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3 books match the query 'Kearney, Mary Celeste'

cover of Designing the Teenage Girl: The Debut of a Popular Character

Designing the Teenage Girl

The Debut of a Popular Character

Mary Celeste Kearney

University of Texas Press, 2026

Explores the forgotten first wave of American teen-girl entertainment from the late 1920s through the early 1950s.

During the mid-twentieth century, American entertainment featuring teenage girls blossomed. From short stories to plays, films, comics, radio programs, and television shows, writers and other creative professionals developed a new character type that helped to define midcentury girlhood and teen culture. Designing the Teenage Girl uncovers the largely forgotten first wave of US teen-girl entertainment, tracing its emergence in the 1920s through a thirty-year production cycle that spanned all sectors of American popular culture.

Beginning with short stories such as Sally Benson’s Junior Miss and following their adaptations, Kearney reveals how teen-girl narratives circulated across industries. Drawing on archival research and analysis of visual, narrative, and sound design, Kearney situates these texts within the identity politics of the period. While midcentury teen-girl entertainment privileged white, middle-class femininity, it also contained alternative visions of girlhood that complicated heteronormative and patriarchal expectations. This study reframes the origins of teen-girl entertainment and demonstrates how its aesthetic strategies and industrial practices continue to shape representations of girlhood today.

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cover of The Girls' History and Culture Reader: The Twentieth Century

The Girls' History and Culture Reader

The Twentieth Century

Edited by Miriam Forman-Brunell and Leslie Paris

University of Illinois Press, 2011

The Girls' History and Culture Reader: The Twentieth Century provides scholars, instructors, and students with the most influential essays that have defined the field of American girls' history and culture. A relatively new and energetic field of inquiry, girl-centered research is critical for a fuller understanding of women and gender, a deeper consideration of childhood and adolescence, and a greater acknowledgment of the significance of generation as a historical force in American culture and society.
 
Bringing together work from top scholars of women and youth, The Girls' History and Culture Reader: The Twentieth Century illustrates girls' centrality to major twentieth-century forces such as immigration, labor, feminism, and consumerism. Themes in this pioneering volume include girls' use of fashion and music, their roles as workers, their friendships, and new ideas about girls' bodies. While girls in the twentieth century found new avenues for personal ambition and self-expression, especially at school and in the realm of leisure and popular culture, they continued to wrestle with traditional ideas about feminine identity, socialization, and sexuality.
 
Contributors are Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Rachel Devlin, Susan J. Douglas, Miriam Forman-Brunell, Kyra D. Gaunt, Mary Celeste Kearney, Ilana Nash, Mary Odem, Leslie Paris, Kathy Peiss, Vicki L. Ruiz, Kelly Schrum, and Judy Yung.
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cover of Undead TV: Essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Undead TV

Essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Elana Levine and Lisa Parks, eds.

Duke University Press, 2007

When the final episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer aired in 2003, fans mourned the death of the hit television series. Yet the show has lived on through syndication, global distribution, DVD release, and merchandising, as well as in the memories of its devoted viewers. Buffy stands out from much entertainment television by offering sharp, provocative commentaries on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and youth. Yet it has also been central to changing trends in television production and reception. As a flagship show for two U.S. “netlets”—the WB and UPN—Buffy helped usher in the “post-network” era, and as the inspiration for an active fan base, it helped drive the proliferation of Web-based fan engagement.

In Undead TV, media studies scholars tackle the Buffy phenomenon and its many afterlives in popular culture, the television industry, the Internet, and academic criticism. Contributors engage with critical issues such as stardom, gender identity, spectatorship, fandom, and intertextuality. Collectively, they reveal how a vampire television series set in a sunny California suburb managed to provide some of the most biting social commentaries on the air while exposing the darker side of American life. By offering detailed engagements with Sarah Michelle Gellar’s celebrity image, science-fiction fanzines, international and “youth” audiences, Buffy tie-in books, and Angel’s body, Undead TV shows how this prime-time drama became a prominent marker of industrial, social, and cultural change.

Contributors. Ian Calcutt, Cynthia Fuchs, Amelie Hastie, Annette Hill, Mary Celeste Kearney, Elana Levine, Allison McCracken, Jason Middleton, Susan Murray, Lisa Parks

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