Teenage Time: Coming of Age Disruptively in Literature, Culture and Film 1945-2024
Jul 2025 · Bloomsbury Publishing
Ebook
296
Pages
infoThis book will become available on July 24, 2025. You will not be charged until it is released.
About this ebook
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.
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.
About the author
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, 1880–1920 (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.
Reading information
Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.
