In a search for self-identity and a "true Englishness," travel literature provides English readers with a narrative structure within which an image of a distinctly English self/culture can be constructed through the traveler's narration. The rhetorical poses found in narratives by Victorian travel writers like Charles Kingsley and J.A. Froude are caught up in this self-reflexive trend, as well as certain anthropological stereotypes. Such rhetorical poses and anthropological stereotypes are also useful in looking at the ways in which the child figure is situated as geographical, temporal, and cultural Other in Victorian nostalgic narratives such as Peter Pan. Anthropology (traditionally dedicated to the study of "primitive" peoples) has developed methods of reading Otherness and forms of cultural contact which also serve well in constructing a nostalgic "Neverland" in children's literature, from which adult readers have been distanced. I will explore the interplay, between native as Other in a remote land and child as Other in a remote land, that secures the aesthetic practice of literature an ideological space in Victorian culture.
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