[ecrea] New publication: Children's Media and Modernity

*New from Peter Lang Oxford*


  Children’s Media and Modernity
  <https://www.peterlang.com/view/product/79340>


    Film, Television and Digital Games

By Ewan Kirkland

Oxford, 2017. 256 pp. £55.00

ISBN 978-3-0343-1991-1 hb

eBook available soon

Throughout the modern era the figure of the child has consistently 
reflected adult concerns about industrialisation, urbanisation, 
technology, consumerism and capitalism. Children represent a symbolic 
retreat from modern life, culturally aligned with fairy tales, 
medievalism, animals and nature. Yet children also embody the future and 
are often identified with the most contemporary forms of popular culture.

This book explores how products for children navigate such 
contradictions by investigating the history and textuality of three 
major forms of modern media: cinema, television and digital games. Case 
studies – including /Wallace and Gromit/, /Teletubbies/, /Horrible 
Histories/, /Little Big Planet/ and /Disney Infinity/ – are used to 
illustrate the complex intersections between children’s culture and 
modernity.

Cinema – so closely associated with the emergence of modernity and mass 
popular culture – has had to negotiate its relationship with child 
audiences and depictions of childhood, often concealing its connection 
with modernity in the process. In contrast, television’s incorporation 
into family home-centred, post-war modernity resulted in children being 
clearly positioned as the audience for this domestic entertainment. The 
latter decades of the twentieth century saw the promotion of home 
computers as educational tools for training future generations, 
capitalising on positive alignments between children and technologies, 
while digital games’ narrative references, aesthetics and merchandise 
established the new medium as a form of children’s culture.

*Ewan Kirkland* lectures in Film and Screen Studies at the University of 
Brighton.

Available for purchase here: https://www.peterlang.com/view/product/79340


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