• childhood
• adulthood
• age identity
• cultural studies
• queer theory
• children's literature
• implied reader
• Peter Pan
• J.M. Barrie
• age studies
• Wolfgang Iser

This thesis argues in favour of bringing together deconstructive studies and reader-response criticism as tools of literary analysis, focussing on J.M. Barrie's 'Peter and Wendy' (1911) as a case study. In particular, it explores the ways in which the implied reader(s) of the novel are informed by cultural constructs related to age. In doing so, it underlines the most productive points of contact between the literary fields it employs, leveraging them to carry out an original reading of a classic text of children's literature.


'Peter and Wendy' has been discussed by critics both for the constructs of childhood that it implies, and because it envisions a ‘double addressee’ composed of child and adult readers. These are crucial themes for several literary fields: children’s literature studies, as well as branches of cultural studies that differ from one another but share an interest in deconstructing social identities.

This thesis explores the interconnections between the two themes through a shift in perspective, employing Wolfgang Iser’s theory of reader-response criticism. It reframes the question of the double addressee by identifying two implied readers in the novel, a ‘child’ and an ‘adult’ one, and by describing the defining features of each. Then, it analyses the effect exerted on each implied reader by some of the representations of childhood and adulthood in the text.

While taking care to minimise the risks of undue generalisations, the thesis employs the concept of a double implied reader as a valuable interpretive tool: the features attributed to the ‘child’ and ‘adult’ implied readers, it argues, are the first and most comprehensive constructs of age identity that we encounter in the novel. The underlying general belief is that cultural constructs are never only found in a text’s characters and plot; they also define its (implied) reader – an argument that is relevant to literary theory in general, regardless of the addressees' age.