Twilight Saga Research Articles

“Reaping” Environmental Justice through Compassion in The Hunger Games

When we look back at literary culture in the future, the early twentyfirst century will be recognized as a golden age of Young Adult literature. Read increasingly by adults as well as teens, young adult fiction has a growing audience and thus a growing influence, particularly when—as has been the case with Harry Potter and the Twilight Saga— the novels become multi-million dollar entertainment empires. The newest testament to the growing popularity of young adult fiction is The Hunger Games, a speculative fiction novel that tackles two of the most pressing environmental issues of our time: the global food system and hunger. Addressing these problems through a grotesque gladiatorial spectacle, the novel repeatedly emphasizes that food is a social and environmental justice concern, showing that how we view the natural world—as “raw materials” to be consumed, manipulated, or contaminated according to our desires—extends to both our domestic labor practices and our use of marginalized human beings globally. Through a fast-paced, action-packed plot, Suzanne Collins indicts the global food system where agribusiness and control over the methods of growth, agricultural knowledge, land rights, and cash cropping

Revisiting Stoker’s Dracula: No Brave Good Villains Left

This article considers the implication of the main character, Count Dracula, the villain/anti-hero in Stoker’s text, as a starting point to analysing the approaches deployed in the novel that introduce new stratagems to uncover the motives which allow the readers to find excuses to deny “pure” evilness. Stoker’s Dracula (1897) introduced the plausibility―in the realm of the gothic horror novel―of finding heroes in modern day “villains”. This paper will argue this influence by introducing connections with modern “pop” vampires: from the teenage vampires in the Twilight saga both the texts (2005, 2006, 2007, & 2008) and the film versions ( 2008, 2009, 2010, & 2012), to the grown-up fantasies of Charlaine Harris in the True Blood saga (both the 13 books published between 2001 and 2012 and the Home Box Office TV series that started in 2008 and, so far is in its 7th season in 2014) and Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows (2012), the remake of the 70s American Broadcasting Company Gothic soap opera (which ran between june 1966 to April 1977). Bearing in mind the history of the vampire, through a brief account of its constant presence in the contemporary film and television industry, we will attempt to unveil the cultural reasons that bring light to the fact that modern society is out of brave good villains. The presentation will retrieve some theoretical support from Cristopher Frayling’s analysis of the vampire myth, David Punters’ ideas on the modern gothic and Maggie Kilgour’s assumptions on the rise of the gothic.

What’s Hidden in Gravity Falls: Strange Creatures and the Gothic Intertext

What’s Hidden in Gravity Falls: Strange Creatures and the Gothic Intertext

Bite Me! The Twilight Saga, a Fantasy Space of Self-Transformation as Self-Realization

This article seeks to challenge the conventional reading of the Twilight saga as a regressive influence on young women. We argue that by drawing on themes of governmentality and fantasy, it is possible to open up the debate to consider Twilight as a text offering a fantasy space of transcending the limitations of neoliberal subjecthood. In particular, the article focuses on the figure of the vampire Edward Cullen as the carrier of anxieties around the boundaries of the autonomous subject and highlights the ways in which Bella Swan’s desire for transformation to vampire speaks to a specific set of normative neoliberal ideals for young women in the 21 st century.

Pure Passion: The Twilight Saga, “Abstinence Porn,” and Adolescent Women’s Fan Fiction

Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga has inspired much discussion regarding the apparent contradiction between the novels’ abstinence-only messages and their erotic tone. This article explores how many adolescent women navigate this contradiction by crafting “smutty” fan fiction stories that offer graphic depictions of sex that are absent from the novels. Examining stories about the central couple, Edward and Bella, as well as both heterosexual and queer non-canon pairings, I argue that many adolescent women readers use their fan fiction to resist and reimagine the novels’ abstinence-only messages while exploring their own sexual questions and desires.

The Twilight of Feminism? Stephenie Meyer’s Saga and the Contradictions of Contemporary Girlhood

Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga has achieved extraordinary popularity and scholars have interrogated the nature of its appeal from a variety of perspectives. Its popularity raises questions because in many ways it mirrors romantic fictions from the 1960s and 1970s. Such fictions have been read by critics as expressions of female anger and frustration at their lack of power in relationships and in society—as stories of revenge and appropriation. Yet it is often stated that girls today can compete and succeed in their own terms and there are many powerful, emancipated fictional heroines. For these reasons, girls’ enthusiasm for a romance like Twilight is initially difficult to understand. There is, however, a well-developed literature on girls and girls’ education which problematises their apparent empowerment and demonstrates that although girls have opportunities denied to previous generations, they are subject to intense and insidious forms of patriarchal control. This article examines Twilight in the light of this literature. It focuses on the imperative to conform to norms of female beauty and the growth of self-harm as a defining characteristic of female identity. These are explored through the examination of two tropes in Twilight: the repeated use of the beauty makeover and the repeated use of what Tania Modleski called ‘the disappearing heroine’ in her analysis of Harlequin romances of the 1960s and 1970s. I conclude that one reason for Twilight’s exceptional success may be its capacity to provide fantasy resolutions to some of the intense conflicts and contradictions girls face growing up in the twenty-first century.

Thirsting for vampire tourism: Developing pop culture destinations

Destinations associated with pop culture phenomena, such as destinations depicted in books and films, often experience increased numbers of visitors as well as strengthened and changed destination images. The pop culture phenomenon the Twilight Saga (book and film series) is in this paper used as an example to explore how a pop culture phenomenon can affect destinations, and how destinations manage this type of tourism. Case studies in Forks, WA, in the USA, Volterra, Montepulciano in Italy and British Columbia in Canada illustrate different tourism destination strategies. Forks has, for example, developed experiences based on a fictionally constructed reality connected to Twilight, which has reimagined the destination, and, thus, fabricated the authenticity of the place. Volterra and Montepulciano, on the other hand, have experienced a Twilight Saga tourism development characterised by deliberations regarding the immersion of Twilight Saga elements into their cultural heritage which has resulted in a strategy best described as guarding the authenticity of their respective destinations. Finally, British Columbia has had no strategy and exhibits little interest in Twilight tourism. The priority of the destination has been to satisfy the needs of film producers. The study elaborates on different paths of pop culture tourism development, i.e. it is not always advisable to fully exploit the potential that a pop cultural phenomenon can bring to a destination. Which strategy should be used by a particular destination depends on the unique character of the place and its perceived need for tourism development.

Re-masculating the Vampire: Conceptions of Sexuality and the Undead from Rossetti's Proserpine to Meyer's Cullen

This paper explores the relationship between sexuality and the undead from Victorian England to present day vampire narratives. Specifically, I examine the shift in the vampire narrative from the frightening Dracula to the extremely sexualized nature of vampires in the early twenty-first century. My results are concerned with the nature and exchange of fluids between vampire bodies and their victims (or lovers) and the power associated with that exchange. My conclusion implies that re-masculating the vampire is a return to a patriarchal dominant discourse promulgates the heteronormative status quo, unlike their early predecessors, which tend to undermine heteronormative sexuality. “Those Victorians always coupled sex with death,” writes Margaret Atwood in a recent short story published in The New Yorker. This particular comment comes at the conclusion of the story, after an elderly woman exacts fatal revenge on her childhood rapist, whom she encounters on a booze cruise for seniors. As Atwood notes, the Victorians were always coupling sex and death, and they had good reason: sex was scary. Without modern medicine, childbirth was risky and infant mortality was high. Further, diseases like syphilis and other venereal diseases posed an additional threat that could be fatal. The Victorian vampire is a spot-on literary manifestation of these fears. Penetration by the vampire could leave the victim dead. But the Victorian vampire is not solely a manifestation of sex and death. By disrupting the normative sexual discourse, it also reveals a fear of a lack of heteronormative sexuality. Examining the vampiric sexual bodies in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, J. Sheridan La Fanu’s “Carmilla,” and three modern interpretations of the vampire: Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, the television show True Blood, and Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight Saga, reveals a shift in the nature of the vampire narrative. The Victorians are not the only ones who are always coupling sex with death. The recent Twilight phenomena, shows (and books) like True Blood, and even modern horror movies like Friday the 13th (in which a young woman is staked through the breasts post-coitus by a set of deer antlers) seem to demonstrate that over 100 years later we are still coupling sex and death. One of the oldest couplings of sex and death, and one of literature’s first undead, is Persephone. Ovid appropriately titles it “The Rape of Proserpine.” Hades “swept her away, so impatient in passion. In panic, Proserpina desperately cried for her mother and friends [...] her dress had been torn at the top” (Ovid 5.395-400). Hades then takes her to the underworld where she eats the six pomegranate seeds that destine her to return every year to the underworld. This functional narrative explains that Ceres/Demeter (her mother) is so upset by the yearly loss of her daughter 1 Schuck: Conceptions of Sexuality and the Undead from Rossetti's Proserpine to Meyer's Cullen

Romance and the Female Gaze Obscuring Gendered Violence in The Twilight Saga

This article examines the violence inherent in the popular Young Adult Fiction series The Twilight Saga, considers how this violence can be re-coded as reassuring through the use of romance genre conventions, and further extends this analysis by applying the concept of the female gaze to the series. The article initially examines the gendered violence within The Twilight Saga, considering both the physical violence that occurs, as well as the mental and emotional violence, using Evan Stark's notion of coercive control. The series is then considered as conforming to the romance genre, using the work of Tania Modleski and Janice Radway, discovering how instances of violence can be re-coded as reassuring. This analysis is then further extended by introducing the concept of the female gaze, and considering how a female gaze might impact the way the potentially anxiety-inducing male body can be read as desirable, and how culturally determined understandings of what constitutes the desirable male body are evolving.

O LEITOR EM MEIO AO CANÔNICO E A MASSA: A INTERTEXTUALIDADE EM LUA NOVA E ECLIPSE, DE STEPHENIE MEYER E EM SUAS ADAPTAÇÕES CINEMATOGRÁFICAS

RESUMO: É sabido que obras clássicas da literatura são revisitadas de várias formas, podendo ser usadas como base para adaptações cinematográficas, peças teatrais, dentre outras formas de adaptação, ou ainda, podem continuar em uma mesma mídia, ou seja, sendo adaptadas ou utilizadas como intertexto em um romance. Nesse sentido, podem se encontrar relações entre literatura canônica e literatura de massa, haja vista que essa última, muitas vezes, encapsula obras de autores consagrados para contribuir em sua tessitura. Dessa forma, visto que em dois romances da saga Crepúsculo (Stephenie Meyer), Lua Nova e Eclipse, é neles utilizado, respectivamente, o intertexto com Romeu e Julieta e O Morro dos Ventos Uivantes, o objetivo desse artigo é analisar como tais recursos intertextuais são feitos na mídia escrita para, em seguida, checar como eles são representados nos filmes adaptados. Essa análise será realizada a fim de mostrar a possível influência da literatura de massa e da mídia cinematográfica na formação do leitor. Para isso, utilizar-se-á do aporte teórico de Kristeva (1978), Venuti (2002), Koch (2005), Diniz (2005), Hutcheon (2006), Clüver (1997; 2007) entre outros.

“Unconditionally and Irrevocably”: Theorizing the Melodramatic Impulse in Young Adult Literature through the Twilight Saga and Jane Eyre

“Unconditionally and Irrevocably”: Theorizing the Melodramatic Impulse in Young Adult Literature through the Twilight Saga and Jane Eyre Katie Kapurch (bio) I cried and curled up in my bed. I was so sad I didnt come out of my room all weekend. Then when I went back to school my friends said they did the same the thing. After I got over the shock I read on and cried when Bella saved him. I want to see new moon throught (sic) his POV (team_Edward_4_ever, “I cried” on TwilightTeens.com)1 Responding to Stephenie Meyer’s New Moon (2006) in an online discussion forum for Twilight fans, team_edward_4_ever confides the personal and affective reactions associated with her reading experience of the second novel in Meyer’s saga. Another fan, manuela, agrees: “yeah, new moon is a very sad book. whenever Bella thought of the holes edward left in her, I felt so sad! and I remember this one paragraph after edward left in which Bella said something like : time passes, every aching second, even for me. I cried :/ haha.”2 These two preliminary responses on the thread “I cried” are followed by thirty more fan comments that detail emotional reactions to—and pleasure in reading about—the traumatic separation of first-person narrator Bella Swan from the perpetually seventeen-year-old Edward Cullen, a vampire whose moral convictions prohibit him from drinking human blood. Such fan reactions demonstrate how melodramatic conventions, particularly occasions of exaggerated suffering prior to a joyful reunion, speak to contemporary readers, in this case girls participating in an online fansite.3 The young adult novels of Meyer’s Twilight Saga are indeed brimming with melodramatic moments that motivate affective reading experiences. In the second novel, New Moon (2006), the characters’ high school romance initiated in Twilight (2005) is temporarily thwarted when Edward, driven by guilt over Bella’s safety, instigates [End Page 164] a break-up early in the book. The remaining three hundred-plus pages depict Bella’s depression and struggle to live without Edward. However, when she rescues the vampire from a suicide attempt, the young lovers reunite at the novel’s end. Eclipse (2007) and Breaking Dawn (2008) continue the tale of Bella and Edward’s romantic involvement, which eventually culminates in their marriage, a vampire-human hybrid child, and Bella’s conversion to vampirism—a happily-ever-after ending consistent with the melodramatic mode.4 Intriguingly, Twilight fan responses are comparable to reader sympathy with another pair of fictional lovers: first-person narrator Jane Eyre and the secretive, brooding Edward Rochester, who, like Edward Cullen, also happens to be ridden with guilt and in need of salvation only the heroine can supply. Sandra M. Gilbert offers a central insight into the appeal of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), explaining how the novel challenged Victorian literary norms in part through the intensity of characters’ expressive discourse, another tenet of melodrama: Unlike most of her predecessors, too, [Brontë] endowed her main characters—hero as well as heroine—with overwhelmingly powerful passions that aren’t always rational and often can’t be articulated in ordinary language. This sense of unspeakable depth or fiery interiority imbues both Rochester and Jane with a kind of mystery that has always been charismatic to readers. (357) Accounting for Jane Eyre’s sustained popularity, Gilbert identifies the main characters’ passionate feelings as part of the reason for female readers’ continued captivation with Brontë’s text (357). One cannot deny the phenomenal (and global) popularity of Meyer’s series for contemporary readers, particularly (though not limited to) Western girls and adult women,5 who may be compelled by textual qualities that mirror those in Jane Eyre. While the Twilight and Jane Eyre readerships are not identical and cannot be regarded as one homogenous group, awareness of their sympathetic and empathetic reactions permits us to consider both texts through the framework of melodrama. As works characterized not only by similar heroines, heroes, and romantic plots, Brontë’s and Meyer’s novels share a melodramatic reader response. An exploration of melodrama’s significance in these female coming-of-age stories, then, yields insight into the important relationship between Jane Eyre and the Twilight...

Twilight : Fairy Tale and Feminine Development

This article makes the case that The Twilight Saga is a fairy tale, structured by pairs of binary oppositions, which traces the ideal pattern of feminine psychological development as set forth in Jungian psychology. To enter Forks is to enter the archetypal realm of the unconscious. Edward and Jacob are animus-figures; Victoria is Bella's shadow. Bella's eventual psychological wholeness (individuation) is symbolized in the stable quaternio with which the novel ends: Bella married to Edward and her daughter (a younger Bella) paired with Jacob. The Saga's conclusion shows the relationship of the individuated person to her community, as Bella saves the Cullen clan.

Black Girls Are from the Future: Afrofuturist Feminism in Octavia E. Butler's Fledgling

Vampires are a ubiquitous presence in contemporary American culture. The recent popularity of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Twilight Saga, Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, the Underworld films, and HBO's True Blood, among other works, not only reflects how saturated popular culture is with vampires but also the enduring importance of these figures. Today's vam - pires, whether they are bloodthirsty killers or brooding romantic heroes, are as seductive to the public imaginary as were their nineteenth-century counterparts and often represent both an enchanted escape from our understood reality and a commentary thereof. Previous manifestations of the vampire phenomenon reflected, for example, xenophobic concerns about foreign contagion or the horrors of same-sex desire, among other things. Contemporary iterations, however, often underscore some of the anxieties mainstream culture has with our current multicultural and postracial society by seeking to reinstate the supremacy of whiteness, often through such tropes as the triumph of a lily-white vampire slayer or through nostalgia for an all-powerful white man who is a vampire. Vampire texts by people of color are often invested in significantly different cultural projects, ones that more often than not trouble norma - tive notions of race, fantasy, and power that vampires so often represent in dominant popular discourse. To that end, this essay argues that black women's vampire fiction challenges conventional tropes in contemporary vampire lore in a way that suggests a concerted literary tradition in African American speculative fiction. Using Octavia E. Butler's Fledgling (2005a) as a representative text, I contend that the novel offers a black feminist Afrofuturist epistemology that transgressively revises the contemporary

‘The urge towards love is an urge towards (un)death’: Romance, masochistic desire and postfeminism in the Twilight novels

Stephanie Meyer’s enormously popular Twilight saga of teen vampire romance novels is commonly referred to as the young adult fiction equivalent of what the Harry Potter series was for children. Central to the series, which sells in the tens of millions globally, is an adolescent romantic relationship that, as I will show, is in many ways masochistic. Interrogating gendered subjectivity within the series, particularly in regard to its teenage narrator, Bella Swan, and her relationship with the hyper-idealized vampire hero, Edward Cullen, this article analyses the way the four narratives figure adolescent feminine desire as well as how they link eroticism and death. It also positions the series within broader feminist debates about postfeminism within popular culture, and explores how (and, with more difficulty, why) a masochistic relationship and an undead subjectivity for a teenage girl are seen as utopic sites of possibility in these narratives. If, as Nina Auerbach argues, each age produces the vampire it requires, then might Edward Cullen and his teen vampire bride suggest about the current, purportedly ‘postfeminist’, context and young women in particular?

A Latter Day Eve: Reading Twilight through Paradise Lost

Abstract: Critics have demonstrated how Stephenie Meyer's Twilight saga reinforces the notion that the appropriate roles for women are those of wife and mother. Viewed from a literary historical perspective, however, the Twilight saga can also be seen as reinterpretation of the Genesis story, told from a female point of view as a vampire narrative. Meyer's “New Eve” is part of a literary tradition that springs from Paradise Lost. Meyer's portrayal of the concept of free will and her connected depiction of the redemptive power of motherhood emphasizes elements in the Latter Day Saints tradition that present a more positive view of Eve, and by extension of “Woman,” than is common in traditional portrayals of Genesis.

The Vampire Stalker (review)

Reviewed by: The Vampire Stalker Claire Gross van Diepen, Allison. The Vampire Stalker. Point/Scholastic, 2011. 257p. ISBN 978-0-545-28375-5 $17.99 Ad Gr. 8–10 In van Diepen’s fictional world, the pinnacle of teen girl fan culture is occupied not by the Twilight saga but by The Mists of Otherworld, the tale of an alternate Chicago where the vampire incursion froze technological progress around the 1920s. James and Hannah, Otherworld’s star-crossed human/vampire couple who are attempting to forge peace between the species, are most readers’ favorite characters, but super-fan Amy is completely in love with James’ brother Alexander, an angsty vampire hunter. The twist? It turns out that the author of the Otherworld series wasn’t just inspired, she was actually subconsciously picking up on a real story from a parallel world. When Alexander accidentally chases the most dangerous of all his vampire foes through a portal into Amy’s Chicago, he runs into Amy, who helps him figure out his unfamiliar surroundings and track his target. A lot of incident is shoehorned into the novel, from interludes surrounding Alexander’s adjustment to modern conveniences and social mores to a road trip with the school librarian (who worked on a degree in “literary physics” before being kicked out [End Page 51] of academia for her radical—and, it seems, apparently correct—theories) to meet the flabbergasted author. The romance between Amy and Alexander is beyond unbelievable, and none of the characters evince much depth, with many of them simply conveniently placed to provide some needed plot point. Still, as a snappy, affectionate send-up of both vampire fandom and the Mary Sue phenomenon (in which fanfiction romantic interests are thinly disguised authorial avatars), this is quite fun, riffing on fan culture without dismissing what it means to its members. Vamp-lovers and vamp-haters alike may therefore want to be in on the joke. Copyright © 2011 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

BEAUTY AND THE BEAUTIFUL BEAST

This paper interprets Stephenie Meyer's Twilight saga as a contemporary rewriting of the ‘Beauty and the Beast’ fairy tale in which the heroine, Bella Swan, quests for a sexual subjectivity and agency not readily available to her in mainstream heterosexual culture. Using work on the ‘missing discourse’ of female desire, it is noted that a normative understanding of heterosexuality still allocates the ownership of desire along gender lines, where young men can claim sexual agency as an integral part of their identity, whereas young women are pressured to disavow their own desire if they are to be accepted as ‘good girls’. In this context Twilight articulates a fantasy of claiming a carnality and sexual subjectivity for its heroine through her association with a supernatural ‘beast’—Edward Cullen, a vampire. Twilight is positioned as one title in a growing publishing sub-category of Young Adult supernatural romance in which young female characters claim a sexuality that transgresses heterosexual norms by forming erotic ties with human–creature hybrids. It is argued that, despite its conservative features, Twilight is an attempt to inscribe this ‘missing discourse’ of female desire through a reclaiming of the beast's sexuality for its heroine.

Mormon Female Gothic: Blood, Birth, and the Twilight Saga

Mormon Female Gothic: Blood, Birth, and the Twilight Saga

Breaking Faith: Disrupted Expectations and Ownership in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga

My paper suggests that the Twilight saga’s enormous popularity is closely tied to its author’s tension-filled relationship with her fans, who claim ownership of her text by forcing their own interpretations through online media. The result is that through engaging with her fans, Stephenie Meyer actually empowers the Twilight fandom and alters the role readers play in the tri-part relationship of reader, author, and text. Fan studies and reception theory help me to effectively examine this dynamic by considering interpretations of what is “canon,” representations of women, and the creation of new Twilight books.

Breaking Faith: Disrupted Expectations and Ownership in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga

Breaking Faith: Disrupted Expectations and Ownership in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga