Abstract

Natalie Babbitt’s modern fable Tuck Everlasting (1975) reflects on what it means to be human (and bovine) through an ambiguous and philosophical layering of care; a care-ful layering that is evocative of Martin Heidegger’s exploration of Da-sein in Being and Time (1927). In this talk, Sainsbury will explore Heidegger’s notion of care and fable in relation to the temporal condition of human being played out figuratively in Tuck Everlasting. Emphasis will be on the mutual concepts of mortality and care at work in Babbitt’s novel and in Heidegger’s response to ‘an old fable’ from Hyginus.

Lisa Sainsbury is Director of the National Centre for Research in Children’s Literature in the Department of English and Creative writing at Roehampton University. Her current area of research is philosophy and contemporary children’s literature and her book, Ethics and British Children’s Literature: Unexamined Life (Continuum-Bloomsbury) is due for publication in 2013.

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