The Child Savage, 1890}}}2010 From Comics to Games [Paperback]

Taking up the understudied relationship between the cultural history of childhood and media studies, this volume traces twentieth-century migrations of the child-savage analogy from colonial into postcolonial discourse across a wide range of old and new media. Older and newer media such as films, textbooks, children's literature, periodicals, comic strips, children's radio, and toys are deeply implicated in each other through ongoing 'remediation', meaning that they continually mimic, absorb and transform each other's representational formats, stylistic features, and content. Media theory thus confronts the cultural history of childhood with the challenge of re-thinking change in childhood imaginaries as transformation-through-repetition patterns, rather than as rise-shine-decline sequences. This volume takes up this challenge, demonstrating that one historical epoch may well accommodate diverging childhood repertoires, which are recycled again and again as they are played out across a whole gamut of different media formats in the course of time.Contents: Introduction, Elisabeth Wesseling. Part I The Child Savage in (Neo-)Colonial Discourse: Technologies of power: school discourse in 19th-century Ireland, Vanessa Rutherford; Kiplings Just So Stories: the recapitulative child and evolutionary progress, Ruth Murphy; Of savages and wild children: diverging representations of exotic peoples and young pranksters in comic strips from the Belle ?0poque, Pascal Lef?vre; Getting to know the other: Dutch childrens magazines and alterity (1890-1910), Helma van Lierop-Debrauwer; Africa in ritual practice and mythic consciousness in the Kulturfilm of the Weimar Republic (1918-1933), Luke Springman; Childhood and primitivism: the impact of the n?gritude movement on avant-garde childrens literature, Bettina K??mmerling-Meibauer. Part II Domestic Savages: Animals, angels, and Americans: remediating Dickensian melodrama in the comic strip Little Orphan Annie (1924-1945), ElisabelÓ%