Coats, Karen. "Lacan with Runts Pigs." Children's Literature 27 (1999): 105-28.

    This article performs a Lacanian psychoanalytic reading of Charlotte's Web in order to explain the growth and development of both Fern and Wilbur. Coats describes the concepts of alienation, separation, and the role of language in the development of subjectivity. She also shows how children's literature plays an important role in the development of a specifically modernist personality structure, which depends on separation from the mother and the internalization of the law of the father.