Victorian Melodrama in the Twenty-First Century - Jane Eyre, Twilight, and the Mode of Excess in Popular Girl Culture

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.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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    

Über den Autor / die Autorin

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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Zusammenfassung

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.

Zusatztext

  

Bericht

  

Produktdetails

• Autoren: Katie Kapurch
• Verlag: Palgrave UK
• Sprache: Englisch
• Produktform: Fester Einband
• Erschienen: 25.08.2016
• EAN: 9781137590602
• ISBN: 978-1-137-59060-2
• Seiten: 257
• Serie: Springer Palgrave Macmillan
• Themen: Geisteswissenschaften, Kunst, Musik > Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft > Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft; Naturwissenschaften, Medizin, Informatik, Technik > Naturwissenschaften allgemein; B, TIME, Literaturwissenschaft: 1800 bis 1900, Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Comparative Literature, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, Contemporary Literature, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Modern—19th century, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Literature, Modern—20th century, Literature, Modern—21st century, Victorian era