Twilight Saga

The myth of the vampire has existed for many centuries but it was in the 19th century when they became a recurrent topic in the literature of the period. Since then, the popularity of these supernatural creatures has only increased, not only thanks to literature but also to other cultural expressions such as the cinema or the television.
But vampires have also undergone a series of changes and adapted to different periods. I will focus my analysis on female vampires as portrayed on screen in the 21st century, how they no longer act as victims but have a much more different role from the one portrayed in the previous two centuries. Female vampires have evolved and in that transition, they mirror they new view on women and their role in the 21st century society.

BOOKS Alice in Transmedia Wonderland. Curiouser and Curio ser New Forms of a Children’s Classic. Jefferson: McFarland, 2016. (forthcoming) Body-Texts in the Novels of Angela Carter. Writing from a Corporeagraphic Point of View . Lewiston, Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2008. ( pp. 372, ISBN10: 0-7734-48926 ISBN13: 978-0-7734-4892-6) EDITORIAL WORK 5. Co-editor of EJES special journal issue Feminist Interventions in Intermedial Studies (forthcoming in 2017) with Dr Catriona McAra 4. Exploring the Cultural History of Continental Europ ean Freak Shows and Enfreakment. Eds. Anna Kérchy and Andrea Zittlau. Newcastle Upon Ty e: Cambridge Scholars Press. 2012. (Isbn13: 978-1-4438-4134-4 Isbn: 1-443 8-4134-X) 3. Postmodern Reinterpretations of Fairy Tales: How Ap plying New Methods Generates New Meanings. Ed. Anna Kérchy. Lewiston, Lampeter: The Edwin Me llen Press, 2011. (pp. 520, ISBN10: 0-7734-1519-X ISBN13: 978-0-7734-151 9-5) 2. The Iconology of Law and Order . Legal and Cosmic . (P...

My immersion in the Twilight saga began when I read the series along with my then-nine-year-old daughter. Were it not for her, I might never have been introduced to Bella, Edward, and Jacob-indeed, I may have become a "Twihater" who, never having read the series, was convinced its popularity signaled the looming demise of humanity (and certainly of "good literature").

This chapter interrogates the under-examined racial dynamics of the Twilight saga, arguing the series associates whiteness with civility, beauty, and intellect on the one hand, and indigenous people with animality and primitivism on the other. The structural divide between humans, vampires, and werewolves under-girds the love triangle at the series' core  with Bella, a white damsel/Mary Sue, encouraged to choose between two racialized suitors which are contrasted using various binaries that  perpetuate white supremacist ideologies.

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.

Popular culture surrounds us: It is the products we consume, the movies we watch, the music we listen to, and the books we read. It is on our televisions, our phones, and our computers. Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century engages with these texts and offers a diverse selection of contemporary scholarship from a wide variety of perspectives. These essays, adapted from presentations at the first annual Ray Browne Conference on Popular Culture held at Bowling Green State University in 2012, participate in an ongoing dialogue about popular culture's importance in both the academy and our everyday lives. This collection honors the diversity, depth, and breadth of popular culture studies by examining contemporary television, film, video games, internet fandom, cultures and subcultures, and gender, sexuality, and identity politics. Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century reflects the necessity of exploring our common experiences and the many cultural modes that shape our everyday lives.

An unapologetically “against the grain" reading of "Twilight" by Stephanie Meyer and the subsequent film adaptation that explores the inadvertent queer resonances embedded within the film. Topics covered include  the queer origins of the vampire figure, the "cult of beauty" tradition, the "sad young man" trope, the ambiguous star-text of Robert Pattinson, and gay male spectatorship.

In recent years, shapeshifting characters in literature, film and television have been on the rise. This has followed the increased use of such characters as metaphors, with novelists and critics identifying specific meanings and topics behind them. This book aims to unravel the shapeshifting trope. Rather than pursue a case-based study, the works are grouped around specific themes--adolescence, gender, sexuality, race, disability, addiction, and spirituality--that are explored through the metaphor of shapeshifting. Because of its transformative possibilities and its flexibility, the shapeshifter has the potential to change how we see our world. With coverage of iconic fantasy texts and a focus on current works, this work engages with the shapeshifting figure in popular culture from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

Taking Bram Stoker’s Dracula as its starting point, this essay examines the veg- etarian and vegan politics and identities that are both implicitly and explicitly present in three contemporary popular cultural representations of vampires, Joss Whedon’s 1997–2003 television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Stephenie Meyer’s 2005 novel Twilight and Catherine Hardwicke’s 2008 adaptation of it, and Alan Ball’s HBO series True Blood (based on The Southern Vampire Mysteries novels by Charlaine Harris), which first aired in 2008. These texts highlight a shifting cultural discourse of rights, violence, and identity that indicates a moment of profound uncertainty with regard to what it means to be human in a supposedly post-feminist, post-racist, and post-human world.

What does Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey have in common? What can these two series of novels possibly share? Twilight is a mostly chaste fantasy romance between a 104-year-old vampire and a teenage girl, whereas Fifty Shades of Grey is an erotic series dealing with a college graduate and a young business magnate who is into BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism). Apparently they have a lot in common since both series have struck a chord in our society, becoming full-fledged cultural phenomena. Bearing in mind that Fifty Shades of Grey was in origin fan fiction of Twilight, this chapter deals with what happened since 2005, when Twilight was first published, and 2012 when Fifty Shades of Grey became the biggest hit, topping bestseller lists for months. There are both cultural and ideological implications emerging from the transformation that the Twilight series has undergone. From a set of novels and films written by a Mormon American author and addressing a young adult audience, Twilight has turned into Fifty Shades of Grey, an erotic saga labeled by the media “mommy porn,” written by a British fan of Twilight and addressing an adult female audience. The story of this journey is worth exploring in full since it also shows a common tension in contemporary culture, that between corporate-driven and consumer-driven processes, between commercial culture and grassroots creativity.

Since the first accounts on vampires appeared, these supernatural beings have been continuously transformed and adapted to different periods. The first accounts linked them to demons and were always related to misfortunes and death. But it is in the 19th century when they first became more than a mere legend and were transformed into a recurrent topic in the literature of the period. From that moment onwards, they would turn into an iconic figure and their appeal would increase in the following century, thanks not only to literature but also to other cultural expressions such as the cinema, television, comics, etc.

This paper explores werewolf and shapeshifters in literature and lore arguing The Twilight saga elides these two very different figures. Noting that werewolves are generally  presented as more dangerous and negative in literature and lore while shape-shifters tend to be depicted as more noble and glorified, the saga is examined in relation to its problematically racialized and class-based representations. In turn, Jacob's character is read as reliant upon cultural appropriation on the one hand and stereotypical depiction on the other, both of which perpetuate falsehoods about indigenous culture while simultaneously carrying on the long historical tradition of white authors "speaking for" indigenous culture.

The vampire has always been constructed as a threatening other and associated with violence and deviant behaviours but the emergence of the supernatural romance in the late twentieth century has led to transformation of these creatures into romantic heroes. The Twilight Saga and The Vampire Diaries do not only reflect the degree of success that this type of narratives has had worldwide but they also help analyse how ideology is articulated through the discourse of monstrosity and desire in our contemporary society. Blood is read as the epitome of the vampires’ otherness and used to portray the dichotomy between good and evil, reinforcing particular behaviours and attitudes while censuring others. Both narratives link the vampire’s lust for blood in terms of current anxieties regarding violence and discuss on the breaking of boundaries between what is understood as human and monstrous, challenging these established categories. But vampires have also been linked to themes of desire and sexuality and blood is once again used to portray that otherness and negotiate established assumptions while also helping to draw the boundaries between the normal and the deviant and promoting a discourse of containment.

My Masters Thesis

The purpose of this paper is to examine the evolution of the vampire from the Shadow archetype to the Poseidon archetype.  This evolution is seen in the differences between Dracula from Bram Stoker’s novel of the same name and Edward Cullen from Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga.  The change in the vampire is interesting in that it shows a change in reader appetites.  The Shadow archetype comes from Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious.  The Poseidon archetype’s characteristics come from Jean Shinoda Bolen’s interpretation of Carl Jung’s theory of the archetypes in her book, Gods in Everyman: A New Psychology of Men’s Lives & Loves.  The vampire has traditionally been the villain in novels.  However, the vampire has changed from villain to ally.  The transformation of the vampire from rogue to friend has occurred slowly, but surely.  From the 1960s television series Dark Shadows which introduced audiences to the sympathetic vampire, Barnabas Collins, to Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, the vampire has slowly lost its wickedness.  He or she has become a tortured soul with which the audience is asked to empathize.  The change of the vampire into sympathetic anti-hero has implications for society.  Nina Auerbach declares that we embrace the vampires we need (145).  The vampire is a mirror for society.  We look at him or her and see ourselves, outcasts of society.  We wish to create our own little families in which we are accepted and loved for who we are and our shared values.

Recently I was at a conference on television vampires. The usual suspects were there: True Blood, Buffy, Angel, The Vampire Diaries. But I was surprised by how often Twilight was mentioned, and in what context. These were all scholars who've written -sometimes extensively -on vampires in film and literature, and almost all of them made some sort of reference to Twilight over the two days. What I found most interesting though, is how these references were often disparaging, snarky or deprecating: Twilight, even at a conference full of vampire scholars, was a source of mockery. It made me think about the ways in which we react to texts that are typically seen as 'bad', even when we -in theory anyway -know that there is something of value to them.

The aim of this project is to analyze to what extent contemporary best-seller Twilight (2005) by Stephenie Meyer complies with the characteristics of a work of Gothic fiction and can be considered a Gothic text, or could be better described as a contemporary fairy tale with similar traits to Beauty and the Beast. In order to do so, this thesis will start with background information about the definition of Gothic fiction and its characteristics, putting Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto as its most significant example. With regard to this, it will highlight which Gothic attributes are present in Twilight. Likewise, it will show those features which resonate with an updated version of a traditional fairytale in which a vampire, considered hideous monster, becomes a handsome hero who falls in love with a damsel in distress. Finally, it will conclude by defining Twilight according to its Gothic and fairy tale characteristics, trying to explain why this book has reached such a success both among teenage and adult readers.

Key words: Gothic fiction, romance novel, fairytale, young-adult literature

The purpose of this paper is not to assess the quality of Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey but rather an analysis of the aesthetic elements that point toward the fact that they are examples of bad literature. The paper will establish reasonable criteria that conventional novels would be expected to follow and the paper will look at common arguments from critics and the validity of those arguments in the context of academic philosophical texts on aesthetics, literary criticism and taste. Monroe C. Beardsley’s Aesthetics have provided the background for critical evaluation and certain strict tools for analysis of aesthetic quality.

Throughout history, a lot of literature has been written concerning the relationship between the sweet and innocent heroine and the dangerous, stereotypical bad boy-hero. We see this phenomenon reoccurring over and over again, in novels from hundreds of years ago, but also in novels written in modern times as well. Why is the Byronic Hero so fascinating?
In this thesis I will research the Byronic Hero, and take a look at who he is as a character. Moreover, I will investigate some of the typical characteristics of the Byronic Hero, and explore his obsession with possession and control. Correspondingly, I will study how he dominates and seduces. Lastly, I want to see how revealing his mysterious secrets will show us who he really is. Furthermore, as examples of these characteristics I will throughout this thesis use the characters of two modern Byronic Heroes; Edward Cullen from Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series and Christian Grey from E. L. James’ trilogy Fifty Shades of Grey, as well as one contemporary Byronic Hero that is crucial in this context; Mr. Rochester from Charlotte Brontë’s Victorian novel Jane Eyre.

The publishing success of E.L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey, a series with origins as Twilight fan fiction, has energised popular interest in the practice of writing fan fiction (or 'fanfics'). Equally, however, the series' popularity has fuelled debate on the ethics of its commercial publication. This article highlights the divisive and polarising phenomenon of 'pulling to publish' in the Twilight fandom. 'Pulling to publish' refers to the process of rewriting and republishing for profit a work that was inspired by another's intellectual property, and collaboratively edited by unpaid volunteers - the majority of whom would have expected the edited work to be freely available in perpetuity. Among other relevant case studies, this article examines a critical instance of pseudonymous online protest, challenge and defence between James and another well-known fanfic writer, coinciding with the March 2011 announcement that Fifty Shades would be commercially published. Several critiques of fanfic commercialisation are contextualised by a critical reading of the 'official' publication history of Fifty Shades, revealing the incompatibility of two self-constructed fan identities: the faithful and the opportunistic.

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 yields insight into the important relationship between Jane Eyre and the Twilight Saga––while offering some justification for the latter’s appeal––and ultimately works to invigorate scholarly appreciation for melodramatic impulses in contemporary young adult fiction.

This study comprises of an exploration of the newly emerged ‘Dark Romance’ genre through the use of The Twilight Saga. The Dark Romance novels are generally marketed at teenagers, but I address the decreasing age of the readership and explore the potential effects of such works on pre-adolescent female readers. In particular this thesis explores the possible impact of these texts on the readers’ sexual identity, and how any problems are exacerbated by the blend of genres found in the novels
The introduction provides a justification for a non-empirical research thesis and the necessary background information for the study; such as reading habits of young girls and the risk of identification, a discussion of the genres in Twilight, traditions in vampire literature, a clarification of terms regarding sexuality, and the research questions.

The first chapter addresses the presentation of sex and sexuality itself, using the theories of Michel Foucault as demonstrated in his History of Sexuality. Using J. A. Appleyard’s theory of reading stages, I then argue that the messages portrayed are all the more dangerous for young female readers experiencing literature as Appleyard suggests. The second chapter details the difficulties of identity formation for young girls, affected by their self perception and their interactions with others, using Robyn McCallum’s theory of ideology and identity, with particular reference to the Young Adult Elements of the Saga. The final chapter explores the Saga’s presentation of Bella’s escape from adolescence into a perfect, un-aging vampire, and the unattainable ideals that this portrays. I examine this using Jaques Lacan and Julia Kristeva’s theories of development along with Rosemary Jackson’s views regarding fantasy.
The conclusion explores what has been proved and its importance, as well as including suggestions of how the study could be developed further.

The present study draws on corpus stylistics (cf. [38]; [19]; [26]; [20], to name a few) to investigate the narrative style in Stephenie Meyer’s The Twilight Saga (2005-2008). In particular, it focuses on keywords generated using Wordsmith Tools version 7 [36], and the BNC as a reference corpus. Qualitative and quantitative analyses show that the most frequent lexical words (nouns, adjectives, and verbs) reflect the writer’s focus on carefully selected physical elements of the characters. More specifically, the nouns preferentially denote specific physical attributes of the characters, the adjectives provide a general description of the protagonists and the setting, while the verbs used present the actions of all the characters, their interaction with the other protagonists, and their position in the narrative situation.

Excerpt: Chapter 1. 

The Vegan Studies Project
Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror
Laura Wright
Foreword by Carol J. Adams

The foundational text for the nascent field of vegan studies

Reviews

“Combining personal narratives and gender studies with ecofeminism and pop culture, The Vegan Studies Project offers a brilliant analysis of the impact of vegans and veganism on America’s cultural landscape. Laura Wright’s argument for a new field of vegan studies rings true, and this book will be the foundational text.”
—Hal Herzog, author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight about Animals
“Studies like Wright’s—more than anything else—show how the vegan and vegetarian label and identity are a millstone and a barrier that hinders wider society’s willingness to engage seriously with the rights and wrongs of producing, killing, and eating so many animals. If our strategy is to lessen the harm wreaked on the animals with which humans share this planet, perhaps the strongest lesson we can draw from this work is to step aside from the vegan and vegetarian identity.”
—Tristram Stuart, author of The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times


Description

This inescapably controversial study envisions, defines, and theorizes an area that Laura Wright calls vegan studies. We have an abundance of texts on vegans and veganism including works of advocacy, literary and popular fiction, film and television, and cookbooks, yet until now, there has been no study that examines the social and cultural discourses shaping our perceptions of veganism as an identity category and social practice.

Ranging widely across contemporary American society and culture, Wright unpacks the loaded category of vegan identity. She examines the mainstream discourse surrounding and connecting animal rights to (or omitting animal rights from) veganism. Her specific focus is on the construction and depiction of the vegan body—both male and female—as a contested site manifest in contemporary works of literature, popular cultural representations, advertising, and new media. At the same time, Wright looks at critical animal studies, human-animal studies, posthumanism, and ecofeminism as theoretical frameworks that inform vegan studies (even as they differ from it).

The vegan body, says Wright, threatens the status quo in terms of what we eat, wear, and purchase—and also in how vegans choose not to participate in many aspects of the mechanisms undergirding mainstream culture. These threats are acutely felt in light of post-9/11 anxieties over American strength and virility. A discourse has emerged that seeks, among other things, to bully veganism out of existence as it is poised to alter the dominant cultural mindset or, conversely, to constitute the vegan body as an idealized paragon of health, beauty, and strength. What better serves veganism is exemplified by Wright’s study: openness, debate, inquiry, and analysis.

No one familiar with Bram Stoker's Dracula could fail to recognise the scantily-clad female on the balcony, luring the vampire with her pale bosom and heaving chest. Stoker's Dracula, like many other vampire texts, painted women in very traditional, if opposing, lights: Lucy Westenra, empty-headed and flirtatious, dependent on men for both approval and support; and Mina Harker, embodying purity, innocence, and Christian faith - virtues she retained despite being bitten by the Count.

Modern vampire stories, however, have moved on from these traditional depictions of gender. Today's women wear jeans and high heels, carry stakes in their purses and like their men (vampires) to be in touch with their feminine side. Or do they? This paper examines the portrayal of women in modern vampire stories in terms of gender and relationships. I will be comparing Buffy the Vampire Slayer with Bella of the Twilight series, assessing their roles as 'strong' women and examining the ways in which the characters interact with the men in their lives (Angel and Edward respectively) to determine whether vampires, modern men and feminism really can go hand in hand.

Aside from sponsored videos and professionally created media content, opera is found online in a plethora of amateur creations with low production values and relatively limited visibility: popular arias transcoded from old VHS recordings, audio recordings of famous divas accompanied by photo slides, synthesiser versions of instrumental overtures and—in the case of this chapter’s main case study—lip-syncing teenagers.

This chapter unpicks some of the complexities of dealing with this seemingly intractable material, outlining two logics that underpin opera's presence in amateur YouTube videos. One pertains to the way in which film franchises can provide a link between 'classical' music and unlikely consumers. The second one consists in the way in which operatic singing lends itself to YouTube’s recombinatory practices and to particular forms of automediacy.

This chapter explores how sound works along with filmic image in Hardwicke's Twilight, Weitz's New Moon, and Slade's Eclipse to position the viewer in relation to Bella's perspective. Of particular concern are the uses of voiceover as Bella's narration, an area illuminated by French scholar Michel Chion's work on cinematic sound. Ultimately, I suggest that the consistent use of narrating voiceover throughout Hardwicke's Twilight maintains Bella's interiority and continually positions the viewer to identify with her perspective, while Weitz's New Moon reduces this identification by changing the nature and function of that type of voiceover; Slade's film diminishes that identification still further by effectively eclipsing Bella's voice through the limited and forgettable use of narrating voiceover.

Desde os anos 1980 até hoje, a figura ficcional do vampiro tem se mostrado dotada, cada vez mais, de ética e moral humanas, ou seja, de bondade, em oposição à ideia do vampiro sanguinário e monstruoso, como o Drácula de Bram Stoker. Desse modo, o vampiro de hoje aparenta ser angelical. Essa afirmação, entretanto, frente a uma leitura científica, mostra-se mais que metafórica, pois o vampiro e o anjo ficcionais são de muitas formas similares. O objetivo dessa pesquisa é averiguar tais similaridades semânticas entre o anjo e o vampiro, a fim de compreender o que essas características dizem sobre as obras estudadas e sobre o significado pragmático delas em seus respectivos contextos sócio-históricos. As obras analisadas não exaurem o acervo sobre vampiros e anjos, mas têm por base os títulos mais populares da contemporaneidade da Literatura e do Cinema: de romances best-sellers como Twilight, filmes como Blade e City of angels até seriados de TV como Supernatural e Vampire Diaries. Quanto à fundamentação teórica, três obras dão as diretrizes básicas da pesquisa. Considerando vampiro e anjo como personagens de ficção antes de figuras do imaginário, adotamos Candido et al. (2011) para a leitura sistemática e filosófica da personagem. Para a leitura da semântica das personagens, em Pietroforte e Lopes (2012) encontramos, por analogia, na análise componencial do léxico, um meio de analisar a personagem: como um conjunto de sentidos, um semema, em que os semas são mobilizados conforme a situação discursiva, conforme a obra e, indiretamente, o contexto sócio histórico. E para uma reflexão sobre o sentido dessas similaridades no seio da simbologia e da antropologia, Durand (2012) será utilizado.
Após a análise das personagens das obras que selecionamos, chegamos ao destaque de semas recorrentes, cuja combinatória feita na personagem, resulta em arquétipos de: vampiros assassinos e sanguinários; vampiros comedidos na caçada; vampiros bons e humanizados; anjos servos de deus e assexuados; anjos maus e assassinos; e anjos rebeldes e humanizados (sexuados). Dessa forma, anjo e vampiro tornam-se muito próximos semanticamente, pois os dois, nas obras da contemporaneidade, são criaturas presas a um sistema de servidão, ou aos Céus ou a um clã, e apresentam dilemas morais quando se apaixonam por seres humanos, devendo superar as condições de sua espécie para humanizarem-se. Isso ocorre porque ambos pertencem ao mesmo conjunto semântico de criaturas do imaginário cristão, do sagrado, pois o vampiro é demoníaco. Lúcifer, outrora anjo, tornou-se diabo e é chamado de dragão; da palavra “dragão” pode-se chegar a “Drácula”, reforçando a ideia do vampiro como um demônio, que é um anjo caído. Durand (2012) coloca, não coincidentemente, o dragão como síntese dos semantismos negativos, e o anjo como síntese dos semantismos positivos. São dois polos do imaginário cristão, que se opõem entre si e à criatura “Homem” que ocupa o ponto central desse esquema céu-inferno. O vampiro bom e o anjo rebelde, tão presentes na ficção contemporânea, refletem uma tensão de seus contextos sócio-históricos em torno da humanização da vida.

Do XIX wieku wampira postrzegano jako bestię zagrażającą rodzajowi ludzkiemu. Antropologia romantyczna i inkorporacja tego co ludowe oraz gotyckie do kultury spowodowało reinterpretację tej figury. Wampir zaczął egzystował jako fantazmat. W utworach Johna Williama Polidoriego, Johanna Wolfganga Goethego, a przede wszystkim w Draculi Brama Stokera, Eros i Thanatos nierozłącznie towarzyszą jego liminalnej egzystencji. Od drugiej połowy XX wieku do początku XXI wampir traci kły na rzecz estetycznego ujęcia. Asumptem, dla renesansu wampiryzmu w kulturze masowej, który utrzymuje się od kilku ostatnich lat, jest tetralogia „Zmierzch” amerykańskiej prozaiczki Stephenie Meyer. Główny bohater powieściowego cyklu – Edward Cullen jawi się jako fantazmat nie tylko swojej literackiej miłości Isabelli Swan, ale również milionom nastolatek na całym świecie. Potwór, który jeszcze w „Kronikach wampirów” Anne Rice zabijał i był żądny krwi, pod piórem S. Meyer stał się kimś na kształt superbohatera – przystojny, silny, odważny, szarmancki, inteligentny. Zastosowanie metodologii gender, w szczególności krytyki fantazmatycznej Marii Janion, w badaniu tetralogii Meyer przynosi ciekawe efekty poznawcze w dotychczasowym opisie wampirów, jak również pozwala elastycznie umiejscowić tę twórczość w procesie ewolucji figury wampira od jego istnienia w mitach, podaniach, legendach, przez literaturę romantyczną, aż po powieści Rice. Gender pozwala wykazać, że w cyklu Meyer zniwelowany zostaje męski paradygmat w sposobie pisania o wampirach; wampir tworzony jest jako projekcja kobiecych wyobrażeń oraz pragnień; nastolatki fantazjują o przystojnym, wiernym, oddanym wampirze, który rezygnuje z picia ludzkiej krwi, ponieważ to pozwala im się przenieść do lepszego świata niż ten rzeczywisty, który przygotowuje je do patriarchalnych ról społecznych. Polemicznie zostaje potraktowana popularna teza jakoby w cyklu „Zmierzch” istniała „erotyka abstynencji”.

[THIS PAPER IS IN ITALIAN LANGUAGE]

Edgar Morin nello studio seminale sul divismo Le Star teorizza una liturgia stellare: «Eroicizzate, divinizzate, le star sono più che oggetti d’ammirazione: sono soggetti di culto. Si crea attorno a loro un abbozzo di religione». Lo star system ha ormai cambiato forma senza perdere tuttavia alcuni attributi liturgici. Gli spazi di costruzione e fruizione del divismo contemporaneo sembrano infatti estendersi ed allargarsi nello spazio potenzialmente infinito dei nuovi mezzi di comunicazione.
Il saggio vuole esplorare le dinamiche di edificazione della figura divistica di Robert Pattinson grazie alla fandom della saga di Twilight e l’alterazione di questo processo avviato con l’interpretazione in Cosmopolis di David Cronenberg. Pattinson ha prestato il volto al vampiro seriale pop Edward Cullen e allo speculatore vampiresco Eric Packer: attraverso lo studio delle differenti performance è possibile registrare l’evoluzione/involuzione da corpo di massa a corpo d’autore del giovane divo.

The present study draws on corpus stylistics (cf. [38]; [19]; [26]; [20], to name a few) to investigate the narrative style in Stephenie Meyer’s The Twilight Saga (2005-2008). In particular, it focuses on keywords generated using Wordsmith Tools version 7 [36], and the BNC as a reference corpus. Qualitative and quantitative analyses show that the most frequent lexical words (nouns, adjectives, and verbs) reflect the writer’s focus on carefully selected physical elements of the characters. More specifically, the nouns preferentially denote specific physical attributes of the characters, the adjectives provide a general description of the protagonists and the setting, while the verbs used present the actions of all the characters, their interaction with the other protagonists, and their position in the narrative situation.