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Rethinking the Hollywood Teen Movie: Gender, Genre and Identity
By Frances Smith
Rethinking the Hollywood Teen Movie is the first academic monograph to consider the aesthetic and narrative potential of this highly popular, yet often overlooked, film genre. Reconsidering tropes such as the male juvenile delinquent figure, the makeover and the teen vampire, the book uses a series of detailed case studies of films like Rebel Without a Cause, Grease, Heathers and Twilight to explore the genre's relation to critical concepts of intersectionality, postfeminism and the posthuman. This book is an innovative overview of the Hollywood teen movie and its construction of teen identity.
Frances Smith is Teaching Fellow and Convenor of the Writing Lab at University College London. She has published widely in popular Hollywood cinema, and with Timothy Shary is the co-editor of Refocus: The Films of Amy Heckerling, (EUP, 2016).
List of contents
List of Figures; Acknowledgements; 1: Introduction; 2: Rethinking the Teen Movie; 3: Acting Up: Performing Masculine Delinquency in the Teen Movie; 4: Making Over: Gender and Class at the High-School Prom; 5: Looking Back: Nostalgia, Postfeminism and the Teen Movie; 6: Becoming Other: The Posthuman and the Teen Movie; 8: Conclusion: Not Another Teen Movie?; Bibliography; Filmography
About the author
Frances Smith is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sussex. She is the author of 'Rethinking the Hollywood Teen Movie' (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), which combines close textual analysis and critical theory to argue that the genre possesses a distinct narrative and aesthetic.
Summary
Reconsidering tropes such as the male juvenile delinquent figure, the makeover and the teen vampire, the book uses a series of detailed case studies to provide an innovative overview of the Hollywood teen movie and its construction of teen identity.