Cultural Representations of the Transformative Body in Young Adult Multi-Volume Vampire Fiction, 2000-2010

Abstract

The literary vampire of traditional horror has moved away from the horror genre and found a new and unlikely home in the pages of Young Adult multi-volume vampire fiction, where s/he has embraced and indeed vampirised existing YA generic tropes to transform his/her own physicality in unprecedented ways into something uniquely situated within its new socio-cultural and generic position. This vampire has attracted vast audiences to the YA genre, has arguably been responsible for the increase in YA fiction titles available and has captured a unique socio-literary zeitgeist which will never exist again. The nascent YA “neoteric vampire”, as cultural construct, and its transformative body will form the topic of this thesis in relation to Gothic theories of the body and emerging YA critical theory. The novels will be used as an interpretive vehicle for discussion of the cultural context in order to establish a more formalist close reading and context-driven critical discourse. The key themes addressed will include adolescence and physical maturation, religion, sexuality and gender, beauty and food and each of these salient elements of discussion will look to over-arching topics and their use across these thematically specific areas. Such over-arching tropes will include heteronormative feeding, consumption and vampiric gendering. The original contribution to knowledge lies in the study of a newly introduced literary genre and a newly created kind of teen vampire, constructed specifically to speak to contemporary Western teen audiences of the 2000-2010 period like no vampire has before. This study evaluates and investigates this unique vampire construct in conjunction with linked interdisciplinary, culturally specific critical analysis, from spheres including literary food studies, transformation studies, gender studies and sociology, and Gothic theories relating to the body in metamorphosis. By examining five series of largely unanalysed YA vampire fiction as body-centric, as Gothic, as genre-specific, and as socio-culturally and geopolitically located for the first time as a whole, this thesis adds to and furthers the academic debate in the arena of YA vampire studies as it relates to notions of the body of the vampire, and ultimately the teen body, as represented, culturally constructed, transformable and ephemeral