The representation of youth and youth culture in the novel Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes

Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2+, Free University of Berlin (Institut für Englisch Philologie), course: Youth Cultures - Presenting Youth in Theory and Fictional Writing, language: English, abstract: The purpose of this paper is to analyse the question to what extent a piece of art, in this case a novel, can serve as a basis for cultural studies. For this reason the representation of youth and youth culture in the novel Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes will be analysed. In the second chapter this paper introduces the novel with its main characters and the main themes. The third chapter then focuses on the theories of youth and youth culture from Ogersby. To combine the results drawn from the first two chapters, the fourth chapter deals with the question whether Absolute Beginners main character is represented as a typical teenager of the fifties or whether he is just a construction by the author. All the results of the paper are combined in the conclusion to prove whether the novel serves as a medium for representing youth cultures of the fifties in England or not. This leads to the answer of the question how a piece of art can be taken as a basis for cultural studies.