After-Life Archetype
Presenter Bio
Vanessa received her BA in Classical Studies and a Master of European Studies from the University of Guelph. She is currently a third-year PhD student in the Humanities at York University, where her research explores adaptations and marginalia in children's literature—focusing on how these elements shape cultural narratives and reader engagement across time. Vanessa is deeply passionate about fostering collaboration and promoting cultural education through community involvement.
Session
Imaginative Play at Pooh Corner
Start Date
11-7-2026 11:00 AM
End Date
11-7-2026 12:15 PM
Abstract
This paper introduces the “After-Life Archetype” as a new model for understanding the resilience of children’s literature, arguing that survival is not an inherent quality of texts but a process shaped by material production, imaginative play, and cultural value. Moving beyond traditional bibliographic frameworks, it challenges the concept of children’s books not simply as texts but as dynamic objects that exist across a continuum of care, from production and marketplace circulation to child use, domestic preservation, and institutional archiving. In doing so, it reframes literary criticism as an inquiry not only into meaning but into the conditions that determine which books endure, and why. Central to this argument is the role of imaginative play. Children’s books function as toys, commodities, and experiential objects through their use by way of handling, marking, damaging, and personalizing, that allows the book to become a form of interpretation. Drawing on theoretical approaches including actor-network theory, psychoanalytic understandings of play, and studies of anthropomorphism and material culture, the paper argues that imaginative engagement socializes children into adult behaviours of ownership, care, and valuation. At the same time, these interactions inscribe memory into the book, transforming it from a disposable object into a vessel of affect and nostalgia.
After-Life Archetype
This paper introduces the “After-Life Archetype” as a new model for understanding the resilience of children’s literature, arguing that survival is not an inherent quality of texts but a process shaped by material production, imaginative play, and cultural value. Moving beyond traditional bibliographic frameworks, it challenges the concept of children’s books not simply as texts but as dynamic objects that exist across a continuum of care, from production and marketplace circulation to child use, domestic preservation, and institutional archiving. In doing so, it reframes literary criticism as an inquiry not only into meaning but into the conditions that determine which books endure, and why. Central to this argument is the role of imaginative play. Children’s books function as toys, commodities, and experiential objects through their use by way of handling, marking, damaging, and personalizing, that allows the book to become a form of interpretation. Drawing on theoretical approaches including actor-network theory, psychoanalytic understandings of play, and studies of anthropomorphism and material culture, the paper argues that imaginative engagement socializes children into adult behaviours of ownership, care, and valuation. At the same time, these interactions inscribe memory into the book, transforming it from a disposable object into a vessel of affect and nostalgia.