Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics - Softcover

Saguisag, Lara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0813591767 ISBN 13: 9780813591766

Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 2018

Synopsis

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. 

About this title

About the Author:

 
LARA SAGUISAG is an assistant professor of English at the College of Staten Island–City University of New York. She is the author of several children’s books, such as Children of Two Seasons: Poems for Young People.
 

Review:

"This engaging and sophisticated book addresses how progressive-era comics used the figure of the child as a locus of debate about gender, race, class and citizenship. Saguisag's doing a great public service to comics history here!" (Philip Nel author of Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature, and the Need fo)

“Historians have too long ignored comic strips as source material. Lara Saguisag impeccably unpacks kid comic strips to reveal their complex discourse on childhood and citizenship in Progressive Era America.” (Ian Gordon author of Superman: The Persistence of an American Icon)

“Amazing work—an invaluable contribution to scholarship at the crossroads of comics studies, childhood studies, children’s literature, and cultural and political history. I wish I had written Incorrigibles and Innocents myself—and it will definitely be in my classrooms going forward!” (Charles Hatfield author of Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby)

"Chronicle of Higher Education new scholarly books weekly book list," by Nina C. Ayoub (Chronicle of Higher Education)

"Transitions: Georgia Institute of Technology Selects New Chief, CUNY York College President to Step Down," compiled by Julia Piper (Chronicle of Higher Education)

About this edition

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0813591767
• ISBN 13: 9780813591766
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 248