Interested in the history of adolescence and the development of teen girls as a social category, Nash begins her study with the "discovery" of adolescence in the 1930s and finishes in 1965 when, she argues, "any coherent representation of the teen girl ended" (p. 18). Specifically, Nash uses a historical backdrop to analyze a range of popular narrative cycles that feature teen girls. She defines a narrative cycle as a "collection of stories about a single character across several media" (p. 5). Through an analysis of books, films, plays, popular magazines, and other texts Nash details how writers and other cultural producers consistently undermined girls' authority in popular culture by privileging reductive patriarchal ideas about adolescent girls.