SOURCE: "Narrative Forms and Techniques: The Collaboration of Milne and Shepard," in 'Winnie-The-Pooh' and 'The House at Pooh Corner': Recovering Arcadia, Twayne Publishers, 1995, pp. 41-57.

In the following excerpt, Connolly discusses Milne's creation of a fantasy world, and the ways in which his illustrator assisted him in realizing his objective.

Normative and Fantastic Worlds

Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Comer, as nearly everyone knows, are stories that tell the adventures of Christopher Robin and his toy companions, Pooh Bear, Piglet, Rabbit, Eeyore, Owl, Kanga, Roo, and—joining them in the second book—Tigger. The 10 stories in each book function well as separate bedtime stories, which is, in the fictive narrative frame, exactly what they are meant to be. Nonetheless, they are held together as sets not only through the same Forest world that they inhabit and the same characters who live there but also through the similarity...