Teenage Time: Coming of Age Disruptively in Modern and Contemporary Literature, Culture and Film

(Hardback)

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Adolescence has been codified as an unpredictable, experimental and liminal time. Teenage Time reads this phase as queer in its framing and disruption of developmental narratives of modernity, showing that the identity of the teenager, as it has been culturally perceived in different epochs developing since the 1940s, has shaped the temporal imaginary of the 20th and 21st century. From the conception of the teenager after the Second World War, through notions of rebellion and consumption peaking in the 1980s and 1990s, to representations of their precarious futures amidst the political, social, economic and environmental uncertainties of today, Pamela Thurschwell exposes British and American representations of the adolescent as both destructive and recursive in their disturbance of narrative and teleology in literature, film and sub-cultural history. Calling on theories of queer temporality, time studies, psychoanalysis and Marxist accounts of modernity, this book traces how the teenager is 'out of time' and time-travelling, commodified, anarchic, futureless, precarious with an uneven distribution of time in relation to race, and how they confront dystopias in Young Adult catastrophe literature.

Covering a wide range of works, this book features contemporary and YA fiction such as The Member of the Wedding, American Pastoral, Sula, The Hate U Give, The Fault in Our Stars, How I Live Now, Never Let Me Go, The Hunger Games and They Both Die at the End, and films including Donnie Darko, The Breakfast Club, Back to the Future, Say Anything and Ghost World. Original and conceptually sophisticated, Thurschwell demonstrates how adolescence is formed in dialogue with a crisis in and of historical time, revealing the promise and destruction of the modern teenager.

Reviews

Teenage Time shows us how the social, cultural, and aesthetic fascination with the chronically intense presence of the teenager reframes time in a period when narratives of progress and development have stalled. Matching the vibrancy, savviness, and charisma of its topic, this book drops a teenage time bomb into histories and theories of the Anglo-American moderns just now. * Laura Salisbury, Professor of Modern Literature and Medical Humanities, University of Exeter, UK *

Author Bio

Pamela Thurschwell is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature and Unhistoric Acts at the University of Sussex, UK. She is the author of Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 18801920 (2001) and Sigmund Freud (2000) and the editor of Quadrophenia and Mod(ern) Culture (2017). She has published widely on 19th, 20th and 21st-century literature, adolescence, and culture including Henry James, Taylor Swift, and Bojack Horseman.