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Resource type: Book Chapter Language: en: English DOI: 10.4324/9781003222941 BibTeX citation key: Gordon2022 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details |
Categories: General Keywords: "Kewpies", Adaptation, Intermediality, O’Neill. Rose, USA Creators: Gordon, Meyer, Pietrzak-Franger Publisher: Routledge (London, New York) Collection: Transmedia Practices in the Long Nineteenth Century |
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Abstract |
The transmedial career of the Kewpies was shaped both by Rose O’Neill’s artistic practices as a cartoonist and by her commercial illustrative work for advertisements. O’Neill drew inchoate forms of the characters in both cartoons and advertisements before creating her first Kewpies comic. Later, the Kewpies took many forms, and like much transmedia collapsed the difference between content and promotion. Even before the Kewpies found their greatest fame as dolls, O’Neill had shaped narratives around the Kewpies that meant the characters as comics were indistinguishable from the characters as promotional figures for Jell-O and the political cause of suffrage. This chapter traces O’Neill’s development of the Kewpies and places it in the milieu of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century attempts, in magazines aimed at women, to accommodate an emerging mass culture of consumption with notions of a genteel middle class. The uses that the readers of these magazines made of the Kewpies also had an impact on the characters’ transmediatization in that this (continued and diverse) engagement elided any sense of an essential originating version of the Kewpies that determined their meaning.
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