Picturing Childhood: The Myth of the Child in Popular Imagery FROM THE PUBLISHER
Whether controversial or taken for granted, pictures of children are everywhere -- in glossy magazines, newspapers and advertisements, on greeting cards, brochures, catalogues, charity appeals and the internet. Using visuals from many and diverse sources, Picturing Childhood demonstrates how these familiar images reveal a view of childhood which is constantly changing.
Patricia Holland looks anew at debates and mythologies about children and childhood that have circulated from the 1970s to the present. She reveals that, with disputes over children's rights in the 1970s, child sexual abuse in the 1980s, disruptive children in the 1990s, and precocity, consumerism and violence against children in the 2000s, the traditional image of childhood innocence survives only as a form of kitsch. She considers popular imagery in relation to news, education, welfare, charity and consumer culture and discusses the implications that all this has for the ways in which adults treat children, for children's place in our society and indeed for a better understanding of the nature of childhood itself.
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