Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight: A Vampire Tale?

Abstract

Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series is a vampire-teen romance that has become phenomenally popular among young adult readers. The movies based on these novels furthered the fan frenzy. Yet, its improbable success is matched by its share of criticism. Critics denounce Meyer’s literary skills and accuse her of disseminating racism, sexism, and Mormon-flavored moralism. As opposed to her contemporaries, she seems to have got a slightly different agenda for her readers. This paper delves into the embedded texts in Twilight and tries to re-contextualize them. It finds these texts disseminating appropriated facts and ideals through popular fiction to a vulnerable audience. These masked inceptions of gender, racial, backward, and moralist politics cast a doubt on the authorial intentions of Stephenie Meyer. Her sin-free saga of convoluted representations does not find her guilt-free, as her fans would wish.