Toy Stories

Toy Stories is a tremendous contribution both to psychoanalytic literary criticism and to thing theory.---T. J. Lustig, The Review of English Studies
An invigorating stereoscopic investigation of Victorian literature and its psychic realities through Anna Freud's and Melanie Klein's competing, complementary understandings of the child. Smith rejects easy gestures of repair, education, and development to offer a reverse genealogy where violent toy stories emerge as twisted object lessons, perverse figures for character, and theatrical scenes of regression. A serious contribution to scholarship on the child, on Klein, and to recent criticism that stays with bad feeling.---Adam Frank, The University of British Columbia
Smith's recovery of the toy stories that were hiding in plain sight within nineteenth-century novels is a thrill. One finishes this original and humane study with a new understanding of what character, realism, and narrative were for Dickens, the Bront?s, and Eliot, as well as a new understanding of the novel form's relationship to the project of maturation. The object lessons of the bildungsroman were, as we learn here from a wise and generous tutor, shadowed all along by the object relations that are made manifest in childhood scenes of rough and aggressive play.---Deidre Shauna Lynch, Harvard University
Vanessa Smith's Toy Stories brilliantly dismantles the myth of childhood innocence, perhaps even dearer to the early twenty-first century than to the Victorians. It offers us a theory of the sadistic child as, startlingly, a portrait of both the nineteenth-century novelist and the modern 'adult.' This audaciously original book will be essential reading for anyone interested in Victorian fiction and in the stories we continue to tell ourselves about what it means to grow up.---Joseph Litvak, Tufts University