ASSIGNMENT COVER SHEET

(For Open Universities Australia students)

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Unit Code

CLT340

Assignment No.

Assignment Title

Genre Writing 3

Due Date

24/02/2015

Contact Info

Phone:0403424484

Unit Name

Genre Writing

COE USE ONLY

Date Received

Email:joseph.zizys@gmail.com

Word Count:

Turnitin No.:

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Student Name:

Family Name Zizys

Student Number:

42351979

Date:

24/02/2015

Given Name Joseph

Q1) Are genre conventions fixed or do they change over time/across cultures? Discuss in relation
to two genres of your choosing.

1500 Words

The changing genre conventions of romance, the gothic and the vampire.
By Joseph Zizys

Genre conventions are not fixed. They change and evolve just like the writers, readers and cultures
in which they are produced evolve and change. I will examine changing genre conventions in the
genres of romance and in vampire fiction. I will argue that vampire fiction, especially recent
examples like Twilight instantiate many genre conventions from both popular romance and from
the gothic vampire tradition. This shows an evolution and hybridisation of the vampire novel from
gothic towards romance, and indicates a change in the way we relate to the figure of the vampire.
In Pulp Scott McCracken describes Romance as the original form of popular fiction. (McCraken
1998 p75) Wikipedia lists the Twilight series of novels, by Stephanie Meyer, as selling over 100
million copies (Wikipedia 2015). They are therefore very popular fiction. The novels centre around
the relationship between a teenage girl, Bella, and a vampire named Edward with whom she falls in

love. The books are nominally young adult fiction, but utilise conventions from romance, vampire
fiction, and young adult genres.
The novels are also gothic, and include tropes like the werewolf, which was an increasingly
popular theme in nineteenth century fiction (Du Coudray 2002 p1) especially gothic fiction. But the
books diverge from gothic conventions, and especially the conventions of the vampire in many
ways; Meyers vampires do not have fangs, they can survive drinking animal blood, they have large
families, all variations on the vampire trope seen in the locus classicus of the genre, Bram Stokers
Dracula (Stoker 2008). Kokkola argues that it is precisely the mixing of different genres that creates
new and intriguing modes in the Twilight saga (Kokkola 2011). The possibility that Meyers Mormon
background plays into her version of the romance form is also canvassed.
Twilight combines the gothic in the form of the vampire with the romance embodied by the teenage
girl falling in love with the mysterious stranger. The would be couple overcome obstacles, as in the
received structure of the romance, but there are also vampires and werewolves, as in the gothic
novel. Also much of the action his set in a high school, and the central theme of the books seems
to be that of sexual abstinence of the main character, all of which would place the books in the
young adult genre. This hybridisation of genre creates something new, something that certainly
could not possibly have been written in any genre or combination thereof in the nineteenth century.
Meyer also infuses the books, many would argue, with her Mormon sensibility of true love waits
(Kokkola 2011).
Almost every part of Meyers novels embody some trope or convention from some genre or other.
Her writing is not literature in the sense of high art. She writes pulp. But it is not possible to
analyse her work to arrive at the real genre that she is working in. Her novels reflect an
atomisation of popular culture that transcends genre as such. Each trope is taken up then dropped

in turn. Tropes can be taken from multiple genres and woven together, then cut of and replaced by
what seems like a new mono-genre, before that genre too is hybridised and remixed into the pool.
This form of writing, common especially now in young adult fiction, is almost a new genre in itself, a
kind of pastiche of genre that everyone can recognise all the parts of, but that can still surprise by
the composition of those familiar parts into new, innovative wholes. New innovative wholes that are
somehow still completely familiar and satisfying like bad pizza.
This new form, exemplified by Meyer, is not the product of a new or profound literary technique.
Meyers first novel came to her in a dream, and she wrote it in three months (Meyer 2013). She did
little or no research into genre, knew almost nothing about the traditional literary representations of
the vampire in high literature or in genre fiction, and was not consciously attempting to write a
pastiche.
We can see through this example a great deal that is instructive about the construction of genre
fiction. Writers of genre fiction need not be steeped in the traditions in which they work in the sense
of reading culture, precisely because the tropes of genre are popular. They float around the culture
in adverts, in cliche, on television, on cereal packets, you do not need to have read Dracula to
know what a vampire is, you do not even need to be able to read.
Conventions can change because writers like Meyer, and the generation that will follow her, can
write genre fiction without knowing much about the conventions that they are writing in. They are
therefore free to make use of conventions they know their audience will be familiar with, as they
are, but also free to invent new conventions where they either do not find the familiar convention
useful to the purposes of their work, or simply do not know it.
We already have an example of this sort of work emanating from the culture around Meyers
Twilight series: 50 Shades of Grey by E.L James was drafted within the Twilight fan fiction

community. It ostensibly explores themes of BDSM and sits within the Erotic Romance genre, but
its connection to BDSM and indeed to Erotic Romance more broadly is much more tenuous than
its profound connection to the Twilight series.
Meyer, a writer of a Mormon background, is in this sense culturally very far from E.L James.
However in another cultural sense the two are extremely close. In terms of the material culture of
mass market paperbacks, internet publishing, the fan fiction community, and the pastiche and
hybridisation of genre, Twilight and 50 Shades are obvious bedfellows, however a genre analysis
would place them apart, one predominantly young adult and fantastical, the other essentially adult
and realistic, one concerned with abstinence and the other concerned with bondage. Yet they are
completely intertwined in the mode of production and genealogy of the development of popular
literature and they are both almost certain to be enormously influential on subsequent evolutions of
genre, having both sold over 100 million copies and both supporting thriving online communities of
fans who also write.
Genre conventions are not fixed, they change over time and across cultures. They also interact, in
complex ways, with each other, and can hybridise into strange new forms, as in Twilight, and these
strange (but comfortingly familiar) new forms can in turn spawn new work in other genres as in 50
Shades.
We may be currently in a cultural environment where genre itself is more or less transcended, and
a kind of post-modern pastiche of genre is the norm, this new form may be both a genre unto itself,
a genre that Twilight and 50 Shades are both perfect examples of, or perhaps borders will firm and
evolve and in hindsight we will see Twilight as inaugurating the young-adult-vampire-romanceabsitnence genre and 50 Shades as standing at the head of the anti-feminist-fake-bdsm-consentfail genre, and both in the future will diverge and sustain new taxonomies.

Only time will tell.

Bibliography:

Du Coudray, Chantal Bourgault. (2002) Upright citizens on all fours: Nineteenth-century identity
and the image of the werewolf" Nineteenth-Century Contexts , 24:1 , 2002 , 1-16

Kokkola, Lydia. (2011) Virtuous Vampires and Voluptuous Vamps: Romance Conventions
Reconsidered in Stephenie Meyers Twilight Series in Childrens Literature in Education June
2011, Volume 42, Issue 2 pp 165-179, Spingerlink, 2011

McCracken, Scott. (1998) Popular romance" in Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction , 1998 , 75-101

Meyer, Stephanie. (2013) G2 intervie in The Guardian accessed at

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/11/stephenie-meyer-twilight-the-host on 24/02/2015

Stoker, Bram. (2008) Jonathan Harker's journal" in Dracula, Ellmann, Maud , 2008c , 14-26

Wikipedia, (2015) list of best selling books accessed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bestselling_books on 24/02/2015