Stephenie Meyers Twilight-Saga erzielt einen beachtlichen Umsatz im Buchhandel und an der Kinokasse. Einen wesentlichen Beitrag hierzu leisten die Fans der Saga, deren Tätigkeiten in vielerlei Hinsicht als produktiv zu verstehen sind. Der vorliegende Artikel untersucht diesen Zusammenhang von Kulturwirtschaft und Fankultur und schlägt vor, Fans als Agenten und ihre Netzwerke als Märkte kultureller Güter zu verstehen. Dabei gilt es zu beachten, dass digitale Technik und Medien fankulturelle Praktiken signifikant verändert haben: Fans können nun effektiver als unter analogen Bedingungen zu einem wirtschaftlichen Erfolg ihres Kultobjektes beitragen.
Archive
Evangelia Kindinger: Reading Supernatural Fiction as Regional Fiction: Of “Vamps,” “Supes” and Places that “Suck”
Bon Temps, Forks, Tulsa: recent vampire fiction has transformed these apparently “off-the-map” and rural places to sites of supernatural adventures and exotic characters. If “the monster exists only to be read,” if it is “an embodiment of a certain cultural moment – of a time, a feeling, and a place” (Cohen, Monster Culture 4), then we need to read the places in which vampires are narrated. In this paper, I argue that authors such as Stephenie Meyer, Charlaine Harris and P.C. and Kristin Cast tell regional vampire tales, rooting the cultural figure “vampire” in specific regional settings that result in the vampires‘ domestication and Americanization.
Heike Steinhoff, Maria Verena Siebert: The Female Body Revamped: Beauty, Monstrosity and Body Transformation in the Twilight-Saga
Throughout the four novels of the Twilight-saga, its protagonist Bella Swan goes through immense physical changes. This paper will read Bella’s bodily transformation from human to vampire as a makeover narrative. We will demonstrate that it follows the same narrative pattern as extreme makeover programs such as The Swan, including the construction of an abject body in the ‘before‘ stage, a painful bodily transformation, a mirror scene after the procedure that has been conducted on her, and the constitution of a new, whole self. This gendered discourse can be read either as female empowerment or as a subjection of the female body to patriarchal ideals.