Other Maps Showing Through: The Liminal Identities of Neverland

J. M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy is portrayed by contemporary criticism as a politically subversive narrative resistant to the determinations of Empire. This essay will suggest that such an interpretation ignores the explicitly aesthetic character of Barrie's story: Neverland is a textual space in which reality is fictively recomposed to the benefit of its inhabitants, a ludic site whereon identity is contingent and provisional. The island is a map of aesthetic potentialities and, as such, affords readers themselves patterns for producing a world beyond the strictures of determinate typification.