Genre
Children's Fiction
Setting and Context
The Lake District, an area of countryside in the north of England where the author herself lived.
Narrator and Point of View
The narrator is the author and she speaks to the reader as well as telling the story from the reader's perspective, as if an onlooker.
Tone and Mood
Friendly, teaching, uplifting.
Protagonist and Antagonist
The protagonist and antagonist roles change according to whether you are a child or an adult reader of the books; for example, to a child, Tom Kitten is the protagonist, and his mother, with her strict rules and insistence upon manners, is the antagonist; however, to an adult reader, his mother is the protagonist and her naughty son is the antagonist, because of his constant disobedience.
Major Conflict
There is ongoing conflict through several of the books between Peter Rabbit and his extended family, and the gardener in the house next door, over the bunnies eating his vegetables.
Climax
At the end of the story of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, the climax is the moment when Lucie wakes up to see the little lady she has been talking to about laundry speeding up the hill and she realizes that Mrs Tiggy-Winkle is a hedgehog.
Foreshadowing
The end of the first story about Peter Rabbit foreshadows the story of Benjamin Bunny in that Benjamin, his cousin, goes with him to the vegetable patch to retrieve the clothes he left there last time he was chased out of the garden.
Understatement
N/A
Allusions
The majority of the allusions are to particular locations, rather than to characters or events at the time. The author alludes to the different places in the village where she lives.
Imagery
The imagery is actually achieved through the illustrations that the author paints rather than through the language in the books. A famed watercolorist, Potter used the pictures in the book to paint images of the landscape and the countryside where the characters lived and had their adventures.
Paradox
N/A
Parallelism
There is a parallel between Potter's own frustration about the rules and regulations that were imposed upon her as a woman at the time, and the characters' own frustration with the rules and regulations put upon them.
Metonymy and Synecdoche
The author sometimes uses the term "the village" to encompass all of the people living within the community of the village.
Personification
The characters are not personified so much as they are anthropomorphic throughout all of the books.
