Description
Book SynopsisWeiner highlights the new importance of youth as a social category of identity in the context of the postwar explosion of the mass media and explores the ways in which girls both defined and disrupted this category.
Trade ReviewIn the exhilarating Enfants Terribles, Susan Weiner... utilizes French theory-especially psychoanalytic and feminist-to analyze the historical phenomenon of the emergence of a new teenage girl in France after the Second World War. -- Susan B. Whitney Journal of Social History A thorough and engaging study. Through examining film, advertising, magazines, music and women's writing, Weiner attempts to elicit the process by which the French media created and imposed an image of female youth in the two decades preceding the 'revolution' of 1968, and to suggest that the cumulative effect of this process means that '68 cannot be taken as the first moment in which youth emerged as a public force in postwar France... The strength of Enfants Terribles lies in its impressively comprehensive cultural research, and the perspective this provides on contemporary feminism. -- Lisa Hilton Times Literary Supplement In this provocative book, Weiner weaves together media, politics, and culture in postwar France through the analysis of the emergence of youth-especially young women-as social actors and objects. Choice This is a fascinating and indispensable work of gender and cultural analysis... As an historian, I particularly appreciate her attentiveness to the historical specificity, as well as continuities, of her subject. -- Whitney Walton H-France, H-Net Book Reviews A compelling academic assessment of female social development in this dynamic era. -- Alicia Austin France Today Susan Weiner's exciting work on France in the period following the Second World War explores the emergence, between 1945 and 1968, of a new definition of what it meant to be young and female in France. -- Rebecca Pulju SubStance In a wide-ranging study Weiner discusses the disruptive feminine 'other' that 'emerges alongside complicity with patriarchy' in magazines, popular fiction, politics, film, technological advances and in contemporary social surveys. -- Stephanie Spencer Paedagogica Historica 2004
Table of ContentsContents: 1 From ELLE to MADEMOISELLE 2 Fictions of Female Adolescence 3 The Mal du Siecle: Politics and Sexuality 4 Technological Society and Its Discontents 5 Quantifying Youth Conclusion: From Object to Subject?
