In this Book

summary
Is it possible to conceive of a Hello Kitty Middle Ages or a Tickle Me Elmo Renaissance? The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first reference to “cute” in the sense of “attractive, pretty, charming” to 1834. More recently, Sianne Ngai has offered a critical overview of the cuteness of the twentieth-century avant-garde within the context of consumer culture. But if cuteness can get under the skin, what kinds of surfaces does it best infiltrate, particularly in the framework of historical forms, events, and objects that traditionally have been read as emergences around “big” aesthetics of formal symmetries, high affects, and resemblances? The Retrofuturism of Cuteness seeks to undo the temporal strictures surrounding aesthetic and affective categories, to displace a strict focus on commodification and cuteness, and to interrogate how cuteness as a minor aesthetics can refocus our perceptions and readings of both premodern and modern media, literature, and culture. Taking seriously the retro and the futuristic temporalities of cuteness, this volume puts in conversation projects that have unearthed remnants of a “cult of cute”—positioned historically and critically in between transitions into secularization, capitalist frameworks of commodification, and the enchantment of objects—and those that have investigated the uncanny haunting of earlier aesthetics in future-oriented modes of cuteness.

Table of Contents

Download PDF Download Full Book
  1. Cover
  2. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Title Page, Copyright
  2. pp. 1-8
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Contents
  2. pp. 9-12
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Introduction:The Time of the Child
  2. Wan-Chuan Kao & Jen Boyle
  3. pp. 13-28
  4. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Torturer-Cute
  2. Andrea Denny-Brown
  3. pp. 29-52
  4. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Indulgence and Refusal:Cuteness, Asceticism, and theAestheticization of Desire
  2. Elizabeth Howie
  3. pp. 53-66
  4. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. From “Awe” to “Awww”:Cuteness and the Idea ofthe Holy in ChristianCommodity Culture
  2. Claire Maria Chambers
  3. pp. 67-86
  4. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. “All the Pretty Little Ponies”:Bronies, Desire, and Cuteness
  2. Justin Mullis
  3. pp. 87-110
  4. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Consuming Celebrity:Commodities and Cutenessin the Circulation of MasterWilliam Henry West Betty
  2. Marlis Schweitzer
  3. pp. 111-136
  4. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Embracing the Gremlin:Judas Iscariot and the(Anti-)Cuteness of Despair
  2. Mariah Junglan Min
  3. pp. 137-154
  4. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Cute, Charming, Dangerous:Child Avatars in Second Life
  2. Alicia Corts
  3. pp. 155-174
  4. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. What’s Cute Got ToDo With It?Early Modern Proto-Cutenessin King Lear
  2. James M. Cochran
  3. pp. 175-194
  4. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Hamlet, Hesperides, and theDiscursivity of Cuteness
  2. Kara Watts
  3. pp. 195-218
  4. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Cute Lacerations in DoctorFaustus and Omkara
  2. Tripthi Pillai
  3. pp. 219-242
  4. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Katie Sokoler, YourConstruction Paper TearsCan't Hide Your YayoiKusama-Neurotic Underbelly
  2. Kelly Lloyd
  3. pp. 243-260
  4. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Contributors
  2. pp. 261-269
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
Back To Top