Kidding Around The Child in Film and Media

Kidding Around: The Child in Film and Media is a collection of essays generated by a conference of the same title held at the University of the District of Columbia. The works gathered examine a variety of children's media, including texts produced for children (e.g., children's books, cartoons, animated films) as well as texts about children(e.g., feature-length films, literature, playground architecture, parenting guides). The primary goal of Kidding Around is to analyze and contextualize contested representations of childhood and children in various twentieth- and twenty-first-century media while accounting for the politics of these narratives. Each of the essays gathered offers a critical history of the very notion of childhood, at the same time as it analyzes exemplary children's texts from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These chapters depart from various methodological approaches (including psychoanalytic, sociological, ecological, and historical perspectives), offering the reader numerous productive approaches for analyzing the moments of cultural conflict and impasse found within the primary works studied. Despite the fact that today children are one of the most coveted demographics in marketing and viewership, academic work on children's media, and children in media, is just beginning. Kidding Around assembles experts from this inchoate field, opening discussion to traditional and non-traditional children's texts.

Alexander N. Howe is Associate Professor of English at the University of the District of Columbia, USA. He is the co-editor of Marcia Muller and the Female Private Eye: Essays on the Novels that Defined a Subgenre (2009) and author of It Didn't Mean Anything: A Psychoanalytic Reading of American Detective Fiction (2008).

Wynn Yarbrough is Associate Professor and chair of the English Department at the University of the District of Columbia, USA. He is the author of Masculinity in Children's Animal Stories, 1888-1928: A Critical Study of Anthropomorphic Tales by Wilde, Kipling, Potter, Grahame and Milne (2011) and A Boy's Dream (2011).

Acknowledgements

Introduction: “Representations and Renegotiations: Childhood and Its Uses,” Wynn Yarbrough and Alexander Howe, University of the District of Columbia, US

Part 1: Rites of Passage and Impasse
Chapter 1: "Betwixt and Between: Reading the Child in M. Night Shyamalan's Films," Kevin Wisniewski, University of Pennsylvania, US
Chapter 2: "The Monstrous Masculine: Abjection and Todd Solondz's Happiness," Adam Wadenius, San Francisco State University, US
Chapter 3: "Only a Child: Spectacles of Innocence in the Lolita films," Brian Walter, St. Louis College of Pharmacy, US

Part 2: Childhood as Text
Chapter 4: "The 'Rubbing Off' of 'Art and Beauty': Child Citizenship, Literary Engagement, and the Anglo-American Playground Movement," Michelle Beissel Heath, Tulane University, US
Chapter 5: "The Studio World Surprised and Disturbed Ruth: The Diffident Stage Mother and the Difficult Child in a Post-War Novel by Noel Streatfeild," Sally Stokes, The Catholic University of America, US
Chapter 6: "Building a Mystery: The 1990's Autistic Thriller," Chris Foss, University of Mary Washington, US
Chapter 7: "Pundit Knows Best: The Self-Help Boom, Brand Marketing and The O'Reilly Factor for Kids," Michell Abate, The Ohio State University, US

Part 3: Disney and Its Progeny
Chapter 8: “Power to the Princess: Disney and the Creation of the 20th Century Princess
Narrative,” Bridget Whelan, SOWELA Technical Community College, US
Chapter 9: "Surreal Estate: Building Self-Identity in Monster House," Michael Howarth, Missouri Southern State University, US
Chapter 10: "The Wild and the Cute: Disney Animation and Environmental Awareness," David Whitely, Cambridge University, UK
Conclusion: Criticism and Multicultural Children's Films, Iris Shepard, St. Gregory University, US and Ian Wojcik-Andrews, Eastern Michigan University, UK

Notes on Contributors
Index