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.
In the more recent Reading Children's Literature: A Critical Introduction (2013), Carrie Hintz and Eric Tribunella cover a wide variety of forms, genres, and themes and skillfully guide readers in ...using the lens of age, race, indigeneity, gender, sexuality, and ability to arrive at nuanced readings of texts for young people. ...she displays how pleasure, uncertainty, and exchange of knowledge are part and parcel of the practice of scholarship. With the inclusion of "author talkbacks"—short essays in which children's book authors reflect on their writing habits and priorities and share their experiences in the publishing industry—she opens the book to voices of children's book authors, including that of minoritized writers.
Superstorms, firestorms, heat waves, droughts, flooding, warming and acidifying waters, disappearing shorelines, and melting ice caps have decimated natural habitats, disrupted food chains, altered ...animals' migratory patterns and reproductive behaviors, and imperiled the health, livelihoods, lands, and traditions of peoples around the world, particularly those who are marginalized. While industries—including the one hundred companies responsible for 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions (Griffin 8)—are rarely held accountable for the ecocide they enact on a planetary scale, individuals are urged to exercise personal responsibility by becoming eco-conscious consumers. In Timothy Morton's formulation, climate change is a hyperobject: an entity so extremely complex and so "massively distributed in time and space relative to humans" that we are unable to wrap our minds around its totality or even specific aspects (1). Because climate change is nonlocal, none of its single manifestations can be pinned down as climate change itself (4). Because it is interobjective, climate change is never itself but rather a mesh constituted by a plurality of different objects (83). Because it is phasing and temporally undulating, climate change distorts the spatial-temporal frames in which we exist and eludes perception by three-dimensional beings like us (55).
Historians and critics often view R. F. Outcault’s comic strip Buster Brown (1902–1921) as a subversive series, as it is headlined by a naughty boy who constantly challenges adults and whose pranks ...appear to undermine family stability. The strip, however, also has a conservative function. While Buster Brown depicts the home as a site of conflict, it also celebrates the middle-class family as a resilient institution. The series specifically suggests that humor is effective in dealing with domestic conflict, suggesting that laughter and playfulness alleviate tensions and allow family members to sympathize with one another. In Buster Brown , the mischief-making child is made delightful rather than threatening. At a time when many Progressive Era Americans worried that the institution of the family was in a state of crisis, Buster Brown assured its readers that poking fun at family matters fortified the home.
...Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak's "Using Literary Criticism for Children's Rights: Toward a Participatory Research Model of Children's Literature Studies" makes the bold proposal of expanding children's ...roles in children's literature research. ...as demonstrated by the authors, examining children's literature through the lens of children's rights requires an opening up to voices from other fields such as law, medicine, anthropology, history, and sociology.
