Kidding around
Subtitle: the child in film and media
By: edited by Alexander N. Howe and Wynn Yarbrough
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2014
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 240
ISBN-13: 9781623560560
Subjects: Children in motion pictures; Congresses; Children in mass media; Mass media and children
Description: 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
Notes: Papers presented at a conference held at the University of the District of Columbia, September, 2008.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Rites of Passage and Impasse. "Betwixt and Between: Reading the Child in M. Night Shyamalan's Films,"   / Kevin Wisniewski; title: "The Monstrous Masculine: Abjection and Todd Solondz's Happiness" / Adam Wadenius; title: "Only a Child: Spectacles of Innocence in the Lolita films," / Brian Walter; title: Childhood as Text. "The 'Rubbing Off' of 'Art and Beauty': Child Citizenship, Literary  Engagement, and the Anglo-American Playground Movement," / Michelle Beissel Heath; title: "The Studio World Surprised and Disturbed Ruth: The Diffident Stage Mother and the Difficult Child in a Post-War Novel" / by Noel Streatfield,  Sally Stokes; title: "Building a Mystery: Relative Fear and the 1990s autistic thriller," / Chris Foss; title: "Pundit Knows Best: The Self-Help Boom, Brand Marketing and The O'Reilly Factor for Kids," / Michelle Abate; title: Disney and Its Progeny.  "Power to the Princess: Disney and the Creation of the Twentieth-Century Princess Narrative," /  Bridget Whelan; title: "Surreal Estate: Building Self-Identity in Monster House," / Michael Howarth; title: "The Wild and the Cute: Disney Animation and Environmental Awareness," / David Whitely; title: Conclusion.