9781786838926
Distributed for University of Wales Press
Witchcraft and Adolescence in American Popular Culture
Teen Witches
A study of teenage witches in twentieth-century American pop culture.
The teenage witch emerged in American fiction in the late twentieth century, quickly becoming a cultural touchstone. Witchcraft and Adolescence in American Popular Culture reveals how novels, films, television, and comics about witchy women register shifting attitudes toward adolescent femininity. Drawing on Deleuzian, Foucauldian, and new materialist theories, Miranda Corcoran charts a new feminist history from 1940s bobbysoxer to today, untangling strands of embodiments, agency, and violence.
The teenage witch emerged in American fiction in the late twentieth century, quickly becoming a cultural touchstone. Witchcraft and Adolescence in American Popular Culture reveals how novels, films, television, and comics about witchy women register shifting attitudes toward adolescent femininity. Drawing on Deleuzian, Foucauldian, and new materialist theories, Miranda Corcoran charts a new feminist history from 1940s bobbysoxer to today, untangling strands of embodiments, agency, and violence.
256 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 | © 2022
Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations of Frequently Referenced Texts
Introduction
Chapter 1: Towards a Teratology of the Teenage Witch
Chapter 2: ‘A Pack of “Bobby-Soxers”’: Marion L. Starkey and the Birth of the Post-War Teenage Witch
Chapter 3: ‘A guide to life’: Identity Formation and Perverse Readers in the Long 1960s
Chapter 4: Becoming-Witch: Makeover Narratives and Glamourous Transformations
Chapter 5: ‘How could there not be a choice?’: Agency and Power in Fourth-Wave Teen Witch Textsx
Conclusion: ‘By then I might be an entirely different person.’
Select Bibliography
List of Abbreviations of Frequently Referenced Texts
Introduction
Chapter 1: Towards a Teratology of the Teenage Witch
Chapter 2: ‘A Pack of “Bobby-Soxers”’: Marion L. Starkey and the Birth of the Post-War Teenage Witch
Chapter 3: ‘A guide to life’: Identity Formation and Perverse Readers in the Long 1960s
Chapter 4: Becoming-Witch: Makeover Narratives and Glamourous Transformations
Chapter 5: ‘How could there not be a choice?’: Agency and Power in Fourth-Wave Teen Witch Textsx
Conclusion: ‘By then I might be an entirely different person.’
Select Bibliography