Zu dieser Ausgabe Sophie G. Einwächter, Maria Verena Siebert
People are Strange: Re-Viewing The Lost Boys Simon Bacon
The Female Body Revamped: Beauty, Monstrosity and Body Transformation in the Twilight-Saga Heike Steinhoff, Maria Verena Siebert
Bites from the Margins: Contemporary African American Women’s Vampire Literature Marie-Luise Löffler, Florian Bast
Reading Supernatural Fiction as Regional Fiction: Of “Vamps,” “Supes” and Places that “Suck” Evangelia Kindinger
Fankulturwirtschaft. Der Beitrag der Fans zum Erfolg des Twilight-Saga-Franchise Sophie G. Einwächter

Zu dieser Ausgabe

Sophie G. Einwächter, Maria Verena Siebert

People are Strange: Re-Viewing The Lost Boys

Simon Bacon

Good films never die! It may not have launched a thousand ships but Joel Schumacher’s 1987 The Lost Boys has influenced many of the subsequent mainstream vampire films and series that have followed it. From Buffy the Vampire Slayer to the Twilight-saga, the Never-Never-land that is inhabited by the eternal teenager and Mall-Rat vampire is never far away. Finding itself situated in the middle of the explosion of teen-vamp films of the 1980’s, The Lost Boys configures a seminal point in the transition of the Old World European revenant of Count Dracula to the young and achingly hip teenage vamp of New World America, consequently it is as popular now as it was when it was first released.

The Female Body Revamped: Beauty, Monstrosity and Body Transformation in the Twilight-Saga

Heike Steinhoff, Maria Verena Siebert

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.

Bites from the Margins: Contemporary African American Women’s Vampire Literature

Marie-Luise Löffler, Florian Bast

Black women’s literature has always striven to reclaim the black female body and black female subjectivity from dominant cultural discursive formations. This focus is also crucial within black women’s vampire fiction. Reading Jewelle Gomez’s Louisiana 1850 and Octavia Butler’s Fledgling, this paper shows how black women writers have claimed the vampire to deconstruct white supremacist, patriarchal power dynamics, as formerly marginalized characters claim coporeal and discursive control of their lives. Fusing core concerns of black women’s literature with the multi-metaphoric potential of the vampire, black women writers thus radically transform the conventions of traditional vampire lore.

Reading Supernatural Fiction as Regional Fiction: Of “Vamps,” “Supes” and Places that “Suck”

Evangelia Kindinger

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.

Fankulturwirtschaft. Der Beitrag der Fans zum Erfolg des Twilight-Saga-Franchise

Sophie G. Einwächter

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.