They must learn to negotiate the many institutions that shape them: school, government, religion, identity politics, family, and so on” ( 2000, p. Trites states: “During adolescence, adolescents must learn their place in the power structure. He and Trites both presume that the nature of Young Adult literature is tightly connected to issues of power.

Rather than radically challenging class society, the novel maintains and reproduces the social order (2007, pp. He argues that the novel undermines its own purported critique of social class mainly by its endorsement of American education. As Tribunella puts it, The Outsiders is “a key prototype of the new realist novel for young adults, but also an explicitly didactic one” ( 2007, p. Trites and Tribunella identify ways in which Hinton’s debut fosters its readers by reproducing the dominant ideology of the middle class and of the American school system. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye ( 1951), Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), Joyce Johnson’s Come and Join the Dance (1962) and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), the emotional norms of adult middle-class society were being breached by youngsters who were too emotional, or not emotional enough.Īlthough emotions occupy a central position within the novel, previous scholarship has mainly focused on the ways in which it deals with power, socialization, and ideology (Trites, 2000 Tribunella, 2007 Beals 2018), and on its representation of mainstream culture, consumerism, capitalism, and class difference (Abate, 2013 Tribunella, 2007 Beals 2018). The obsession gave rise to a great deal of more-or-less sensational fiction and nonfiction titles about angry young men (Abate, 2013, pp. The era was obsessed with the juvenile delinquency that, due to the social, economic, and familial disruptions caused by World War II, had been and was still increasing. Stanley Hall’s previously uncontested work on adolescence (Hall, 1904 Erikson, 1950 Friedenberg, 1959, 1965 Goodman, 1960 Freud, 1965). Friedenberg, and Paul Goodman developing G. Studies on youth turned into independent areas of research, with developmental psychologists and sociologists such as Erik Erikson, Anna Freud, Edgar Z. For the first time in history, teenagers became important cultural assets and trendsetters, consequently generating a plenitude of interpretations and representations (Green, 1999, p. This process, with its 1950s teenage revolt and 1960s counterculture, produced a shift in how the young generation was thought of and represented in everything from literature and film to politics, psychology, and sociology. During the post-war era a youth culture spread around the Western world, as a growing number of young people were questioning the dominant values of society. In the midst of the conflicting demands of post-war society and consumer culture sits the contemporary youth culture of Hinton’s The Outsiders. Since advertising depends on impulse and therefore demands expressiveness, a kind of emotional informality was encouraged in parallel with the demand for self-control (Sterns, 1994, p. This contradiction was in turn further complicated by a simultaneous growth in consumer culture. The coexistence of an ethic of emotional control with a contrasting discourse encouraging male sexual expression generated confusion amongst men (Robinson, 2002, pp. This restraint, however, accompanied an equally widely recognized belief that male sexual energies must be released.

231).Whereas the Victorians believed all emotions to be socially useful in one way or another, twentieth-century Americans called for a far more restrained and less intense emotional style, where emotions should be controlled and no emotion should dominate one’s thought processes (Sterns, 1994, p. Although the word “cool” became a widespread term for an emotional style only in the 1960s, it signifies a feeling that was already evident in the preceding decades (Sterns, 1994, p. Emotion historians such as Phillip Sterns and Sally Robinson have argued that a fundamental shift in the hegemonic emotional norm occurred in America in the early twentieth century. These conflicting emotional styles are characteristic features, not only of Hinton’s novel, but of contemporary views of youth at the time.

Real wild child the outsiders