Teenage Time

Coming of Age Disruptively in Literature, Culture and Film 1945-2024

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.

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