Contemporary British Coming-Of-Age Films (1979 to the Present)
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Royal Holloway - Pure 1 Contemporary British Coming-of-Age Films (1979 to the Present) Philippa Zielfa Maslin A thesis submitted to Royal Holloway, University of London, in accordance with the requirements of a Ph.D. in the Department of Media Arts 2 Declaration of Authorship I declare that the work in this thesis was carried out in accordance with the regulations of Royal Holloway, University of London. This work is original, except where indicated by special reference in the text, and no part of the thesis has been submitted for any other academic award. Any views expressed in the thesis are those of the author. Signed: Philippa Zielfa Maslin Date: 19th January 2018 3 Abstract Locating itself in relation to existing work on youth in, primarily American, cinema, the thesis questions the analytical usefulness of conceptualising the ‘youth/teen film’ as a genre and, instead, seeks to establish the value of analysing the ‘coming-of-age film’ as a genre involving the employment of adolescent protagonists. In setting out to do so, it focuses on films which are set in Britain, made from 1979 onwards, and rarely discussed as coming-of-age films (or, indeed, youth/teen films), but which may be seen to benefit from such a critical approach. Following a survey of a range of anthropological, biological, historical, juridical, psychoanalytic, psychological and sociological approaches to adolescence, as well as scholarship on the literary precursor of the coming-of-age film, the Bildungsroman, and on the relationship between adolescence and cinema, a working definition of the coming-of- age genre is proposed.
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