Michelle Ann Abate
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781496820730
- eISBN:
- 9781496820785
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496820730.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Comics Studies
Chapter One spotlights a fundamental, but under-examined, aspect of Harold Gray's popular newspaper strip: Little Orphan Annie as an orphan girl story.When Gray's eleven-year-old moppet made her ...
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Chapter One spotlights a fundamental, but under-examined, aspect of Harold Gray's popular newspaper strip: Little Orphan Annie as an orphan girl story.When Gray's eleven-year-old moppet made her debut in 1924, many of the most popular novels, poems, and films in the United States featured orphan girls as their protagonists.Given this situation, the comic's original audience would have immediately recognized Annie as participating in this phenomenon.Accordingly, this chapter demonstrates that, far from an incidental detail about the original historical context for Little Orphan Annie, the formula for orphan girl stories serves as both a creative starting point for the comic and its critical end point.Placing Little Orphan Annie back in the context of the orphan girl story-and tracing the way in which this phenomenon operates in Gray's strip-yields new insights about the strip's connection with popular culture, the factors fueling its success, and its primary artistic kinships.Less
Chapter One spotlights a fundamental, but under-examined, aspect of Harold Gray's popular newspaper strip: Little Orphan Annie as an orphan girl story.When Gray's eleven-year-old moppet made her debut in 1924, many of the most popular novels, poems, and films in the United States featured orphan girls as their protagonists.Given this situation, the comic's original audience would have immediately recognized Annie as participating in this phenomenon.Accordingly, this chapter demonstrates that, far from an incidental detail about the original historical context for Little Orphan Annie, the formula for orphan girl stories serves as both a creative starting point for the comic and its critical end point.Placing Little Orphan Annie back in the context of the orphan girl story-and tracing the way in which this phenomenon operates in Gray's strip-yields new insights about the strip's connection with popular culture, the factors fueling its success, and its primary artistic kinships.
Vincent DiGirolamo
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780195320251
- eISBN:
- 9780190933258
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780195320251.003.0014
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
1920s America contained a cacophony of feuding factions pitting guardians of tradition against the forces of modernity. Small-town America detested the vice and depravity of the metropolis. White ...
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1920s America contained a cacophony of feuding factions pitting guardians of tradition against the forces of modernity. Small-town America detested the vice and depravity of the metropolis. White supremacists resented the black and immigrant hordes invading their neighborhoods and workplaces. And fundamentalists felt bullied by godless advocates of evolution. Such conflicts reverberated in the nation’s newspapers, especially in the sensational tabloid press. The children who peddled these papers were not mere merchants of discord, but also its agents. As predominately immigrant, sexually precocious city kids from non-teetotaler, non-Protestant, working-class families, they represented the troubling symptoms of modernity over tradition. They played a central role in Jazz Age journalism, politics, social reform, race relations, and labor struggles, thereby challenging the notion that children’s economic value diminished as their emotional value rose in the early decades of the 20th century.Less
1920s America contained a cacophony of feuding factions pitting guardians of tradition against the forces of modernity. Small-town America detested the vice and depravity of the metropolis. White supremacists resented the black and immigrant hordes invading their neighborhoods and workplaces. And fundamentalists felt bullied by godless advocates of evolution. Such conflicts reverberated in the nation’s newspapers, especially in the sensational tabloid press. The children who peddled these papers were not mere merchants of discord, but also its agents. As predominately immigrant, sexually precocious city kids from non-teetotaler, non-Protestant, working-class families, they represented the troubling symptoms of modernity over tradition. They played a central role in Jazz Age journalism, politics, social reform, race relations, and labor struggles, thereby challenging the notion that children’s economic value diminished as their emotional value rose in the early decades of the 20th century.
