Crossover Literature and Age in Crisis at the Turn of the 21St Century : Harry
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At the turn of the 21st century, the widely visible popularity of children’s and young adult literature with adult readers lead literary and social critics Crossover Literature and Age in Crisis to ask whether the inhabitants of Western culture were refusing to grow up. Whilst books had been crossing over the line between the adult and at the Turn of the 21st Century: children’s book market ever since the separation into two markets had been introduced, the perceived rise in this traffic led to a felt crisis concerning Harry Potter’s Kidults and age and identity. At the example of theHarry Potter and the Twilight novels, Maria Verena Peters analyzes the discourse about childhood, coming of the Twilight Moms age and adulthood inside and outside the pages of children’s and young adult literature as the 20th century came to an end and a new millennium was beginning. Her analysis suggests that this discourse was determined by an anxiety that without the patriarchal, heterosexual, nuclear family, age Maria Verena Peters cannot serve to produce meaningful identity categories. Beyond the policing of gender and sexuality, the discourse of age in crisis – as the examples of Harry Potter’s kidults and the Twilight moms serve to show – also functions to naturalize notions of class and consumption. In addition to the prominent two novel series of the title, the PhD thesis covers a wide range of popular culture artefacts, from Near Dark to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and from The Big Bang Theory to Hotter than my Daughter. It builds upon key findings of fan studies to uncover the intersectionality of age, gender, class and consumption in the marketing, reception and critique of children’s and young adult literature. Crossover Literature and Age in Crisis at the Turn of the 21st Century Crossover of the 21st Literature and Age in Crisis at the Turn | Maria Verena Peters Maria Verena Reihe Medienwissenschaften Band 15 ISBN 978-3-96182-013-9 Maria Verena Peters Crossover Literature and Age in Crisis at the Turn of the 21st Century Reihe Medienwissenschaften Band 15 Maria Verena Peters CROSSOVER LITERATURE AND AGE IN CRISIS AT THE TURN OF THE 21st CENTURY Harry Potter’s Kidults and the Twilight Moms Phd Project in Literary and Cultural Studies 2018 Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.dnb.de abrufbar. Dissertation, 2015 angenommen von der Philosophischen Fakultät der Universität Siegen Impressum Rechte: bei der Autorin Umschlag: universi – Markus Bauer M.A. Druck und Bindung: UniPrint, Siegen Siegen 2018: universi – Universitätsverlag Siegen www.uni-siegen.de/universi Gedruckt auf alterungsbeständigem holz- und säurefreiem Papier. ISBN 978-3-96182-013-9 I thought about adults. I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies, like children’s books hidden in the middle of dull, long books. The kind with no pictures or conversations. Neil Gaiman Table of Contents 1. Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 9 2. Research Survey ................................................................................................................13 3. The Child ............................................................................................................................23 4. The Kidult ..........................................................................................................................31 Part 1: Reading Harry Potter and Twilight 5. “In the wizarding world, we come of age at seventeen.” Childhood, Adulthood and Coming of Age in Harry Potter ............................................37 5.1 School and Coming of Age: The Nostalgic Nightmare of the School Story .............................................................37 5.1.1 Harry Potter and the Literary Tradition of the School Story ..........................38 5.1.2 Harry Potter and the Haunted Castle .................................................................43 5.2 Lord Voldemort: Monstrous Infant and Kidult .....................................................46 5.3 “His money’s worth” – Capitalism, Consumption and Coming of Age ............................................................ 54 5.4 The Boy Who Saved the World: The Adventure Plot as Male Coming of Age ................................................................62 5.5 The Representation of Age in Harry Potter ..............................................................70 6. “And how long have you been seventeen?” – Childhood, Adulthood and Coming of Age in Twilight ...................................................75 6.1. The Nuclear Family and Coming of Age ...............................................................77 6.1.1 Twilight and the Conventions of Teen Vampire Fiction ................................77 6.1.2 Twilight and the Mother-Daughter Problem ....................................................88 6.2 The Body and Coming of Age: Twilight as Makeover Narrative and Marriage Plot .......................................................94 6.3 “But how could I let him give me things?” – Capitalism, Consumption and Coming of Age .......................................................... 105 6.4 Childhood as Lack: the Vampire Child ................................................................ 107 6.5 The Representation of Age in Twilight .................................................................. 113 7. Childhood and the Discourse of Crisis: The Haunted Return of the Father ....... 115 Part 2: Readers of Harry Potter and Twilight 8. The Kidult: Adulthood and the Discourse of Crisis .................................................121 8.1 The Adult Readers of Harry Potter and Twilight .....................................................121 8.1.1 Harry Potter and the Kidult Reader ..................................................................127 8.1.2 Modes of Consumption: Kidults and Fandom .............................................130 8.1.3 Gender and the Kidult: Twilight and the Twilight Moms ..............................133 8.1.4. Modes of Consumption, Continued: Kidults and the Dangers of Reading ........................................................................138 9. Age, Gender, Class and Economy ...............................................................................141 10. Conclusion .....................................................................................................................145 11. Epilogue .........................................................................................................................149 12. Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................151 13. Works Cited ...................................................................................................................153 13.1 Print and Web .........................................................................................................153 13.2 Film and Television ................................................................................................165 1. Introduction What does it mean to be an adult? According to scholars from various disciplines such as sociologist James Côté, communication theorist Neil Postman or political theorist Benjamin R. Barber, answering this question has become immensely difficult. The borderline between childhood and adulthood, they suggest, started to erode after the Second World War, resulting in a prolonged state of adolescence. This development has been described as the end of childhood and/or adulthood, the infantilisation of adults or kidulthood. The particular origins of the kidult1 are usually traced back to the logic of consumer capitalism as a part of which consumers are encouraged to buy goods that they do not actually need. Barber, for instance, defines the kidult as the product of an “infantilization that is closely tied to the demands of consumer capitalism” (3). The kidult, a consumer with the capital of an adult but the desire for play of a child, is depicted as the perfect breed of consumer – from Playstations to action figures there is nothing that the kidult would not buy. Around the turn of the twentyfirst century, the kidult's literary tastes have come under particular public scrutiny. In reviews in both American and British newspapers, literary critics have scorned infantilised adults who enjoy J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books more than their children do. Adult women reading Stephenie Meyer's Twilight novels, originally intended for a young adult [YA] audience, have been demonized across the media landscape as bad mothers who try to revive their youth at the expense of their progeny. In all of these texts, children's and YA literature read by adults has been considered escapist. This discourse has fed back into the academia. Political scientist Jacopo Bernadini, for instance, sees the popularity of the Harry Potter and Twilight novels with adult readers as direct evidence for an increasing infantilization. In contrast to this, the study at hand will suggest that the cultural work of such novel series as Harry Potter and Twilight, when read by adults, is not necessarily to prolong a state of childhood – to the contrary, their reading could actually function to reaffirm clear-cut