Hughes writes that this paper was presented to "the Halloween 2014 Spectral Visions event at the University of Sunderland, where I was honoured to be invited to give a keynote talk on paranormal romance." At Academia.edu the precise date of Oct 30, 2014 is given.
the concerns of autonomy and subjectivity are central to much paranormal romance. Dark and monstrous urges—the bloodlust of the vampire, the pack mentality of the werewolf—are opportunities to explore aspects of instinct and responsibility. Their adult counterparts typically retreat into essentialism (though there are exceptions and interesting qualifications and ambiguities), but Young Adult Dark Romances often explore complex ideas of subjectivity, choice, bad faith, and determinism. Since the traditional Gothic monster has always represented ‘the Other’ (that is, those excluded or execrated for their race, sex, or sexuality), the new sympathetic monster of these texts inevitably turns our attention to the politics of identity and to ideas of tolerance and assimilation of outsiders. All these issues become inter-twined and scrutinised in the best paranormal romance. (2)
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re vampires:
I’ve chosen as my main example a Young Adult novel, Alyxandra Hervey’s clever and sophisticated My Love Lies Bleeding (2010) [pic 31]. Notice how it mimics the iconography of the Twilight cover [pic 32]—many of the covers do. It’s not the best of them; it’s interesting, though. It’s engaging and well-written, and it illustrates the themes I want to talk about very well—such as genre, agency, epistemology. And it’s better thanTwilight! (10)
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Various ideological issues are raised by the werewolf narrative. There are those around gender. Thus many of these novels share the obligatory feisty female protagonist [pic 37], who is present both from a generic imperative and due to what is socially acceptable in present-day Western society, particularly when a largely female readership is involved. Yet contradictions emerge between this and the prevalent submission to pack hierarchy and to the dominant alpha male that the heroine half-willingly acquiesces to. (12)
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Faeries in paranormal romance have the viciousness, the unpredictability, and the predatory nature of vampires, together with their sex appeal. But they are associated not with death—rather with intensified life, life out of human control, and thus, in general, nature. In the twenty-first century this inevitably evokes the values and concerns of environmentalism, though the scary nature of faeries means that the incorporation of these values is not uncritical. Kagawa neatly draws on the folkloric motif of faery aversion to iron, which represents a contemporary questioning of modernity in many dark faery books. (14)
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Vampires are cool; they have long been seen as sexy and glamorous. Zombies, by convention, are not so. And yet zombies do seem to be very popular at the moment for other reasons. This may well be due to the need to fill a monstrous gap left by the assimilation of the vampire into human society. But the non-vampiric Undead is also employed - particularly in Young Adult fiction - to dramatise coping with death. (17)
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Waters’s portrayal of returning dead who, retaining their physical wounds and having the impeded consciousness and stumbling gait of the zombie, engage in love affairs and struggle for their rights, is a daring and tricky narrative move. Through this, he is able to explore identity politics with great depth and flexibility. (20)
Hughes writes that this paper was presented to "the Halloween 2014 Spectral Visions event at the University of Sunderland, where I was honoured to be invited to give a keynote talk on paranormal romance." At Academia.edu the precise date of Oct 30, 2014 is given.
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re vampires:
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