Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Petersen, Christina G.

Titel

Introduction: When Both Were Young

Ist Teil von

• The Freshman, 2019, p.1-7

Auflage

1

Ort / Verlag

United Kingdom: Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2019

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Harold Lloyd's The Freshmanpresented a self-reflexive comedic image of the first American youth culture - the 1920s college - as a space of conspicuous leisure and consumption. In the process, Lloyd's film became one of the top-grossing comedies of the silent era. As the introduction discusses, The Freshman innovated by combining age-old themes of "being yourself" with a new era of conforming to middle-class norms, capitalizing on a cultural fascination with youth in the 1920s. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book traces the emergence of 1920s collegiate culture as an influential instance of youth culture before the ascendance of the teenager and teenpic in the 1950s. It explores the rise of middle-class collegiate style as a distinct subculture, form of mass culture, and instance of popular culture in 1920s America. The book argues for American masculinity in Harold Lloyd's silent films as a liminal position between working and leisure class, active and passive, child and adult, and reality and fantasy. It provides a critical reading of The Freshman's narrative and formal characteristics to argue not only for the film's status as an early entry in the youth film genre but for a reconsideration of one of its central tropes: the liminal body.