Witchcraft and Adolescence in American Popular Culture

Witchcraft and Adolescence in American Popular Culture: Teen Witches is a comprehensive study of the teenage witch as a cultural trope. The book explores the changing representation of adolescent witches in film, literature and other media from the 1940s to the present.

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In the decades since the Second World War, the teenage witch has emerged as a major American cultural trope. Appearing in films, novels, comics and on television, adolescent witches have long reflected shifting societal attitudes towards the teenage demographic. At the same time, teen witches have also served as a means through which adolescent femininity can be conceptualised, interrogated and reimagined. Drawing on a wide theoretical framework - including the works of Deleuze and Foucault as well as recent new materialist philosophies - this book explores how the adolescent witch has evolved over the course of more than seventy years. Moving from the birth of the bobby soxer in the 1940s through to twenty-first-century teenage engagements with fourth-wave feminism, this book treats a range of themes including embodiment, agency, identity, violence and sexuality.