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The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children's Culture

The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children's Culture

by Gary Cross (Author)

  • New

    Illustrated 2004

    $102.99
Synopsis

The cute child - spunky, yet dependent, naughty but nice - is largely a 20th-century invention. In this book, Gary Cross examines how that look emerged in American popular culture and how the cute turned into the cool, seemingly its opposite, in stories and games. Cross shows how adults have created the ideal of the innocent childhood and have used this to project adult needs and frustrations rather than concerns about protecting and nurturing the young - and how the images, goods, and rituals of childhood have been co-opted by the commercial world. Magazine and TV ads, articles from the popular press, comic strips, movies, radio scripts, childrearing manuals, and government publications support this argument and the book is illustrated with cartoons, toys, ads, and photos.

$102.99

Quantity

20+ in stock

More Information

Format: Illustrated
 Pages: 268
 Edition: Illustrated
 Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 01 Mar 2004
ISBN 10: 0195156668
ISBN 13: 9780195156669

Media Reviews
The strengths of Cross's work are his extended analysis of the rise of the consumer market and his thorough grounding in the details of children's popular culture in the United States since the late nineteenth century. On balance this is a lively, provocative, and very readable analysis of a persistant social concern about children and youth. * American Historical Review *
Author Bio

Author of An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America, Kids' Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood, and seven other books relating to the history of modern society, Gary Cross is a Distinguished Professor of Modern History at the Pennsylvania State University.