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, the author discusses a range of themes including embodiment, agency, identity, violence and sexuality.
Table of Content
List of Abbreviations of Frequently Referenced Texts
Introduction
Chapter 1: Towards a Teratology of the Teenage Witch
Chapter 2
‘Bitch Witches’: Marion Starkey and the Birth of the Post-War Teenage Witch
Chapter 3
‘Leave Something Witchy’: Identity Formation and Perverse Readers in the Long 1960s
Chapter 4
Makeover Narratives and Glamourous Transformations: The Postfeminist Teen Witch
Chapter 5
‘How could there not be a choice? Free will?’: Agency and Choice in Teen Witch Texts of the Fourth Wave
Index
About the author
This book is aimed at undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as academic researchers.
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