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The Cute and the Cool
Gary Cross
Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children's Culture
Oxford University Press
April 2004
272 pages ISBN: 0195156668 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
The twentieth century was, by any reckoning, the age of the
child in America. Today, we pay homage at the altar of
childhood, heaping endless goods on the young, reveling in
memories of a more innocent time, and finding solace in the
softly backlit memories of our earliest years. We are, the
proclamation goes, just big kids at heart. And, accordingly,
we delight in prolonging and inflating the childhood
experiences of our offspring. In images of the naughty but
nice Buster Brown and the coquettish but sweet Shirley
Temple, Americans at mid-century offered up a fantastic world of
treats, toys, and stories, creating a new image of the child
as "cute." Holidays such as Christmas and Halloween became blockbuster
affairs, vehicles to fuel the bedazzled and wondrous
innocence of the adorable child. All this, Gary Cross
illustrates, reflected the preoccupations of a more gentle
and affluent culture, but it also served to liberate adults
from their rational and often tedious worlds of work and
responsibility. But trouble soon entered paradise. The
"cute" turned into "cool" as children, following their
parental example, embraced the gift of fantasy and
unrestrained desire
to rebel against the saccharine excesses of wondrous
innocence in deliberate pursuit of the anti-cute. Movies, comic books, and video games beckoned to children
with the allures of an often violent, sexualized, and
increasingly harsh worldview. Unwitting and resistant
accomplices to this
commercial transformation of childhood, adults sought-over
and over again, in repeated and predictable cycles-to rein
in these threats in a largely futile jeremiad to preserve
the old order. Thus, the cute child-deliberately
manufactured and cultivated--has ironically fostered a
profoundly troubled
ambivalence toward youth and child rearing today. Expertly weaving his way through the cultural artifacts,
commercial currents, and parenting anxieties of the previous
century, Gary Cross offers a vibrant and entirely fresh
portrait of the forces that have defined American childhood.
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