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Ilana Nash; Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2006, viiip+264p,
ISBN 0-253-21802-0
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£14.95 (Pbk)
American Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth-Century Popular Culture provides a lucid cultural history of the teenage girl in American popular culture from the 1930s to the 1960s. Examining such figures as Nancy Drew, Judy Graves, Corliss Archer, Patty Duke and Gidget, Ilana Nash's fascinating study anatomizes portrayals of adolescent femininity in and across mainstream media - including books, magazines, films, television and theatre. The term 'narrative cycle' is used here to describe 'a collection of stories about a single character across several media' (p. 5). This definition enables Nash to draw a critical distinction between 'narrative cycles' as reiterations of a character across different narrative forms (resulting from its popularity among consumers) and 'franchises', which 'introduce new characters with the intention of exploiting their brand simultaneously in several different markets' (p. 5). The study focuses on comic narrative cycles because, unlike dramas of the period, they bring into focus 'the teenager' as a figure in need of interpretation and categorization in the mid-twentieth century American cultural imagination.
Nash begins with a discussion of the contradictory representations of teenage girls as either subordinate angels or agents of chaos - constructions that position them as 'types' and thus deny their subjectivity and personhood. Moreover, she argues, while professing to define the 'average' teen girl by placing...