Cinema and Youth Cultures
About the Book Series
Cinema and Youth Cultures engages with well-known youth films from American cinema as well the cinemas of other countries. Using a variety of methodological and critical approaches the series volumes provide informed accounts of how young people have been represented in film, while also exploring the ways in which young people engage with films made for and about them. In doing this, the Cinema and Youth Cultures series contributes to important and long standing debates about youth cultures, how these are mobilized and articulated in influential film texts and the impact that these texts have had on popular culture at large.
Series Editors: Siân Lincoln (independent scholar) and Yannis Tzioumakis (University of Liverpool)
Published volumes:
Clueless: American Youth in the 1990s (2017)
Grease: Gender, Nostaligia and Youth Consumption in the Blockbuster Era (2017)
Boyhood: A Young Life on Screen (2017)
Easy A: The End of the High-School Teen Comedy? (2018)
The Hunger Games: Spectacle, Risk and the Girl Action Hero (2018)
L’auberge Espagnole: European Youth on Film (2018)
The Virgin Suicides: Reverie, Sorrow and Young Love (2018)
The Freshman: Comedy and Masculinity in 1920s Film and Youth Culture (2019)
The Breakfast Club: John Hughes, Hollywood, and the Golden Age of Teen Film (2019)
Y Tu Mama También: Mythologies of Youth (2019)
Halloween: Youth Cinema and the Horrors of Growing Up (2019)
American Pie: The Anatomy fo Vulgar Teen Comedy (2019)
Bande de Filles: Girlhood Identities in Contemporary France (2020)
Gidget: Origins of a Teen Girl Transmedia Franchise (2020)
The Beatles and Film: From Youth Culture to Counterculture (2020)
Clerks: ‘Over the Counter’ Culture and Youth Cinema (2020)
Forthcoming:
American Graffiti
Rock Around the Clock
Precious
Mary Poppins
Big Wednesday
Moonlight
The Commitments
King Creole
Mustang
The Outsiders
The Motorcycle Diaries
Before Sunrise
King Creole: The Disputed Territories of 1950s American Youth Culture
1st Edition
By Anthony Thomas McKenna
January 16, 2026
This book positions King Creole in the disputed territories of 1950s youth culture. It is one of Elvis’s best regarded films, but one of his least financially successful. It is a portrait of youthful alienation and juvenile delinquency made at a time when these topics were becoming less fashionable...
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse: Youth, Race, and the Hypertext
1st Edition
By Charlie Michael
December 26, 2025
Exploring the dynamic genres of animation and comic book films, this book examines the transmedia role of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) and its critical involvement in attempts to diversify representations in youth-oriented cinema and culture. Several years after the movie’s immense ...
Rock around the Clock: Exploitation, Rock 'n' roll and the Origins of Youth Culture
1st Edition
By Yannis Tzioumakis, Siân Lincoln
January 30, 2025
Examining one of the earliest films made specifically for young audiences in US cinema, Rock around the Clock (1956), this book explores the exploitation production company that made the film and the ways it represented young people, especially in terms of their association with rock ’n’ roll music...
Before Sunrise: Young Love on the Move
1st Edition
By María del Mar Azcona, Celestino Deleyto
November 29, 2024
This book offers a fresh analysis of Before Sunrise that reframes its romance within the contexts of transnational culture and cinema. The book highlights the symbolic value of the film’s construction of transnational youth in the building of a trans-European culture. Engaging with the film’s ...
Big Wednesday: Lamenting Lost Youth in the New Hollywood
1st Edition
By Mark McKenna
November 19, 2024
This book provides an examination of Big Wednesday as an unconventional film that employs a mythic sensibility in its representation of the loss of youth and young manhood. Critically and commercially unsuccessful on its original release, the coming-of-age, surf drama Big Wednesday (1978), has ...
American Graffiti: George Lucas, the New Hollywood and the Baby Boom Generation
1st Edition
By Peter Krämer
October 09, 2024
Combining a detailed film analysis with archival research and social science approaches, this book examines how American Graffiti (1973), a low-budget and star-less teen comedy by a filmmaker whose only previous feature had been a box office flop, became one of the highest grossing and most highly ...
Mary Poppins: Radical Elevation in the 1960s
1st Edition
By Leslie H. Abramson
August 26, 2024
This volume examines Mary Poppins as a 1960s film reflecting and invested in its radically changing times, a largely but not unmitigatedly antiestablishment musical resonant with conditions and issues powerfully affecting baby boomers. Among the explosion of baby boomer films that rocked the 1960s,...
Mustang: Translating Willful Youth
1st Edition
By Elif Akçalı, Cüneyt Çakırlar, Özlem Güçlü
August 26, 2024
This book provides a critically informed account of the Turkey-born France-based director Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s debut film Mustang (2015), which tells the story of five orphaned sisters living with their grandmother and uncle in a remote Turkish village. The film’s familiar art-house style, and its...
The Outsiders: Adolescent Tenderness and Staying Gold
1st Edition
By Ann M. Ciasullo
August 26, 2024
This volume traces the unique trajectory of The Outsiders, from beloved book to beloved movie. Based on S.E. Hinton’s landmark novel, Coppola’s film adaptation tells the story of the Greasers, a gang of working-class boys yearning for security, love, and acceptance in a world ruled by their rival ...
Lady Bird: Self-Determination for a New Century
1st Edition
By Rob Stone
May 27, 2024
Examining the ideas, philosophies and strategies that inform and enable a young woman’s self-determination for a new century, this is a detailed, insightful study of Greta Gerwig’s much-loved, influential and critically acclaimed film. Drawing on Transcendentalism, French feminist thought, ...
The Motorcycle Diaries: Youth, Travel and Politics in Latin America
1st Edition
By Nadia Lie
May 27, 2024
The first monograph to examine Walter Salles’ The Motorcycle Diaries, this book explains the significance of Salles’ film with respect to the specific category of ‘youth culture’ as a historically and culturally situated concept. The Motorcycle Diaries looks at the film’s engagement with ‘emerging ...
Moonlight: Screening Black Queer Youth
1st Edition
By Maria Flood
September 25, 2023
This book helps readers understand Moonlight’s profound political and social importance, the innovative technical choices adopted by director Barry Jenkins and the film’s adoption and disruption of traditional coming-of-age themes through the specific prism of Chiron’s childhood and youth. ...