American Sweethearts Teenage Girls in Twentieth-Century Popular Culture [Paperback]

Teenage girls seem to have been discovered by American pop culture in the 1930s. From that time until the present day, they have appeared in books and films, comics and television, as the embodied fantasies and nightmares of youth, women, and sexual maturation.

Looking at such figures as Nancy Drew, Judy Graves, Corliss Archer, Gidget, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Britney Spears, American Sweethearts shows how popular culture has shaped our view of the adolescent girl as an individual who is simultaneously sexualized and infantilized. While young women have received some positive lessons from these cultural icons, the overwhelming message conveyed by the characters and stories they inhabit stresses the dominance of the father and the teenage girls otherness, subordination, and ineptitude.

As sweet as a cherry lollipop and as tangy as a Sweetart, this book is an entertaining yet thoughtful exploration of the image of the American girl.

. . . Nash . . . adds to growing body of work in 'girls' studies.' . . . Overall, this book makes a valuable contribution to this emergent field. . . . Recommended.

Contents<\>
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Radical Notions: Nancy Drew and Her Readers, 19301949
2. Pretty Baby : Nancy Drew Goes to Hollywood
3. Delightfully Dangerous Girls in the 1940s
4. The Postwar Fall and Rise of Teen Girls
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index

American Sweethearts provides a good introduction to the history of adolescence and an indepth history of popular constructions of white adolescent femininity in a range of popular narratives. Nashs study of teen girls in popular twentiethcentury American narrative cycles fills in gaps in research on youth and gender and will be of interest to scholars in a variety of fields. 

Ilana Nash is Assistant Professor of English at Western Michigan University. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Nash's book is a fascinating and inl“Ô