Twilight and History

Description

The first look at the history behind Stephenie Meyer's bestselling Twilight series, timed to release with the third movie, Eclipse

The characters of the Twilight Saga carry a rich history that shapes their identities and actions over the course of the series. Edward, for instance, may look like a seventeen-year-old teen heartthrob, but was actually born in 1901 and died during the Spanish Influenza of 1918. His adopted sister, Alice, was imprisoned in an insane asylum in 1920 and treated so badly there that even becoming a vampire was a welcome escape. This book is the first to explore the history behind the Twilight Saga's characters and their stories. You’ll learn about what life might have been like for Jasper Whitlock Hale, the Confederate vampire who fought during the Civil War, Carlisle Cullen, the Puritan witch hunter-turned-vampire who participated in the witchcraft persecutions in Early Modern England, and the history of the Quileute culture that shaped Jacob and his people —and much more.

• Gives you the historical backdrop for Twilight Saga characters and events
• Adds a whole new dimension to the Twilight novels and movies
• Offers fresh insights on vampires, romance, and history

Twilight and History is an essential companion for every Twilight fan, whether you've just gotten into the series or have followed it since the beginning.
Acknowledgments: For Those Who Turned Us.

Twilight's Timeline.

Introduction: Frozen in Time (Nancy R. Reagin).

PART ONE: Your Basic Human-Vampire-Werewolf/Shape-shifter Triangle: Bella, Edward, and Jacob.

1 “An Old-Fashioned Gentleman”? Edward’s Imaginary History (Kate Cochran).

2 Biting Bella: Treaty Negotiation, Quileute History, and Why “Team Jacob” Is Doomed to Lose (Judith Leggatt and Kristin Burnett).

3 CinderBella: Twilight, Fairy Tales, and the Twenty-First-Century American Dream (Sara Buttsworth).

4 Courting Edward Cullen: Courtship Rituals and Marital Expectations in Edward’s Youth (Catherine Coker).

PART TWO: Some Family History: The Cullen Coven.

5 Jasper Hale, the Oldest Living Confederate Veteran (Elizabeth Baird Hardy).

6 Smoky Mountain Twilight: The Appalachian Roots of Emmett McCarty Cullen and His Family (Elizabeth Baird Hardy).

7 Better Turned Than “Cured”? Alice and the Asylum (Grace Loiacono and Laura Loiacono).

8 Carlisle Cullen and the Witch Hunts of Puritan London (Janice Liedl).

9 A Subtle and Dangerous Gift: Jasper Hale and the Specter of the American Civil War (Andrea Robertson Cremer).

10 Like Other American Families, Only Not: The Cullens and the “Ideal” Family in American History (Kyra Glass von der Osten).

PART THREE: A World of Vampires: The Volturi and Beyond.

11 The Sort of People Who Hired Michelangelo as Their Decorator: The Volturi as Renaissance Rulers (Birgit Wiedl).

12 “Where Do the Cullens Fit In?”: Vampires in European Folklore, Science, and Fiction (Eveline Brugger).

13 Getting Younger Every Decade: Being a Teen Vampire during the Twentieth Century (Kat Burkhart).

The Forks High School Faculty.

Index: Alice Foresaw All of This.

Sujets

• Histoire
• List of Twilight characters
• Twilight (series)
• Twilight
• Personnages de la saga du désir interdit
• Bella Swan
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 18 mars 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780470619780
• Langue: English

Extrait

Table of Contents
 
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Twilight’s Timeline
Introduction
Notes
 
PART ONE - Your Basic Human-Vampire-Werewolf /Shape-shifter Triangle
 
Chapter 1 - “An Old-Fashioned Gentleman”?
 
Imaginary History: How Literature and History Play Together
The Lost Generation: Edward’s Historical Moment
The Victorian Gentleman: A Secular Saint
The Byronic Hero: Darcy, Rochester, and Heathcliff
Imagining Edward’s History through Literature
 
Chapter 2 - Biting Bella
 
Treaties and the Shaping of Indigenous Identity
Rogue Entities and the Challenge of the Treaties
Rialto Beach and the Erotic Triangle: Contemporary Treaty Conflicts
 
Chapter 3 - CinderBella
 
Preface
The Dreams of Lambs and Lions
Creatures of the Night: Defenders of the Dream
CinderBella and Her Sisters
Conclusion: What Price the Glass Slipper?
 
Chapter 4 - Courting Edward Cullen
 
The Influence of Romance
The Place of Twentieth-Century Courtship
Gendered Expectations and Conflicted Desires
Other Lives in Other Universes
Conclusion: “She Had Her Hat On . . .”
 
PART TWO - Some Family History
Chapter 5 - Jasper Hale, the Oldest Living Confederate Veteran
 
Because the Girls Are Watching
Tenting Tonight
The Rattle of Musketry
Up through the Ranks
The Lingering Shadow
 
Chapter 6 - Smoky Mountain Twilight
 
The Prisoning Hills
The Ring of the Ax, the Whistle of the Train
A “Real” Mountain Man?
Keeping Themselves to Themselves
Them’s Fightin’ Words
Taking a Joke
Come In and Sit a Spell
A Bear of Very Little Brain
Gloom, Despair, and Agony
Thicker Than Water
The Way We’ve Always Done Things
 
Chapter 7 - Better Turned Than “Cured”?
 
Madhouses and Asylums
Make a Commitment
Crowd Control and Early Therapies
Shock Therapies
Conclusion: Better Turned Than “Cured”?
 
Chapter 8 - Carlisle Cullen and the Witch Hunts of Puritan London
 
“The London of My Youth”
“Just before Cromwell’s Rule”
“His Father Was an Intolerant Man”
“When Monsters Were Not Just Myths and Legends”
“Carlisle Was a Disappointment; He Was Not Quick to Accuse”
The Soul of the Family
Like Father, Like Son
 
Chapter 9 - A Subtle and Dangerous Gift
 
A Time of Making Men
The Bloody Civil War: A Family Affair
Desertion
The Best and Worst We Could Be
 
Chapter 10 - Like Other American Families, Only Not
 
The Failure of Twilight’s Traditional Family
Love Is the Tie That Binds
“Barren” Wives and the Kin We Choose: Families That Aren’t Biological
Twilight and the Nonnuclear Family
What Is a “Traditional” Family, Anyway?
 
PART THREE - A World of Vampires
Chapter 11 - The Sort of People Who Hired Michelangelo as Their Decorator
 
Near-Royalty, Control, and Power Gained through Patronage
People You Wouldn’t Want to Cross
“So Medieval!”: Renaissance Art, the Artists, and the People Who Paid Them
 
Chapter 12 - “Where Do the Cullens Fit In?”
 
Demonic Creatures with a Taste for Blood and Corpses That Won’t Stay Put
Vampire Hunters and Vampire Science during the “Century of Light”
Sexing Up a Myth: From European Vampire Literature to Pop Culture Vamps
So, Where Do the Cullens Fit In?
So Where Does That Leave Us?
 
Chapter 13 - Getting Younger Every Decade
 
What Is a Teenager?
What the Kids Today Are Listening To
Dracula and the Drive in Movie
Television
Automobiles
Going Steady, Dating, and Teen Marriage
Eager Human Soldiers or Draft-Dodging Vampires?
What Is an Adult, After All?
Bella: Born in the Wrong Century?
Leaving the Decades Behind, or When in Rome . . .
 
The Forks High School Faculty
Index

This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Copyright © 2010 by Nancy R. Reagin. All rights reserved
 
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada

 
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
 
Twilight and history / edited by Nancy R. Reagin. p. cm.
Includes index.
eISBN : 978-0-470-61978-0
1. Meyer, Stephenie, 1973- Twilight saga series. 2. Young adult fiction, American—History and criticism. I. Reagin, Nancy Ruth, 1960-
PS3613.E979Z887 2010
813’.6--dc22 2009049267
813’.6--dc22
2009049267
 

 
For Seth, who first persuaded me to read Twilight
Acknowledgments
For Those Who Turned Us
It was fandom that turned me first, and to which this book is most indebted. Being involved in literary fandoms taught me the pleasures of exploring an imaginary world and the fun of uncovering the history within and behind each world-building exercise.
Eric Nelson and Connie Santisteban at Wiley drew me into their “vegetarian ” coven, proposing this book and seeing it though its development with unfailing support and good humor. Lisa Burstiner and Alexa Selph contributed greatly to the book ’s readability and backstopped me on the details of the story world.
I myself turned the contributors, and I thank each of them for bringing her expertise and imagination to this book. And we are all indebted to Stephenie Meyer, whose world drew us in and who gave us all so much to write about.
Twilight’s Timeline
Introduction
Frozen in Time
Nancy R. Reagin
 
 
 
 
D o you realize what century this is?” Bella Swan asks Edward Cullen in Eclipse , frustrated that he insists on observing the “rules” of his own youth when it comes to courtship. It’s a good question: again and again in the Twilight Saga, the vampire characters act in ways that show that while they may know—on an intellectual level—what century it is, they don’t always care. Each of them was frozen in time at the moment of being turned into a vampire. “You think of me as a . . . living stone—hard and cold,” Edward tells Bella. “That’s true. We are set the way we are, and it is very rare for us to experience a real change.” ( Eclipse , 500.) Each of these characters has a unique personal history, which forms the unchanging core of his or her identity.
Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga has become a pop culture phenomenon, and not only because of Edward’s inhumanly angelic face and perfect, marble body. The Italian novelist and literary critic Umberto Eco observed that films and novels that attract large numbers of enthusiastic fans tend to be those that “provide a completely furnished world,” so that its fans can quote characters and discuss the story world’s details as if they were part of their own reality. 1 Twilight certainly matches this description: we can lose ourselves in a world where shape-shifting wolves defend unsuspecting humans against ravenous bands of newborn vampires. And while its love triangle of vampire-human-werewolf/shape-shifter pulls us in deep, Twilight’s alternate universe is both like and unlike our own. It’s a world-building exercise that’s been thought out down to the last detail, including a body of imagined lore and myth for both the Quileutes and the vampires (which Bella explores on her universe’s Internet) unlike any we’ve seen elsewhere: vampires who sparkle rather than dissolve when exposed to sunlight and werewolves who can change form at a moment’s notice, liberated from the moon’s cycle.
But part of Twilight’s attraction is its rich use of historical events to create a detailed backstory for many characters. Each of the vampires comes from a particular time and place, frozen in age and mentality at the moment he or she was turned. Each of them moves through the decades and centuries, carrying the values and experiences of generations long dead, even (among the Volturi) from cultures thousands of years in the past. Their history becomes part of who they are now, today.
Jasper Hale is and always will be a Confederate veteran: what did he experience during the Civil War, and how did that shape him? Carlisle Cullen was raised among English Puritans and witch-hunters and witnessed not only the Enlightenment