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 Peter Krämer
February 20, 2023
Combining a detailed film analysis with archival research and social science approaches, this book examines how American Graffiti (1973), a low-budget and star-less teen comedy by a filmmaker whose only previous feature had been a box office flop, became one of the highest grossing and most highly ...
By Ann M. Ciasullo
January 24, 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
December 27, 2022
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 ...
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 Rob Stone
November 17, 2022
Examining the ideas, philosophies and strategies that inform and enable a young woman’s self-determination for a new century, this is a detailed, insightful study of Greta Gerwig’s much-loved, influential and critically acclaimed film. Drawing on Transcendentalism, French feminist thought, ...
By Nadia Lie
September 09, 2022
The first monograph to examine Walter Salles’ The Motorcycle Diaries, this book explains the significance of Salles’ film with respect to the specific category of ‘youth culture’ as a historically and culturally situated concept. The Motorcycle Diaries looks at the film’s engagement with ‘emerging ...
By Pamela Robertson Wojcik
May 06, 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 Neil Archer
February 17, 2022
This in-depth study of one of the twenty-first century’s most acclaimed films, The Social Network: Youth Film 2.0 considers the contribution of David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s film to the understanding of ‘youth’ in a contemporary, digital age. The book starts by situating The Social Network...
By Katherine Whitehurst
December 23, 2021
Examining how the discourses of youth, race, poverty and identity take shape when Push is adapted to the big screen, this book brings together valuable research to delve into representations of African-American girlhood. The book draws attention to how Black girlhood takes shape in the film ...
By Nessa Johnston
November 30, 2021
This book examines The Commitments (Parker, 1991) for the first time as a film, rather than an adaptation of Roddy Doyle’s bestselling novel, and as a significant cultural event in 1990s Ireland. A major hit in Ireland and around the world, the film depicts the short-lived attempts of an ensemble ...
By Maria Flood
September 30, 2021
This book helps readers understand Moonlight’s profound political and social importance, the innovative technical choices adopted by director Barry Jenkins and the film’s adoption and disruption of traditional coming-of-age themes through the specific prism of Chiron’s childhood and youth. ...
By Peter Templeton
December 28, 2020
This study of Kevin Smith’s debut film breaks new ground by exploring how Clerks sits at the intersection of political and cultural trends relevant to alternative youth cultures in the early 1990s. Clerks (1994) was born of and appeals to a specific youth subculture, with the multimedia ‘View ...
