Genre, Reception, and Adaptation in the "Twilight" Series ed. by Anne Morey (review)

Ashgate continues its excellent series, Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present, with a strong collection of essays covering Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga from the three perspectives announced in the title. Worth immediate note is the elegant simplicity in that grouping. The anthology has no sectional divisions; instead, editor Anne Morey lets the "phenomenon," a word frequently used in the introduction to describe the Twilight Saga, unfold throughout the book by way of the "politics of the text: the complex set of negotiations by which individuals and communities determine meaning via an understanding of how a text's contents speak to an existing, and shifting, cultural context" (1). As such, Morey immediately neuters any arguments concerning qualitative concerns with Meyer's work, and authorizes the essays as examining the construction of a pop-cultural event. Hers is one of the strongest arguments as yet proffered for academic consideration of Meyer's work, through the simple consideration of the Saga as a relevant artifact reflecting the zeitgeist of the here and now.

This is not to say that Morey dons blinders to numerous reservations concerning Twilight. From the outset, she notes it as "an almost perfect example of 'girl culture,'" while clarifying and redefining its position as, ostensibly, a "combination of low-status genres—the vampire tale, the romance, [and] the female coming-of-age-story" within traditions as rich and lurid as nineteenth-century gothic and romance fictions (1, 2). And while Morey may not divide the essays throughout the collection, she provides a strong argument within the introduction for the tripartite construction of the Twilight Saga as a phenomenon. Having already addressed the complexity of its multigeneric construction, Morey theoretically constructs a Habermasian idea of a "girl's reading" as a "paradoxical phenomenon" of the combination of both the "public" and "private" spheres of reading, with that construct being "both disturbing and promising" (7). This collection would have been remiss had it not addressed the film industry's cultivation of Meyer's books and their adaptation into a variety of different media, most prominently the movie series; Morey not only does not slip into the trap of ignoring the somewhat critically-derided movies, but rather embraces the adaptations of the work with considerable relish and aplomb. While the claim that the "films are exceptionally literary in the sense that that they prize the spoken or written word over the visual effect" is arguable at best, it's the audacity and clarity of her argument that makes it a breath of fresh air in a cosmology of Twilight criticism that seems to be constantly apologizing for its own existence.

The essays themselves are of a consistently superior caliber. Jackie C. Horne's contribution, "Fantasy, Subjectivity, and Desire in Twilight and Its Sequels," transcends the collection's categorization of genre, as many of the essays do. However, Horne's contribution is particularly adept at traversing the scope of the Twilight Saga while emphasizing a reconsideration of desire and subjectivity, posited as "the first step in creating a poetics of fantasy worthy of the complex ideological work that seemingly simple 'wishfulfillment' fantasies typically perform" (31). Horne's simple breviloquence underpins a remarkably complex and compelling reconceptualization of "readerly desire" in the series, with little to no gristle in the analysis. Morey's own chapter, "'Famine for Food, Expectation for Content': Jane Eyre as Intertext for the 'Twilight' Saga," and Hye Chung Han and Chan Hee Hwang's "Adaptation and Reception: The Case of the 'Twilight' Saga in Korea" play similar games with transcending the topoi of the collection; the latter in particular adds a new category of translation theory into the mix of genre consideration. A fascinating exploration of the phenomenon abroad, Han and Hwang's look at Twilight as somewhat atypical in terms of reception of "female genres in the Korean cultural context" is nothing less than a marveling look at the history of the Saga's publication in Korea...