Description
Book SynopsisNew Directions in Childhood Studies: Innocence, Trauma, and Agency in the Twenty-first Century acknowledges that the conceptual frameworks for understanding the experience of childhood in the twentieth century are no longer adequate and offers important updates to the construct of American childhood. The chapters in this collection examine contemporary children’s literature, film, and video games to explore the ways in which everyday realities like trauma, disaster, and death impact the experience of childhood in America today. In many ways, the essays show, the narratives blur traditional lines between children’s and adult content, taking children series as subjects while also guiding them through the processes of dealing with the particular challenges. Collectively, the essays develop a more contemporary construct of the American child and offer new insights into what that construction might mean for contemporary American society and culture.
Table of Contents Introduction, “Constructing the 21st Century Child”
James Curtis
Part I: Picturing a New Kind of Childhood
Chapter One: “Rainbows in the Window: Static Childhood in COVID-19 Picture Books”
Cara Byrne and Kristin Kondrlik
Chapter Two: “Picturing Political Agency in Childhood: Visual Rhetoric of Child Activism and
Identity in Children’s Literature”
Meghan Whitfield
Chapter Three: “[Re]Interpreting the Deaf Child’s Solitude: A Counternarrative to Cece Bell’s El
Deafo”
S. Leigh Ann Cowan
Part II: The Rule of Law and Transgressive Constructions of American Childhood
Chapter Four: “Because What You Don’t Know Can Kill You: Law, YA Lit, and the American
Adolescent Today”
Jamie M. Fine
Chapter Five: “These Are the Rooms We’re Not Supposed to Go In…But Let’s Go Anyway!”:
Celebrating the Mobile Child, Embracing Nontraditional Kinship Structures, and Deconstructing
Neglect in The Florida Project”
Joseph V. Giunta
Part III: Technology and the Posthuman Child
Chapter Six: “Roblox and the Value in Suspending Playbor Time”
Sumaria Butt
Chapter Seven: “Happy Endings, Only $1.99: Uncovering the Corruption of Fairytales in Hope:
The Other Side of Adventure and its Online Legacy”
Imogen Nutting and Ryan Twomey
Part IV: The 21st Century and the Necessity of Trauma-Informed Narratives
Chapter Eight: “The New ‘Normal’”: Cancer and Childhood in Rob Harrell’s Wink
Allyson Wierenga
Chapter Nine: “The Trauma of Childhood and Emerging into Adulthood in A Court of Thorns
and Roses”
Kirsten Bilger and Michael G. Cornelius
About the Contributors
