This book examines melodramatic impulses in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga, as well as the series’ film adaptations and fan-authored texts. Attention to conventions such as crying, victimization, and happy endings in the context of the Twilight-Jane Eyre relationship reveals melodrama as an empowering mode of communication for girls. Although melodrama has saturated popular culture since the nineteenth century, its expression in texts for, about, and by girls has been remarkably under theorized. By defining melodrama, however, through its Victorian lineages, Katie Kapurch recognizes melodrama’s aesthetic form and rhetorical function in contemporary girl culture while also demonstrating its legacy since the nineteenth century. Informed by feminist theories of literature and film, Kapurch shows how melodrama is worthy of serious consideration since the mode critiques limiting social constructions of postfeminist girlhood and, at the same time, enhances intimacy between girls—both characters and readers.
Table of Content
Preface.- Introduction: Melodrama, Power, and Girl Culture.- Powerless Protagonists: Melodramatic Heroines of Victorian and Postfeminist Girlhood.- Spatial Invasions and Melodrama’s Narrative Structure: Innocence, Villainy, and Vigilance in Girlhood.- Musical Gestures: Melodramatic Lullabies of Anxious Desire.- Secrets Revealed, Feelings Moralized: Girls’ Confessional Intimacy and Emotional Agency.- Melodrama’s Gothic Remnants: Nightmares and Vampire-Girl Doubles.- Suffering, Separation, and Crying: Melodrama, Tears, and Girls’ Emotional Empowerment.- Melodrama’s Happily-Ever-After? Girls, Re-Reading, and Resistance.- Epilogue: In the Post-Twilight Afterglow.- Appendix: Methodology: Girls’ Online Fandom.- Bibliography
About the author
Katie Kapurch is Assistant Professor of English at Texas State University, USA. She is currently working on a coedited volume (with Kenneth Womack) entitled New Critical Perspectives on the Beatles: Things We Said Today.
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