Where the Wild Things Were

Boyhood and Permissive Parenting in Postwar America

Henry Jenkins

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Paperback

Forthcoming
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English

New York University Press
25 February 2025

Popular culture; Media studies; Gender studies: men; Sociology: family & relationships

Series: Postmillennial Pop

Explores iconic works from The Cat in the Hat to The Twilight Zone to explain cultural trends in parenting and how we conceptualize childhood

The 60s produced a Baby Boom generation that catalyzed the dawn of a new era—the space age, the age of television, the global age, and the beginnings of civil rights. At the same time, a new paradigm for parenting was unfolding that put emphasis on permissiveness, defined by what it permitted – the free and unfettered impulses of children. Others worried that the wildness of children, personified by the characters in Maurice Sendak’s 1963 classic children’s book, Where the Wild Things Are, was destructive, disruptive and disrespectful.

Where the Wild Things Were centers on the exploding, contentious national conversation about the nature of childhood and parenting in the postwar US emblematized by Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care. Renowned scholar Henry Jenkins demonstrates that the language that shaped a growing field of advice literature for parents also informed the period’s fictions—in film, television, comics, children’s books, and elsewhere—produced for and consumed by children. In particular, Jenkins demonstrates, the era’s emblematic child was the boy in the striped shirt: white, male, suburban, middle class, Christian, and above all, American.

Weaving together intellectual histories and popular texts, Jenkins shows how boy protagonists became embodiments of permissive child rearing, as well as the social ideals and contradictions that permissiveness entailed. From Peanuts comic strips and TV specials to The Cat in the Hat, Dennis the Menace, and Jonny Quest, the book reveals how childhood and the stories about it became central to Cold War concerns with democracy, citizenship, globalization, the space race, science, race relations, gender, and sexuality. Written by a former boy in a striped shirt, Where the Wild Things Were explores iconic works, from Mary Poppins to Lost in Space, contextualizing them through a critical but respectful engagement with the core animating ideas of the permissive imagination.

By: Henry Jenkins
Imprint: New York University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9781479831890
ISBN 10: 1479831891
Series: Postmillennial Pop
Pages: 368
Publication Date: 25 February 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Henry Jenkins is Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He is the author or coauthor of twenty books including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture, and By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism.

Reviews for Where the Wild Things Were: Boyhood and Permissive Parenting in Postwar America

"""As the American vernacular art of comics cements its cultural and academic respectability, other areas of cultural studies are being brought to bear on the form. That project yields interesting and illuminating results in University of Southern California communications professor Henry Jenkins' new book, Comics and Stuff."" * Reason Magazine * ""I cannot recommend this book more for those of us who love to study the medium that is comic books. This book needs to sit right next to Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and Will Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art as a must have resource to truly understand all that comic books can be. ... Thanks to Henry Jenkins I also know I’m far from alone and feel like I understand myself better at the end of this book than I did before."" * Masked Library * ""A major book from a major contemporary thinker. Comics and Stuff models a rigorous but supple interdisciplinarity that the hybrid form of comics itself inspires; its range is wide and enlivening. A lucid, brilliant, and important book."" -- Hillary Chute, author of <i>Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere</i> ""Jenkins examines graphic novels with regard to patterns and values in material culture. His broad view of 'stuff' encompasses possessions and objects and also cultural icons. ... Including color illustrations and extensive references, this compelling exploration of comics will inspire readers to think about stuff."" * Choice * ""For nearly a century, comic books have been an integral part of ‘the stuff’ of our collective fantasies, both a wildly successful form of entertainment and a visual archive of our developing identities. In Henry Jenkins’s Comics and Stuff, one of our greatest cultural critics offers an expansive and exuberant study of the ways that contemporary comics and graphic novels document the material life of American culture, from collecting to artistic curation and hoarding to archiving. Jenkins introduces readers to aesthetically innovative, yet largely understudied, comics and graphic novels to show us how this enduring medium provides a visual map of our most cherished object worlds."" -- Ramzi Fawaz, author of <i>The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics</i> ""Jenkins characterizes comics as communicating a series of rituals and personal agendas ... His grasp of comics as a cornucopia of contemporary/past cultures is far reaching."" * CHOICE *"