Barrie, Hook, and Peter Pan: Studies in Contemporary Myth: Estudios sobre un mito contemporáneo ed. by Alfonso Muñoz Corcuera and Elisa T. Di Biase (review)

This bilingual collection of essays on Peter Pan is the fruit of a conference held at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 2011, to commemorate the centenary of the first publication of Peter and Wendy. The volume's English subtitle, 'Studies in Contemporary Myth', attempts to unite the contributions around the idea of Barrie's Peter Pan as 'contemporary myth'. The Spanish subtitle 'estudios sobre un mito contemporáneo' (studies on a contemporary myth) is far more accurate than the rather generalising English version, though the subtitle is slightly misleading in both languages since not all the articles focus on 'myth'. Those which do interrogate the 'myth' of Peter Pan, often influenced by R. D. S. Jack's Myths and the Mythmaker (2010), are among the best of the collection. Jack himself contributes the volume's lead article, a piece that expands upon his theory of Peter Pan as part of a chain of variations on the 'myth of the deathless boy' which functions as a vehicle for exploring a Darwinian account of the human condition.

The volume is divided into six sections with bilingual titles drawn from Peter Pan — 'London/Londres'; 'The Shadow/La Sombra'; 'Neverland/Nunca Jamás'. Evocative though the section titles are, they result in some awkward pairings of articles and distract attention from some of the other synergies among articles throughout the book. Jack's discussion of the multiple variants of Peter Pan and the multiple authorial personae of its author is picked up by Alfonso Muñoz Corcuera in 'The True Identity of Captain Hook' and by Fabio Vericat in his examination of Peter Pan as a 'literary hybrid', 'betwixt-and-between' the genres of theatre and novel. Vericat's exploration of Peter Pan's textual instability also resonates with David Rudd's compelling Lacanian reading which finds Peter to be stuck 'betwixt-and-between' the Imaginary and the Symbolic. The deconstruction of the hero/villain binary in Barrie's text recurs both in Muñoz Corcuera and in Jaime Cuenca's convincing article 'Un truncado ideal de Juventud' in which Peter Pan's villainous features are brought to the fore in contrast to more sympathetic readings of the character. Patricia Lucas's 'La imagen de Peter Pan: Objetos y espacios simboálicos en los textos de J. M. Barrie' ('The Image of Peter Pan: Objects and Symbolic Spaces in J. M. Barrie's Texts') stands out as the only contribution to take up gender as a category of analysis, through an exploration of salient spaces — the house, the isle, the window — in Barrie's texts.

The contributors to this volume come not only from a wide range of different countries but also from many different disciplines — literature, sociology, philosophy, architecture. The positive result of this is that the volume provides a variety of different approaches to Barrie's text, sometimes challenging received ideas. The drawback is that the mixture of different methodologies results in an assortment of articles of rather uneven quality. While there are some excellent contributions to the volume, others somewhat frustrate the reader in their lack of a clear and developed argument, superficial engagement with Barrie's text and limited or virtually nonexistent reference to secondary literature. Indeed, although the introduction claims that this volume fills a gap in Peter Pan criticism (xiii; xxviii), many of the articles engage — when they do — only perfunctorily with the relatively substantial body of secondary literature on Peter Pan. Most of the articles in Spanish have an unhelpful schematic structure with misleading section headings, while many of the articles in English could have been more carefully copy-edited.

Having said that, the great advantage of a bilingual, bi-cultural volume such as this one is a reminder that a canonical...