. I cannot trace the paths of association that led from Grahame’s soy descriptions and my notions of toy books to the topic on which I finally talked “From Andersen to Hoban: Toys as Characters in Literature “Nevertheless that talk became the basis of this study Everything I have always known about the secret lives of in literature began to emerge then toys At first I hardly realized the multidisciplinary ramifications of my interest in toy characters. My scholarly and imaginative reading led me into not only fiction but history psychology anthropology literary theory and finally computer sciences struggles with artificial intelligence. (LL)