The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children's CultureThe twentieth century was, by any reckoning, the age of the child in America. Today, we pay homage at the altar of childhood, heaping endless goods on the young, reveling in memories of a more innocent time, and finding solace in the softly backlit memories of our earliest years. We are, the proclamation goes, just big kids at heart. And, accordingly, we delight in prolonging and inflating the childhood experiences of our offspring. In images of the naughty but nice Buster Brown and the coquettish but sweet Shirley Temple, Americans at mid-century offered up a fantastic world of treats, toys, and stories, creating a new image of the child as "cute." Holidays such as Christmas and Halloween became blockbuster affairs, vehicles to fuel the bedazzled and wondrous innocence of the adorable child. All this, Gary Cross illustrates, reflected the preoccupations of a more gentle and affluent culture, but it also served to liberate adults from their rational and often tedious worlds of work and responsibility. But trouble soon entered paradise. The "cute" turned into "cool" as children, following their parental example, embraced the gift of fantasy and unrestrained desire to rebel against the saccharine excesses of wondrous innocence in deliberate pursuit of the anti-cute. Movies, comic books, and video games beckoned to children with the allures of an often violent, sexualized, and increasingly harsh worldview. Unwitting and resistant accomplices to this commercial transformation of childhood, adults sought-over and over again, in repeated and predictable cycles-to rein in these threats in a largely futile jeremiad to preserve the old order. Thus, the cute child-deliberately manufactured and cultivated--has ironically fostered a profoundly troubled ambivalence toward youth and child rearing today. Expertly weaving his way through the cultural artifacts, commercial currents, and parenting anxieties of the previous century, Gary Cross offers a vibrant and entirely fresh portrait of the forces that have defined American childhood. |
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adults advertising American angelic appeal baby Barbie became Benjamin Spock birthday Boundaries of Innocence boys cartoon celebration chap chil child rearing childhood Christmas comic book comic strip commercial consumer culture COOL Cute Kid delight Disney's Disneyland dolls dren early especially fantasy featured fiction G.I. Joe gifts girls Gremlin Gremlin Child Halloween holiday insisted Jackie Coogan Katzenjammer Kids Little Lord Fauntleroy look magazines Mickey Mouse middle-class modern moral mother movie movie serial natural naughty Notes to Pages offspring parents percent play Playthings popular protect radio Rituals of Innocence romantic Santa Saturday Evening Post Sept sexuality sheltered innocence Shirley Temple Spock stories superhero teddy bear teenage Television theme tobacco Today toddler Tom Swift Trade Cards traditional twentieth century University Press vacation Victorian video games violence wonder wondrous child wondrous innocence York young youth
References to this book
Children and Consumer Culture in American Society: A Historical Handbook and ... Lisa Jacobson No preview available - 2007 |
American Fear: The Causes and Consequences of High Anxiety Peter N. Stearns No preview available - 2006 |