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Origins: How Did It Come to This?
Origins: How Did It Come to This?
In retrospect, it was all their fault.
The Rise of the Sympathetic Vampire, 1967-88
Paranormal Romance: Origins•The paranormal romance genre has its origins in the romantic fantasy, SF, and horror fiction written during the 1980s. Although all three are typically regarded as male-dominated genres, in the 1980s authors such as Anne Rice, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Mercedes Lackey, and Anne McCaffrey enjoyed considerable popularity as authors of SF, fantasy, and horror novels which employed romantic themes. All were particularly popular with female readers.
•Jayne Ann Krentz was publishing paranormal-themed romances as far back as 1984, but the genre only really took off in the 1990s, after the enormous success Rice’s best-selling Vampire Chronicles and the film Ghost. Then as now, romantic vampires were especially popular with both readers and writers.
•Most paranormal romances use supernatural elements to heighten the standard romance plotline. The romantic vampire is, fairly obviously, just an exaggerated version of the standard romance hero: dark, dangerous, brooding, older than the heroine, etc. Similarly, the ever-popular psychic heroine merely exaggerated the talents for empathy and intuition common amongst mainstream romance heroines.
Vampire Romance: The Early Years
Vampire Romance: The Early Years
Vampire Romance: The Early Years
Vampire Romance: The Early Years
Meanwhile, in the Young Adult section…
The Breakthrough: Feehan’s Dark Series, 1999 - Present
The Vampire Romance Before Twilight: Consolidation and Diversification
After Twilight, the Deluge: The Boom Years, 2006-12
Why Vampires? Why Now?
And Why Twilight?
Why Vampires?• The romantic vampire allows the traits of the Byronic ‘alphaman’ romance hero –
strength, age, experience, power, misery - to be exaggerated to hyperbolic, superhuman levels.
• The romantic vampire embodies the aristocratic ‘Old World’ values of honour, courtesy, and chivalry, allowing him and the heroine to collectively embody the best of both worlds. (Cf Sheik romance.)
• The romantic vampire simultaneously acts as an embodiment of animalistic hunger and uncontrolled desire, represented by their thirst for blood.
• The romantic vampire literalises the emotional ‘living death’ of the Byronic romance hero.
• The romantic vampire is a glamourous outsider, desirably Other without actually possessing any meaningful Otherness.
• The romantic vampire has something to be saved from by his heroine.
Why Now?• The limited success of the anti-racist, gay rights, and women’s movements
since the 1960s have served to ‘decontaminate’ the figure of the outsider, provided their difference is manifested in forms which does not challenge the existing social order.
• In particular, ‘liberated’ female sexuality is now not only tolerated but celebrated, again provided that it expresses itself purely on private terms and makes no demands for actual social change.
• Stripped of its connections to radical Otherness, the vampire serves as a convenient symbol for the kind of low-level alienation which has become de rigueur in modern popular fiction, especially modern Young Adult fiction.
Why Twilight?• Meyer’s ignorance of the vampire romance genre as a whole allowed the
Twilight novels to develop in isolation from the rest of contemporary vampire fiction. They thus possess a level of oddness and sincerity (or naïveté) which makes them stand out from the much more polished, knowing works which preceded them.
• While there is no reason to disbelieve Meyer’s assertions that the works contain no deliberate religious or ideological material, they none-the-less articulate an unusually ‘old-fashioned’ version of teenage romance which, like Feehan’s Dark novels, clearly struck a chord with many readers.
• The success of Harry Potter led publishers to develop new mass-distribution techniques for their most popular works, allowing them to be sold through non-traditional outlets (such as supermarkets) and at a considerable discount. This has greatly contributed to the run-away success of works such as Twilight and Fifty Shades.
• They function as wish-fulfilment fantasies of unusual purity.
The Twilight Controversy: Ten Reasons People Hated Twilight
1. For being popular.2. For being popular with young girls.3. For being feminine.4. For being a romance.5. For being ‘badly’ written.6. For being ‘Mormon’ or ‘conservative’.7. For having objectionable gender politics.8. For being amoral and setting a bad example to its readers.9. For its lack of fidelity to the established norms of vampire
fiction.10.For its (perceived and actual) effect on Gothic fiction in general,
and vampire fiction in particular.
The Aftermath
