Identity in crisis: Modernism and the texts of adolescence

The sudden and pronounced appearance of the developmental stage of adolescence in theoretical, fictional, and popular discourses in the early decades of the twentieth century was symptomatic of a larger "identity crisis" in British and American culture. Chapter 1 argues that the "discovery" of adolescence initiated by G. Stanley Hall's and Margaret Mead's first full-length treatments was made in reaction to the newly imported psychoanalytic theories of Freud. Chapters 2 and 3 look at how adolescence was constructed in the popular culture of the first decades of the twentieth century. Whether it was the call to return to nature as exemplified in the Boy Scout movement and Kipling's Kim, or the portrayal of the chivalrous adolescent in the work of Arthur Conan Doyle, these popular texts express a desire to save the volatile and changing adolescent from the confines of the city and place him/her in an environment where he/she can achieve some independence, honor, and self-reliance. Chapter 4 examines the many fictional portrayals of adolescent authors that appeared in the early decades of the twentieth century. Characters such as Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Bernard in Woolf's The Waves attempt to "make names for themselves" by renouncing the names of their fathers and writing their own textual identities. All of these representations of adolescence focus on this volatile site as a way of interrogating determinist notions of identity and development, but all in various ways end up prescribing very stringent guidelines as to what composes a legitimate adult identity. The final chapter applies these and other observations about adolescence towards an analysis of the contemporary fascination with the so-called "real adolescent" in television, film, and the novel. This fascination is symptomatic of a mid-century shift from a fear of the out-of-control adolescent to a fear of the adolescent automaton.