“Unconditionally and Irrevocably”: Theorizing the Melodramatic Impulse in Young Adult Literature through the Twilight Saga and Jane Eyre

Blackford draws on an earlier text, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, in order to explicate the conventions of melodrama in Harper Lee's mid-twentieth-century novel: "By updating Uncle Tom melodrama, Lee taps into a thriving American literary tradition to which readers h...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Children's Literature Association Quarterly 2012-07, Vol.37 (2), p.164-187
Main Author:	Kapurch, Katie
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	1800-1899 1816-1855 2000-2099 affective language American literature Apologies Authors British & Irish literature Bronte, Charlotte (1816-1855) Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Charlotte, 1816-1855 Connotation Conventions English Literature genre conventions Historical text analysis History and criticism Influence Jane Eyre Literary criticism Melodrama Meyer, Brontë, Stephenie,, Charlotte Meyer, Stephenie Meyer, Stephenie (1973- ) Meyer, Stephenie (b.1973) Naming Nineteenth Century novel Novels Politics reader response Reading Stowe, Harriet Beecher (1811-1896) Studies Twenty-First Century Twilight Saga Twilight series Victorian period Young adult fiction Young adult literature Young Adult Readers young adults
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Summary:	Blackford draws on an earlier text, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, in order to explicate the conventions of melodrama in Harper Lee's mid-twentieth-century novel: "By updating Uncle Tom melodrama, Lee taps into a thriving American literary tradition to which readers have been conditioned to react: they must not only think about but also feel the outrage of persecuting innocence" (Mockingbird 90).9 Blackford's examination thus demonstrates how theorizing the melodramatic mode in more recent texts often requires analyses that acknowledge and appreciate its nineteenth-century legacy.10 Even with studies like Blackford's, there exists an absence of scholarly treatment of melodrama in texts about and for youth-particularly adolescent literature-in spite of its profound visibility today. [...]recognizing and naming the formal characteristics of melodrama, without fear of its historically pejorative connotations, offers critics addressing young adult literature a tool for advancing interpretations of political, social, and cultural messages ascertainable only through that mode.11 In the 1995 preface to his important and continuously cited study of melodrama, The Melodramatic Imagination (1976), Peter Brooks articulates the capabilities of melodrama: "the melodramatic mode no longer needs to be approached in the mode of apology.
ISSN:	0885-0429 1553-1201 1553-1201