Easy A: The End of the High-School Teen Comedy? (Cinema and Youth Cultures)

By: Betty Kaklamanidou

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Synopsis: Easy A (2010) is the last significant box-office success in the high-school teen movie subgenre and a film that has already been deemed a ‘classic’ by many cultural commentators and popular film critics. By applying interdisciplinary insight to a relatively overlooked movie in academic discussion, Easy A: The End of the High-School Teen Comedy? is the first in-depth volume that places the movie within several key contexts and concepts of intertextuality, gender, genre and adaptation, and social discourse. Through the unpacking of a complex narrative that draws its plot from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and shares affinities with John Hughes’ paradigmatic films from the 1980s and key films from the 1990s, this volume presents Easy A as a palimpsest for the millennial generation. Clear and comprehensive, the book argues that Easy A marks the end of the commercially successful high-school teen comedy and discusses the reasons through a comparative synchronic and semi-diachronic historical comparison of the film with contemporary cinematic texts and those of the 1980s and 1990s.