Teen Movies

A Century of American Youth

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by Timothy Shary

Type: Studies
Subject: Countries > United States
Keywords: teen movies, United States
Publishing date: 2023
Publisher: Wallflower Press
Collection: Short Cuts
2nd edition
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 184 pages
5 ½ x 8 ¾ inches (14 x 22 cm)

ISBN

978-0-231-20621-1

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Book Presentation:
Cinema has always engaged with the experiences, hopes, fears, and anxieties of—and about—adolescents, teenagers, and young people. This book is a comprehensive and accessible history of the depiction of teenagers in American film, from the silent era to the twenty-first century.

Timothy Shary explores the development of teenage roles across eras and industrial cycles, such as the juvenile delinquent pictures of the 1950s, the beach movies of the 1960s, the horror films of the 1980s, and the fantasy epics of the 2000s. He considers the varied genres of the teen movie—horror and melodrama, romance and adventure, fantasy and science fiction—and its shifting themes and tropes around sex and gender, childhood and adulthood, rebellion and social order, crime and consumer culture. Teen Movies features analyses of films such as Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Splendor in the Grass (1961), Carrie (1976), The Breakfast Club (1985), American Pie (1999), and the Twilight series (2008–2012).

This second edition is updated throughout and features a new chapter examining Millennials and Generation Z on screen, with discussions of many contemporary topics, including queer youth in movies like Moonlight (2016), abortion in films such as Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020), and the flourishing of a “tween” cinema as seen in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. (2023).

About the Author:
Timothy Shary is a professor at Eastern Florida State College. He is the author of Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in American Cinema Since 1980 (revised edition, 2014) and editor of Cinemas of Boyhood: Masculinity, Sexuality, Nationality (2021), among other books.

Press Reviews:
Teen Movies provides an extraordinary amount of history in a compact and absorbing volume. This newly updated edition expands Timothy Shary’s study from the silent era’s first glimmers of teen movies through the diverse representations of youth in the twenty-first century with discussion and mention of dozens of films in each era that touch upon different themes. Michele Meek, author of Consent Culture and Teen Films: Adolescent Sexuality in U.S. Movies

This new edition brings Teen Movies right up to date, examining Gen Z on screen and new directions in the scholarship. Retaining the original’s accessibility, brevity, and rigor, the book remains essential for students and scholars of teen cinema, or anyone who has ever been a teen. Frances Smith, author of Rethinking the Hollywood Teen Movie: Gender, Genre, and Identity

Shary combines discussion of the economic underpinnings, ideological weight, and cultural impact of filmic representations of teens, considering how they have responded to and shaped discourses of identity, race, gender, sexuality and class for young people. From the films of Shirley Temple to Rebel Without a Cause to Moonlight, this updated and expanded edition shows how these films shaped and traversed cultural understandings of the agency and import of young people. Louisa Stein, author of Millennial Fandom: Television Audiences in the Transmedia Age

An informed and ultra-inclusive discussion of films focused on the teenage experience. Christopher Schobert, The Film Stage

See the publisher website: Wallflower Press

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