Adventures in Childhood

Book excerpt: "This book explores how the business of play and the development of modern intellectual property evolved together, and alongside concerns about children's consumption becoming a legitimate source of revenue and profit. Or, in other words, how that industry and children's special attachment to it gradually emerged. In so doing, it considers the paradox in the relationship between the growth of intellectual property and the presumed innocence of childhood that initially underpinned controversies about the construction of the child as a consumer. As is apparent throughout the book, our main argument is neither moralistic nor regulatory. Rather, our concern is to explore how, since the late nineteenth and through to the twentieth century, attempts to come to terms with this paradox were embedded in many issues and contexts. In tracing those entangled relationships, we think it is possible to see how modern authorship, entrepreneurship and even the child as a consumer, all came into simultaneous existence through a process of the mutual conferring of reality"--