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

ISBN-13: 9781349954957 / Angielski / Miękka / 2018 / 239 str.

Katie Kapurch

Spis treści

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Melodrama, Power, and Girl Culture

Chapter 1: Powerless Protagonists: Melodramatic Heroines of Victorian and Postfeminist Girlhood

Chapter 2: Spatial Invasions and Melodrama’s Narrative Structure: Innocence, Villainy, and Vigilance in Girlhood

Chapter 3: Musical Gestures: Melodramatic Lullabies of Anxious Desire

Chapter 4: Secrets Revealed, Feelings Moralized: Girls’ Confessional Intimacy and Emotional Agency

Chapter 5: Melodrama’s Gothic Remnants: Nightmares and Vampire-Girl Doubles

Chapter 6: Suffering, Separation, and Crying: Melodrama, Tears, and Girls’ Emotional Empowerment

Chapter 7: Melodrama’s Happily-Ever-After? Girls, Re-Reading, and Resistance

Epilogue: In the Post-Twilight Afterglow

Appendix: Methodology: Girls’ Online Fandom

Bibliography

O autorze

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.     

Blurb

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.