Bitten by Twilight: Youth Culture, Media, and the Vampire Franchise

Focusing on the wildly successful Twilight series, this collection of scholarly essays examines the phenomenon from diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives. Particular attention is paid to cultural, social, and economic aspects of the series and to the recurrent messages about youth, gender roles, romance, and sexuality. Essays discuss race and religion, and provide audience analyses of young adult, adult, anti-, and international fans. Other chapters are political-economic examinations into celebrity, tourism, and publishing. With new research by established and rising scholars, this volume is a significant contribution to the growing field of youth studies and complements existing feminist cultural analyses of media texts. Contents Acknowledgments vii Prologue ix Introduction - Melissa A. Click, Jennifer Stevens Aubrey, & Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz 1 I. Biting into the Twilight Narrative 19 1. Mormon Morality and Immortality in Stephenie Meyer’sTwilight Series - Margaret M. Toscano 21 2. Twilight Follows Tradition:Analyzing “Biting” Critiques of Vampire Narrativesfor Their Portrayals of Gender and Sexuality - Melissa Ames 37 3. Civilized Vampires Versus Savage Werewolves:Race and Ethnicity in the Twilight Series - Natalie Wilson 55 4. Cullen Family Values:Gender and Sexual Politics in the Twilight Series - Carrie Anne Platt 71 5. Twilight and Transformations of Flesh:Reading the Body in Contemporary Youth Culture - Danielle Dick McGeough 87 6. A Very Queer Refusal:The Chilling Effect of the Cullens’ Heteronormative Embrace - Kathryn Kane 103 7. Taking a Bite Out of Love:The Myth of Romantic Love in the Twilight Series - Tricia Clasen 119 II. Biting into the Twilight Fandom 135 8. Relating to Twilight:Fans’ Responses to Love and Romance in the Vampire Franchise - Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz, Melissa A. Click, & Jennifer Stevens Aubrey 137 9. My Mother, Myself:Mother-Daughter Bonding via the Twilight Saga - Cathy Leogrande 155 10. Back to the Woods:Narrative Revisions in New Moon Fan Fiction at Twilighted - Juli Parrish 173 11. Transnational Twilighters:A Twilight Fan Community in Norway - Inger-Lise Kalviknes Bore & Rebecca Williams 189 12. Biting Back:Twilight Anti-Fandom and the Rhetoric of Superiority - Jessica Sheffield & Elyse Merlo 207 III: Biting into the Twilight Franchise 223 13. Twilight and the Production of the 21st Century Teen Idol - Jennifer Stevens Aubrey, Scott Walus, & Melissa A. Click 225 14. Consumed by Twilight:The Commodification of Young Adult Literature - Marianne Martens 243 15. Touring the Twilight Zone:Cultural Tourism and Commodificationon the Olympic Peninsula - Cynthia Willis-Chun 261 Afterword - Elana Levine 281 List of Contributors 287 Index 291 "This lively collection of essays explores the narrative riches of the Twilight stories themselves even as it looks seriously at the ways they have been marketed and taken up both by their passionate fans and by critics who see them as evidence of a range of cultural and political problems."--Janice Radway, Author of Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature; Professor of Communication Studies/Rhetoric and Gender Studies and American Studies, Northwestern University