How Not To Read Classic Children Literature

Process


When looking at the singular text of Peter Pan and Wendy, I saw interesting implications for the characters and their relationship with time. For the main character Peter, the graph suggests that he has no concern with time since the lines do not intersect. On the other hand, the graphs for Hook and Wendy showed intersecting points between the lines. What I found interesting, is that Hook's graph showed a positive relationship between the two lines until the downfall. His graph also had the most intersecting points. Wendy had two intersecting points but no real concrete relationship. With these observations, I questioned whether age played a factor in a character's relationship with time. It could be since Peter and Wendy are children, time is not a big issue to them. As children they do not pay attention to how much time they will spend doing something or what time it is in the day, instead they focus on the activity and say for themselves when something should end or begin. Especially, Peter. But, for Hook, being older, he uses it more for his convenience.  He might use the time to say when to travel somewhere, or when to start a mission. Or, as do most people, use it as a tool to stay organized.
                                                                                                                                                                                            

Moving on to the corpus of books, I played around some more with the theme of time and the relationship it had with the main characters of each book. While there was no obvious trend, I still found it interesting to see how time was still a constant variable in the texts. All of the graphs had at least intersecting points with the "time" line. Although, it could just be a signifier for the beginning and end of the adventures of the characters.
 

For the Google Ngram data, I thought that it was interesting to see the difference in the graphs of time in American and Britain English. It seems that in American English the trend for "time" was slow but it steadily increased. While for British English it has tiny fluctuations but is still trending in a positive direction. I also looked at the words "children" and "adult" to see if they had any correlation with each other. In American English, the lines trends for "time" and "children" share a similar upward trend starting around the 1870's, and continues on into the 2000's. For British English, there is a positive line but no intersections in any of the lines. However, in both graphs the line for adults is low. I'm not quite sure if this is significant or not, but it could imply how some stories in American English focuses on them of time with children and the stories in British English do not share that same attribute.

 

This page has paths:

This page references: