The Empire's Old Clothes: What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do to Our Minds

By Ariel Dorfman

Book Overview

In this powerful cultural critique, Ariel Dorfman explores the political and social implications of the smiling faces that inhabit familiar books, comics, and magazines. He reveals the ideological messages conveyed in works of popular culture such as the Donald Duck comics, the Babar children's books, and Reader's Digest magazine. The Empire's Old Clothes was widely praised when it was first published in 1983. This edition, including a new preface by the author, makes a contemporary classic newly available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0822346710
• ISBN13: 9780822346715
• Release Date: January 2010
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.9" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Reading Lone Ranger.

Personally, I think Dorfman to be above all a Marxist scholar of _American_ Mass Culture. His analysis of the Lone Ranger comic strips is a classic, above all for the link between superheroes and Welfare State reality. His analysis of Babar I find lacking somewhat in understanding of European realities (after all, to suppose that "savages" - elephants - can become civilized is, for a Frenchman of the 1930s, somewhat of a step foward)and therefore contrived. Meverthless, a must-read.