Incorrigibles and innocents : constructing childhood and citizenship in progressive era comics

Author(s)

Bibliographic Information

Incorrigibles and innocents : constructing childhood and citizenship in progressive era comics

Lara Saguisag

Rutgers University Press, c2019

  • : [pbk.]

Available at  / 2 libraries

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Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. 219-228) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

Nominated for Eisner Award | Winner of the 2018 Ray and Pat Browne Award | Winner of the Charles Hatfield Book Prize from the CSS Histories and criticism of comics note that comic strips published in the Progressive Era were dynamic spaces in which anxieties about race, ethnicity, class, and gender were expressed, perpetuated, and alleviated. The proliferation of comic strip children-white and nonwhite, middle-class and lower class, male and female-suggests that childhood was a subject that fascinated and preoccupied Americans at the turn of the century. Many of these strips, including R.F. Outcault's Hogan's Alley and Buster Brown, Rudolph Dirks's The Katzenjammer Kids and Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland were headlined by child characters. Yet no major study has explored the significance of these verbal-visual representations of childhood. Incorrigibles and Innocents addresses this gap in scholarship, examining the ways childhood was depicted and theorized in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century comic strips. Drawing from and building on histories and theories of childhood, comics, and Progressive Era conceptualizations of citizenship and nationhood, Lara Saguisag demonstrates that child characters in comic strips expressed and complicated contemporary notions of who had a right to claim membership in a modernizing, expanding nation.

Table of Contents

Contents List of Illustrations Introduction: Drawing the Lines Foreign Yet Familiar Crossing the Color Line Family Amusements The "Secret Tracts" of the Child's Mind What Would You Do with Girls Like These? Conclusion: Naughty Boys in a New Millennium Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

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