Cinema and Youth Cultures engages with well-known youth films from American cinema as well the cinemas of other countries. Using a variety of methodological and critical approaches the series volumes provide informed accounts of how young people have been represented in film, while also exploring the ways in which young people engage with films made for and about them. In doing this, the Cinema and Youth Cultures series contributes to important and long standing debates about youth cultures, how these are mobilized and articulated in influential film texts and the impact that these texts have had on popular culture at large.
Series Editors: Siân Lincoln (independent scholar) and Yannis Tzioumakis (University of Liverpool)
Published volumes:
Clueless: American Youth in the 1990s (2017)
Grease: Gender, Nostaligia and Youth Consumption in the Blockbuster Era (2017)
Boyhood: A Young Life on Screen (2017)
Easy A: The End of the High-School Teen Comedy? (2018)
The Hunger Games: Spectacle, Risk and the Girl Action Hero (2018)
L’auberge Espagnole: European Youth on Film (2018)
The Virgin Suicides: Reverie, Sorrow and Young Love (2018)
The Freshman: Comedy and Masculinity in 1920s Film and Youth Culture (2019)
The Breakfast Club: John Hughes, Hollywood, and the Golden Age of Teen Film (2019)
Y Tu Mama También: Mythologies of Youth (2019)
Halloween: Youth Cinema and the Horrors of Growing Up (2019)
American Pie: The Anatomy fo Vulgar Teen Comedy (2019)
Bande de Filles: Girlhood Identities in Contemporary France (2020)
Gidget: Origins of a Teen Girl Transmedia Franchise (2020)
The Beatles and Film: From Youth Culture to Counterculture (2020)
Clerks: ‘Over the Counter’ Culture and Youth Cinema (2020)
Forthcoming:
American Graffiti
Rock Around the Clock
Precious
Mary Poppins
Big Wednesday
Moonlight
The Commitments
King Creole
Mustang
The Outsiders
The Motorcycle Diaries
Before Sunrise
By Ann M. Ciasullo
February 17, 2023
This volume traces the unique trajectory of The Outsiders, from beloved book to beloved movie. Based on S.E. Hinton’s landmark novel, Coppola’s film adaptation tells the story of the Greasers, a gang of working-class boys yearning for security, love, and acceptance in a world ruled by their rival ...
By Leslie H. Abramson
January 13, 2023
This volume examines Mary Poppins as a 1960s film reflecting and invested in its radically changing times, a largely but not unmitigatedly antiestablishment musical resonant with conditions and issues powerfully affecting baby boomers. Among the explosion of baby boomer films that rocked the 1960s,...
By Elif Akçalı, Cüneyt Çakırlar, Özlem Güçlü
December 05, 2022
This book provides a critically informed account of the Turkey-born France-based director Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s debut film Mustang (2015), which tells the story of five orphaned sisters living with their grandmother and uncle in a remote Turkish village. The film’s familiar art-house style, and its...
By Pamela Robertson Wojcik
May 01, 2022
Gidget: Origins of a Teen Girl Transmedia Franchise examines the multiplicity of books, films, TV shows, and merchandise that make up the transmedia Gidget universe from the late 1950s to the 1980s. The book examines the Gidget phenomenon as an early and unique teen girl franchise that expands ...
By Frances Smith
January 23, 2020
Few films in the twenty-first century have represented coming-of-age with the beauty and brutality of Bande de Filles (or Girlhood). This book provides an in-depth examination of Céline Sciamma’s film, focusing on its portrayal of female adolescence in contemporary Paris. Motivated by the absence ...
By Bill Osgerby
October 18, 2019
American Pie represents the most commercially successful example of the vulgar teen comedy, and this book analyses the film's development, audience-appeal and cultural significance. American Pie (1999) is a film that exemplifies that most disparaged of movie genres – the vulgar teen comedy. ...
By Mark Bernard
October 07, 2019
This book argues that Halloween need not be the first nor the most influential youth slasher film for it to hold a special place in the history of youth cinema. John Carpenter’s 1978 horror hit was once considered the be-all, end-all of teen slasher cinema and was regarded as the first, the best, ...
By Scott L. Baugh
September 12, 2019
Charting production, distribution, censorship, and reception, this book examines Y Tu Mamá También in its presentation as a journey of self-discoveries. Three young adults enjoy a road trip together in search of a legendary beach. Behind their stories are mythologies of youth, a network of ideas ...
By Elissa Nelson
April 29, 2019
The Breakfast Club is a quintessential teen film. This book analyzes how multiple factors coalesced to solidify the status of The Breakfast Club as one of the most emblematic films of the 1980s and one of the most definitive teen films of the genre. The film brings together genre-defining elements ...
By Christina G. Petersen
March 26, 2019
Before the advent of the teenager in the 1940s and the teenpic in the 1950s, The Freshman (Taylor and Newmeyer, 1925) represented 1920s college youth culture as an exclusive world of leisure to a mass audience. Starring popular slapstick comedian Harold Lloyd, The Freshman was a hit with audiences ...
By Justin Wyatt
June 22, 2018
Based on the best-selling novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides is director Sofia Coppola’s evocative debut feature of young love, sex, loss and family pressures in mid-1970s America. Acclaimed by both critics and audiences on release, the film is now viewed as a remarkable and bold ...
By Ben McCann
May 14, 2018
Part romantic comedy, part sitcom, part social drama, L’Auberge espagnole (The Spanish Apartment) recounts a familiar ‘youth’ ritual – the move from university to ‘the real world’, the often complicated personal, romantic and cultural encounters that ensue, and the moral uncertainties that ...