In her book titled When Toys Come Alive; Narratives of Animation, Metamorphosis and Development, published by Yale University Press, Lois Rostow Kuznets deconstructs childhood tales like Winnie the Pooh, The Velveteen Rabbit, and even the syndicated comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes." While Kuznets describes many of the stories as joyous or charming, she also writes that "Goals that might have thrilled the child-me as a projection of my egocentric needs and desires are not necessarily what a woman with three-score years of experience in this world still finds fulfilling. I see myself now searching these texts for signs of another, more radical subversion—subversion of the elitism, racism, sexist, and androcentrism in a pervasively patriarchal culture."

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