[ecrea] Not Another Teen Film: Historical Essays on American Cinema and Youth

Call for Chapter:

/Not Another Teen Movie: Historical Essays on American Cinema and Youth/

Solicited is a single chapter of around 6,000 words (plus bibliography) 
to complete the line-up of a proposed edited collection of essays 
provisionally entitled /Not Another Teen Movie: Historical Essays on 
American Cinema and Youth. /A synopsis of the collection is included 
below. Currently, the collection boasts fourteen chapters from an 
international group of leading scholars in the field. The chapter itself 
is needed for a section provisionally entitled “Production Trends”.

The chapter would ideally observe the following guidelines:

1. The chapter is to focus on a youth-oriented and/or youth-centred 
production trend or film cycle that in the main unfolded between the 
years 1950 and 1967.

2. The development(s) upon which the chapter focuses may either be 
principally a product of activity from within the American film industry 
or may be mainly or exclusively the product of a non-American industry 
or film industries having engaged with some aspect of American youth 
film culture, be that output, content, or the American youth as a target 
market.

3. The chapter must either bring to light a trend or cycle hitherto 
neglected or marginalized in Anglophone film historiography or shed new 
light on a previously examined trend or cycle.

4. The chapter is to be the product of film historical approaches and 
methods.

5. The chapter will be anchored to sophisticated understandings of the 
relationships between industry practice, content and themes, and output.

6. The chapter will not have been published previously.

Abstracts of 200-400 words plus an up-to-date academic bio of 50-100 
words are to be submitted as soon as possible in PDF or Word form to 
(richard_nowell /at/ hotmail.com) <mailto:(richard_nowell /at/ hotmail.com)>

Yours Sincerely,

Dr. Richard Nowell (editor)

*_ _*

*_Synopsis_*

The relationships between American cinema and youth have been complex, 
shaping in diverse ways film production, distribution, exhibition, 
reception, and appropriation. Broadly speaking, the American youth 
market has long since been recognized as the engine driving the American 
movie business, with efforts to appeal to the hearts, minds, and pockets 
of young people underwriting the conduct of creative and commercial 
personnel operating in Hollywood, across the American independent 
sector, and even based overseas (see Doherty; Nowell). It can also be 
said that, as highly committed yet supposedly impressionable consumers, 
young people – Americans or otherwise – have featured prominently in 
public sphere discourse, often as the objects of adult concerns over 
their alleged susceptibility to the apparent rabble-rousing, stupefying 
or narcotizing effects of consuming too much, or the “wrong kind” of 
American cultural product (see Biltereyst). Conversely, American cinema 
is understood as a youth-friendly cinema that plays important roles in 
the lives of many young people across the globe (see Meers). Such points 
notwithstanding, the specific character of these relationships remains 
loosely sketched and is currently supported by only a handful of case 
studies. This situation has arisen in part because scholarly attention 
has tended to be focused towards on-screen images of young Americans and 
towards diagnosing certain teenpics, fads, and representational tropes 
as symptoms of the broader psychological, social, and political 
backdrops against which they took form (see Lewis; Shary). An inevitable 
by-product of the longstanding and continued pre-eminence of such 
approaches in both scholarly and popular circles (see Bernstein) has 
been the erection of canons of touchstone films and trends as well as 
the dissemination of reductive notions of youths as malleable consumers, 
which, as a whole, have served to erase many of the nuances 
characterizing this rich and multifaceted aspect of cinema history. 
Developing new lines of enquiry into the intersections of youth and 
American cinema is therefore both salient and timely; Not Another Teen 
Movie aims to do so through a series of case studies, characterized by 
the application of the diverse theoretically-underpinned, empirically 
researched approaches known collectively as the New Film History (see 
Chapman, Glancy, and Harper), that is intended to broaden understandings 
of, shed new light on, and make substantial revisions to, this key area 
of cinema studies.
Accordingly, Not Another Teen Movie brings together essays written by 
scholars from around the globe, all exploring the historical dimensions 
of American cinema and youth across the twentieth century and into the 
new millennium, both in American film culture as well as in other 
national contexts.

Richard Nowell teaches American Cinema at Charles University in Prague. 
He is the author of /Blood Money a History of the First Teen Slasher 
Film /Cycle, has served as a guest editor of /Iluminace: The Journal of 
Film Theory, History, and Aesthetics/, and his articles have been 
published or are forthcoming in, among others, /Cinema Journal/, 
/Journal of Film and Video/, /Post Script/, and /The New Review of Film 
and Television Studies./