Klasyka literacka dla młodych odbiorców w kulturowym imaginarium. Mitobiografie Lewisa Carrolla, L. Franka Bauma i J. M. Barriego oraz mikrohistorie ich dzieł

This doctoral dissertation concerns the ways in which the literary classics for young people function in the cultural imaginarium. The subject of the research are the past and the present histories of Lewis Carroll’s Alice duology, L. Frank Baum’s Oz cycle, and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan works – iconic stories of universal, and not only British or American, children’s literature created in the so-called long 19th century in the Anglo-Saxon cultural circle. The dissertation aims to: • indicate what place in the historical-cultural and historical-literary processes occupy not only the original texts but also the popular beliefs about the biographies of their authors, facts and myths about the creation and further fate of a particular work, the reception of these narratives, their analyses and interpretations, and different kinds of their reworkings; • identify the means of creating cultural beliefs about the lives of writers and present the meanings of these factual-imaginary biographies in the context of the reception and transformation of specific works; • explore the paths followed by the narratives about Alice, Oz, and Peter Pan – from their beginnings to the present day as well as underline the impact of numerous analyses and interpretations of Carroll’s duology, Baum’s cycle, and Barrie’s works on literary and non-literary metamorphoses of these stories; • answer the question on what the originals and reworkings of these stories tell about the culture in which they were written, and especially about its constructs of children and adults, childhood and adulthood, literature for young and adult audiences, i.e. how do the cultural histories of Carroll’s, Baum’s, and Barrie’s works “tell” the broader history of children’s literature – as well as the one of popular and general literature and culture? The presented analyses concern, therefore, not only literary works understood as “finished” stories closed between the book pages. The actual and imagined lives of the three authors mentioned above, referred to as mythobiographies herein, are also discussed as well as the professional and amateur reception of Alice, Oz, and Peter Pan, the illustrations accompanying these works, their numerous adaptations and reworkings, and, in the Polish context, their translations; the dissertation takes into account not only such events, historical figures, and texts that are widely known but also those which have rarely been researched 502 in Poland or have not been discussed at all; the elements of the writers’ private histories and the social histories of their works, which have a significant impact on the popular images of Carroll, Baum, and Barrie and their stories. The research method and perspective chosen in this dissertation is a microhistorical approach to the “lives” of popular narratives of Alice, Dorothy, and Peter Pan. Chapter One has introduces the key terms and, also, the theoretical and methodological issues related to these notions. Firstly, the concepts of children’s literature, literary classics for young readers, rereading, and reworking (both in the intertextual and transfictional variants) are discussed, which are shown against the background of reflection on the child and childhood as socio-cultural constructs. Next, the concepts of the cultural imaginarium, mythobiography, and microhistory are considered, the last one along with the motivation behind the transfer of the method, traditionally not focusing on the “biographies” of works, to the field of literature studies. These reflections serve to develop a conceptual framework for the considerations made in the following three chapters of the dissertation, which are case studies focused, respectively, on Lewis Carroll and his Alice duology (Chapter Two), L. Frank Baum and his Oz cycle, with a particular emphasis on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Chapter Three), and J. M. Barrie and his stories about Peter Pan (Chapter Four). In each of them, the mythobiographies of the authors are discussed, with an indication of their dominant factor and with an emphasis on the connection between the common views on the writers’ lives and the interpretations and analyses of their works. While constructing the microhistories of Alice, Oz, and Peter Pan, the author also strives to describe the various aspects of their professional reception – including contextual references to the history and theory of children’s literature, especially Anglo-Saxon fantasy for young people. Finally, in each of these three chapters, the social and cultural histories of the works of Carroll, Baum, and Barrie are considered. The author takes into account, inter alia, the events accompanying their original publication, the literary critics’ opinions about them, the efforts (including the marketing ones) made to popularise them as well as the growth – initially supervised by the authors themselves – of Alice, Oz, and Peter Pan understood not only as books but also as extensive “industries.” The reflections made in these chapters are interspersed with references to contemporary works intertextually and transfictionally alluding to the classics (taking into account that the authors of adaptations, rewritings, prequels, and sequels often refer not only to the original texts but also to various aspects of Carroll’s, Baum’s and Barrie’s mythobiographies as well as to fragments of discourse on their works). 503 The most important conclusions of the dissertation are as follows: • The stories of Alice, the Land of Oz, and Peter Pan functioned shortly after they had been created and, to an increasing extent, they function today outside the domain of a text limited to a book form (as, for instance, film, TV series, dramatic intertexts and transfictions in such forms as adaptations, pastiches, rewritings, prequels, sequels, etc.). They have accumulated so many meanings that it is often difficult to indicate whether a new text alludes to the (however understood) original or, for example, to an adaptation or rewriting. The stories created by Carroll, Baum, and Barrie should be seen today as peculiar imaginary structures (i.e. products of numerous narratives on cultural texts functioning in the cultural imaginarium, bundles of views on the stories and the lives of their creators); • all three narratives were and still are non-coherent constructions: depending on the point of view, they are imagined as ones of children or adults. This is clearly visible in the incoherent, “schizophrenic” mythobiographies of Carroll, Baum, and Barrie, in the analyses and interpretations of their works, and in the ways in which those works have been transformed; • the cultural histories of these stories and the imagined lives of their authors reveal how childhood and adulthood; literature and culture for young audiences and the universal one (or only “for adults”); “high” and popular art – were constructed in the 19th and 20th centuries and how they are constructed today. The presented “stories about stories” can be seen as a lens in which the issues concerning the “great” history of literature and culture, “great” processes and civilization challenges, are concentrated. Although microhistory, as a way of studying the past, including the cultural one, most often involves looking back from a perspective that allows for seeing a past phenomenon, the final dates of the three “stories” are deliberately not indicated in the dissertation. In conclusion, the author points out that the discussed classic narratives for young readers and the authors of these works are still “alive” in the cultural imaginarium and there is no indication that the interest in them will diminish – their histories are therefore unfinished, open to new potential acts of reading and new forms of transformation. In the final part of the work, the author signalises that the categories of mythobiography and microhistory may serve as important tools in studying the afterlives of various children’s works and their images functioning in the cultural imaginarium.