front cover of Generation Multiplex
Generation Multiplex
The Image of Youth in American Cinema since 1980
By Timothy Shary
University of Texas Press, 2014

Generation Multiplex (2002) was the first comprehensive study of the representation of teenagers in American cinema since David Considine’s Cinema of Adolescence in 1985. This updated and expanded edition reaffirms the idea that films about youth constitute a legitimate genre worthy of study on its own terms. Identifying four distinct subgenres—school, delinquency, horror, and romance—Timothy Shary explores hundreds of representative films while offering in-depth discussion of movies that constitute key moments in the genre, including Fast Times at Ridgemont High, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Breakfast Club, Say Anything . . . , Boyz N the Hood, Scream, American Pie, Napoleon Dynamite, Superbad, The Twilight Saga, and The Hunger Games. Analyzing developments in teen films since 2002, Shary covers such topics as the increasing availability of movies on demand, which has given teens greater access to both popular and lesser-seen films; the recent dominance of supernatural and fantasy films as a category within the genre; and how the ongoing commodification of teen images in media affects real-life issues such as school bullying, athletic development, sexual identity, and teenage pregnancy.

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The Generation of 1914
Robert Wohl
Harvard University Press, 1979

The generation of 1914 holds a special place in memory, affection, and myth. In this irresistible and moving book, Robert Wohl rescues it from the shadows of legend and brings it fully into the realm of understanding. He tells the story of the young men--the middle class elite of five European countries, France, Germany, England, Spain, and Italy, to recreate the generational consciousness that united them as well as the unique national experience that made them different.

These were men born at the end of the nineteenth century when the world of reason was disintegrating into a world of irrationality. They were destined to rule but their lives were interrupted by the greatest of wars, leaving them searching for identity and historical continuity. Wohl recaptures this search through novels, poems, autobiographies, memoirs, sociological treatises, philosophical essays, university lectures, political speeches, conversations when recorded, letters, personal notebooks, and newspaper articles. His book is a brilliant study of European mentalities, both collective and individual.

Probing behind ideas to find the experience that inspired them, Wohl illuminates in unexpected ways the origins of World War I and its impact on its participants. His exploration of the consciousness of generational unity and the power of the generational bond enables him to place in a novel context the spread of pessimism and despair, the waning of liberal and humanitarian values, the rise of Communist and Fascist movements, and the sudden eruption of violence in Europe's progressive countries between the two world wars.

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Generations Past
Youth in East African History
Andrew Burton
Ohio University Press, 2010

Contemporary Africa is demographically characterized above all else by its youthfulness. In East Africa the median age of the population is now a striking 17.5 years, and more than 65 percent of the population is age 24 or under. This situation has attracted growing scholarly attention, resulting in an important and rapidly expanding literature on the position of youth in African societies.

While the scholarship examining the contemporary role of youth in African societies is rich and growing, the historical dimension has been largely neglected in the literature thus far. Generations Past seeks to address this gap through a wide-ranging selection of essays that covers an array of youth-related themes in historical perspective. Thirteen chapters explore the historical dimensions of youth in nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first–century Ugandan, Tanzanian, and Kenyan societies. Key themes running through the book include the analytical utility of youth as a social category; intergenerational relations and the passage of time; youth as a social and political problem; sex and gender roles among East African youth; and youth as historical agents of change. The strong list of contributors includes prominent scholars of the region, and the collection encompasses a good geographical spread of all three East African countries.

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Gilded Youth
Privilege, Rebellion and the British Public School
James Brooke-Smith
Reaktion Books, 2019
The British public school is an iconic institution, a training ground for the ruling elite and a symbol of national identity and tradition. But beyond the elegant architecture and evergreen playing fields is a turbulent history of teenage rebellion, sexual dissidence, and political radicalism. James Brooke-Smith wades into the wilder shores of public-school life over the last three hundred years in Gilded Youth. He uncovers armed mutinies in the late eighteenth century, a Victorian craze for flagellation, dandy-aesthetes of the 1920s, quasi-scientific discourse on masturbation, Communist scares in the 1930s, and the salacious tabloid scandals of the present day.

Drawing on personal experience, extensive research, and public school representations in poetry, school slang, spy films, popular novels, and rock music, Brooke-Smith offers a fresh account of upper-class adolescence in Britain and the role of elite private education in shaping youth culture. He shows how this central British institution has inspired a counterculture of artists, intellectuals, and radicals—from Percy Shelley and George Orwell to Peter Gabriel and Richard Branson—who have rebelled against both the schools themselves and the wider society for which they stand. Written with verve and humor in the tradition of Owen Jones’s The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It, this highly original cultural history is an eye-opening leap over the hallowed iron gates of privilege—and perturbation.
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front cover of Golden and Blue Like My Heart
Golden and Blue Like My Heart
Masculinity, Youth, and Power Among Soccer Fans in Mexico City
Roger Magazine
University of Arizona Press, 2007
For fans of pro soccer in Mexico City, the four most popular teams represent distinct identities that embody such attributes as political power, nationalism, and working-class values. One of these teams, the Pumas, is associated with youthfulness, and its equally youthful fans take pride in the fact that their heroes have not yet been corrupted by corporate or political interests. This ethnographic study examines Puma fans’ understanding of the ideal that the team represents, considers the practices they employ to express and sometimes contradict this ideal, and reveals how soccer fandom in contemporary Mexico has emerged as a nexus of tensions among competing visions of state and society.

Roger Magazine takes readers inside Mexico’s soccer stadiums to explore young men’s participation in struggles over the future of that country’s urban society. His firsthand observations of the fan clubs—las porras—yield a unique inside look at confrontations in the stands over group organization, particularly at the emergence of rebel segments within the clubs. His study offers a close-up look at ground-level struggles over social organization in contemporary urban Mexico, showing how young male fans both blindly reproduce and consciously manipulate images of violence and disorder derived from national myths about typical urban Mexican men.

Golden and Blue Like My Heart offers a new way of understanding the dynamics of fandom while shedding new light on larger social processes and youth culture in Mexico. And with its insight into soccer culture, politico-economic transition, and masculinity, it has important and wide-reaching implications for all of Latin America.
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front cover of Growing Up With Television
Growing Up With Television
Everyday Learning Among Young Adolescents
Joellen Fisherkeller
Temple University Press, 2002
Why talk with young people about TV? This is the question from which JoEllen Fisherkeller begins her insightful examination into the uses and power of TV in youth cultures.Fisherkeller studies the experiences of adolescents watching TV and talking about TV at home, at school, and with their peers. They discuss their hopes for the future as well as the challenges they currently face, and reveal how television plays a role in their everyday life. These young individuals, who come from a wide range of backgrounds, literally grow up with television, as the author follows them from middle school to high school and then on to college.As the most significant cultural symbol in the US, television is a powerful educational and socializing force. Fisherkeller examines how youth are attracted to TV programs and persona that help them work through personal and social dilemmas. TV stories teach them about conflicts of gender, race and class that parallel the lessons they learn from real life and the system of television show them how image creation is a real means of "making it" in an image-conscious society.Growing Up with Television is a groundbreaking book that should speak to a multitude of disciplines on the educative and societal power of a medium that pervades and defines contemporary experience.
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