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Teenage girls seem to have been discovered by American pop culture in the 1930s. From that time until the present day, they have appeared in books and films, comics and television, as the embodied fantasies and nightmares of youth, women, and sexual maturation. Looking at such figures as Nancy Drew, Judy Graves, Corliss Archer, Gidget, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Britney Spears, American Sweethearts shows how popular culture has shaped our view of the adolescent girl as an individual who is simultaneously sexualized and infantilized. While young women have received some positive lessons from these cultural icons, the overwhelming message conveyed by the characters and stories they inhabit stresses the dominance of the father and the teenage girl's otherness, subordination, and ineptitude. As sweet as a cherry lollipop and as tangy as a Sweetart, this book is an entertaining yet thoughtful exploration of the image of the American girl.
This Companion examines the range of American crime fiction from execution sermons of the Colonial era to television programmes like The Sopranos.
Holy adolescence, Batman! Robin and the Making of American Adolescence offers the first character history and analysis of the most famous superhero sidekick, Robin. Debuting just a few months after Batman himself, Robin has been an integral part of the Dark Knight’s history—and debuting just a few months prior to the word “teenager” first appearing in print, Robin has from the outset both reflected and reinforced particular images of American adolescence. Closely reading several characters who have “played” Robin over the past eighty years, Robin and the Making of American Adolescence reveals the Boy (and sometimes Girl!) Wonder as a complex figure through whom mainstream culture has addressed anxieties about adolescents in relation to sexuality, gender, and race. This book partners up comics studies and adolescent studies as a new Dynamic Duo, following Robin as he swings alongside the ever-changing American teenager and finally shining the Bat-signal on the latter half of “Batman and—.”
This book examines the narratives of series heroines that preceded and followed Nancy Drew, each in relation to their social, historical, and economic environments. Covering heroines including Miss Pickerell, Madge Sterling, and Polly the Powers Model, among others, this book illustrates that the recovery of stolen inheritances during the Great Depression serves different social ends than, for example, fighting Germans on an international stage. This book expands scholarship that tends to focus on Nancy Drew by drawing attention to the stories of some other “lost” heroines of twentieth century U.S. series fiction. Organized by time period, the chapters give insight into the cultural landscape that perpetuated the popularity of these heroines in their respective eras, how these series reflected the experiences of readers across the decades, and their continued impact well into the twenty-first century.
Portrayals of Children in Popular Culture: Fleeting Images, edited by Vibiana Bowman Cvetkovic and Debbie Olson, is a collection which examines images of “children” and “childhood” in popular culture, including print, online, television shows, and films. The contributors to this volume explore the constructions of “children” and “childhood” rather than actual children or actual childhoods. In the chapters that are concerned with depictions of actual, individual children, the authors investigate how the images of those children conform or “trouble” current notions of what it means to be a child engaged in a contemporary “childhood.” This is a unique volume, because of ...
"Waksman brings a new understanding to familiar material by treating it in an original and stimulating manner. This book tells 'the other side of the story.'"—Philip Auslander, author of Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music "While there are a number of histories of punk and metal and numerous biographies of important bands within each genre, there is no comparable book to This Ain't the Summer of Love. The ultimate contribution the book makes is to provoke the reader into rethinking the ongoing fluid relationship between punk, a music that enjoyed considerable critical support, and metal, a music that has been systematically denigrated by critics. This book is th...
In Babysitter, Miriam Forman-Brunell brings critical attention to the ubiquitous, yet long-overlooked babysitter in the popular imagination and American history. --from publisher description.
We think we know Betty and Veronica, but we don’t. Far more than just Archie’s girlfriends, the girls have grown beyond simple archetypes to become compelling, relevant characters for each new generation over the past eighty years. Betty, Veronica, and the rest of the Riverdale gang appear to be frozen in time in Archie comic books. They are perpetual high schoolers, recycling the same basic plotlines over and over in their wholesome, small-town American world. However, there is much more to Betty and Veronica than the broad stereotypes and clichéd storytelling suggests. In Betty and Veronica: The Leading Ladies of Riverdale, Tim Hanley explores the complexity behind these two iconic ch...
A biography of the founder of the Stratemeyer Literary Syndicate, a publishing empire that produced, in the early decades of the twentieth century, over 1400 adventure serial novels, including the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series.