Stephanie Meyer's Twilight saga has maintained a tight grip on the contemporary culture's imagination. This timely and critical work examines how the Twilight series offers addictively appealing messages about love, romance, sex, beauty and body image, and how these charged themes interact with cultural issues regarding race, class, gender and sexuality.

Since the publication of Twilight in 2005, Stephenie Meyer's four-book saga about the tortured relationship between human heroine Bella Swan and her vampire love Edward Cullen has become a world-wide sensation, inciting screams of delight from loyal fans, sighs of derision from detractors, and fervent pronouncements about what "Team" one is on. Those looking deeper into its pages and on screen can find intriguing subtexts about everything from gender, race, sexuality, and religion. These accessible essays examine the texts, the films, and the fandom, exploring the series' cultural reach and...