The 13 essays in this volume explore Stephenie Meyer's wildly popular Twilight series in the contexts of literature, religion, fairy tales, film, and the gothic. Several examine Meyer's emphasis on abstinence, considering how, why, and if the author's Mormon faith has influenced the series' worldview. Others look at fan involvement in the Twilight world, focusing on how the series' avid following has led to an economic transformation in Forks, Washington, the real town where the fictional series is set. Other topics include Meyer's use of Quileute shape-shifting legends, Twilight's literary heritage and its frequent references to classic works of literature, and the series' controversial depictions of femininity.
When Stephenie Meyer’s first novel, Twilight, was published in 2005, it had an astounding reception, selling millions of copies. The three sequels that followed—New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn—became international bestsellers as well. The worldwide success of the movie adaptations further cemented the series as a cultural force on par with other popular franchises such as Harry Potter. But why is this? What is it about Twilight that makes it so appealing to people? And what does Twilight’s success reveal about transnational cultural trends? In The Twilight Saga: Exploring the Global Phenomenon, Claudia Bucciferro has assembled a collection of essays that examine the series from a variety of perspectives. The essays in this volume consider both the books and the movies, emphasizing the relationships among the texts, the audience, the entertainment industry, and other aspects of the multimillion-dollar franchise. Organized into five sections, the chapters offer a contextualization of the series’ appeal, explore different types of Twilight audiences, analyze the cultural referents associated with the main characters, and present new ideas regarding representations of gender, sex, class, and race. Concluding essays examine the saga’s influence, unveiling its links to newer workssuch as The Hunger Games, True Blood, and Fifty Shades of Grey. Making sense of how the popular franchise fits within larger contexts, this collection addresses Twilight from an interdisciplinary framework, including insights from history, philosophy, literature, sociology, fan studies, intercultural communication, film studies, and more. Featuring contributions by scholars from the United States, France, Spain, Chile, and Australia, this book emphasizes the international and intercultural relevance of the Twilight phenomenon. The collection is aimed at scholars and students of media and popular culture, but it will also appeal to general readers who are familiar with the series.
The Twilight saga, a series of five films adapted from Stephanie Meyer's four vampire novels, has been a sensation, both at the box office and through the attention it has won from its predominantly teenaged fans. This series has also been the subject of criticism and sometimes derision - often from critics and on occasion even from fans. However, it also offers rich opportunities for analytic and critical attention, which the contributors to Screening Twilight demonstrate with energy and style. Through examining Twilight, the book unpacks how this popular group of films work as cinematic texts, what they have to say about cinema and culture today, and how fans may seek to re-read or subvert these messages. The chapters addressTwilight in the context of the vampire and myth, in terms of genre and reception, identity, gender and sexuality, and through re-viewing the series fandom. Screening Twilight is also a revelation of how a popular cinematic phenomenon like Twilight rewards close attention from contemporary critical scholars of cinema and culture.
This book explores the history of the paranormal romance genre; from its origins in the revisionist horror fiction of the 1970s, via its emergence as a minor sub-genre of romantic fiction in the early 1990s, to its contemporary expansion in recent years into an often-controversial genre of mainstream fiction. Tracing the genre from its roots in older Gothic fiction written by and for women, it explores the interconnected histories of Gothic and romantic fiction, from Ann Radcliffe and Jane Austen in the eighteenth century to Buffy, Twilight, True Blood and The Vampire Diaries in the present day. In doing so, it investigates the extent to which the post-Twilight paranormal romance really does represent a break from older traditions of Gothic fiction – and just what it is about the genre that has made it so extraordinarily divisive, captivating millions of readers whilst simultaneously infuriating and repelling so many others.
In the broad spectrum of popular culture, one can be a fan of just about anything: comic books, television shows, fantasy novels, movie franchises, musical artists, and so on. Because fans are fluid and ever-changing, however, defining them poses a challenge. As a result, too few scholars have yet to focus on the impact of gender in media consumption, leading to a limited portrait of what male and female fans look for. In Fan Girls and the Media: Creating Characters, Consuming Culture, Adrienne Trier-Bieniek has assembled a collection of essays that demonstrate the gendered aspect of fandom and explore the ways different forms of media challenge stereotypical ideals of how culture is consumed. Contributors examine a wide range of fan issues—from gendered stereotypes in the Star Trek and Twilight franchises to gender roles in Tyler Perry films and The Real Housewives of Atlanta. Other essays look at the female comedy fan community, the appeal of avenging-woman characters written by men, and the use of social media by women in the video-game culture. This collection describes how gender is present in fandom, demonstrating the need to combat the marginalization of female identities in various cultural outlets. Fan Girls and the Media will be of interest to anyone studying fandom but also students and scholars of sociology, media, and gender studies.
This comprehensive bibliography covers writings about vampires and related creatures from the 19th century to the present. More than 6,000 entries document the vampire's penetration of Western culture, from scholarly discourse, to popular culture, politics and cook books. Sections by topic list works covering various aspects, including general sources, folklore and history, vampires in literature, music and art, metaphorical vampires and the contemporary vampire community. Vampires from film and television--from Bela Lugosi's Dracula to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Blood and the Twilight Saga--are well represented.
Virginity is of concern here, that is its utter messiness. At once valuable and detrimental, normative and deviant, undesirable and enviable. Virginity and its loss hold tremendous cultural significance. For many, female virginity is still a universally accepted condition, something that is somehow bound to the hymen, whereas male virginity is almost as elusive as the G-spot: we know it's there, it’s just we have a harder time finding it. Of course boys are virgins, queers are virgins, some people reclaim their virginities, and others reject virginity from the get go. So what if we agree to forget the hymen all together? Might we start to see the instability of terms like untouched, pure, or innocent? Might we question the act of sex, the very notion of relational sexuality? After all, for many people it is the sexual acts they don’t do, or don’t want to do, that carry the most abundant emotional clout. Virgin Envy is a collection of essays that look past the vestal virgins and beyond Joan of Arc. From medieval to present-day literature, the output of HBO, Bollywood, and the films of Abdellah Taïa or Derek Jarman to the virginity testing of politically active women in Tahrir Square, the writers here explore the concept of virginity in today’s world to show that ultimately virginity is a site around which our most basic beliefs about sexuality are confronted, and from which we can come to understand some of our most basic anxieties, paranoias, fears, and desires.
Ethics and Form in Fantasy Literature: Tolkien, Rowling and Meyer by Lykke Guanio-Uluru examines formal and ethical aspects of The Lord of the Rings , Harry Potter and the Twilight series in order to discover what best-selling fantasy texts can tell us about the values of contemporary Western culture.
Despite the widely publicised prejudice faced by women in Hollywood, since around 1990 a significant minority of female directors have been making commercially and culturally impactful films there across the full range of genres. This book explores movies by filmmakers Amy Heckerling, Nora Ephron, Nancy Meyers, Catherine Hardwicke, Sofia Coppola, Kimberly Peirce, Kathryn Bigelow and Greta Gerwig, including many which are still critically neglected or derided, seeing them as offering a new understanding of genre filmmaking. That is, like many other contemporary films but in a striking proportion within the smaller set of mainstream movies by women, this body of work revels in a heightened genre status that allows its authors to simultaneously address ‘intellectual’ cinephilic pleasures and bodily-emotive ones. Arguing through close analysis that these films demonstrate the inseparability of such strategies of engagement in contemporary genre cinema, Heightened Genre reclaims women’s mainstream filmmaking for feminism through a recalibration of genre theory itself.
This book investigates the reappearance of the 19th-century dream-child from the Golden Age of Children's Literature, both in the Harry Potter series and in other works that have reached unprecedented levels of popular success today. Discussing Harry Potter as a reincarnation of Lewis Carroll's Alice and J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, Billone goes on to examine the recent resurrection of Alice in Tim Burton's Alice, and of Peter Pan in Michael Jackson and in James Bond. Visiting trends that have emerged since the Harry Potter series ended, the book studies revisions of the dream-child in texts and films that have inspired mass fandom in the twenty-first century: Stephenie Meyer's Twilight, E.L. James's 50 Shades of Grey and Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games. The volume argues that the 21st-century desire to achieve dream-states in relationship to eternal youth results from the way that dreams provide a means of realizing the fantastic yet alarming possibility of escaping from time. This current identification with the dream-child stems from the threat of political unrest and economic and environmental collapse as well as from the simultaneous technophilia and technophobia of a culture immersed in the breathless revolution of the digital age. This book not only explores how the dream-child from the past has returned to reflect misgivings about imagined dystopian futures but also reveals how the rebirth of the dream-child opens up possibilities for new narratives where happy endings remain viable against all odds. It will appeal to scholars in a wide variety of fields including Childhood Studies, Children's/YA Literature, Cinema Studies, Cultural Studies, Cyberculture, Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Gothic Studies, New Media, and Popular Culture.
