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 Rob Stone
October 15, 2022
Examining the ideas, philosophies, beliefs and fears that are expressed in Greta Gerwig's film, this is a detailed, insightful study of a much-loved, influential and critically-acclaimed film. Drawing on Transcendentalism, French feminist thought, Californian art and the work of iconic American ...
By Nadia Lie
September 02, 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 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 Neil Archer
March 15, 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
January 07, 2022
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
December 07, 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 ...
By Stephen Glynn
November 30, 2020
This concise yet comprehensive study explores the emblematic journey by four young men from Liverpool from the epicentre of teen-led youth culture to the experimentation of the counterculture and beyond. Beginning with the celebration of Britain’s own ‘youthquake’ in the joyous and genre-shifting ...
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, ...
