Katie Kapurch

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor at Texas State University

Guided by ecofeminist philosophy and fairy tale criticism, this article theorizes the metaphorical potency of mermaids via Alice Hoffman’s Aquamarine (2001). The novella narrativizes mermaids’ twined applicability to girlhood and the environment while resisting Disneyfied depictions of wish fulfillment. Although Hoffman actively distances her fisht...

"Come Together" is the first track on Abbey Road (The Beatles 1969), the last album the Beatles recorded. Our chapter reveals the song's competing dynamic of invitational playfulness and hope versus violence, dark desire, and disappoint­ment. We shall argue that an obscured distemper-a ghostly disease-suggests an off-color, failed pursuit of bliss...

The Beatles are known for cheeky punchlines, but understanding their humor goes beyond laughing at John Lennon’s memorable “rattle your jewelry” dig at the Royal Variety Performance in 1963. From the beginning, the Beatles’ music was full of wordplay and winks, guided by comedic influences ranging from rhythm and blues, British radio, and the Liver...

The Beatles are known for cheeky punchlines, but understanding their humor goes beyond laughing at John Lennon’s memorable “rattle your jewelry” dig at the Royal Variety Performance in 1963. From the beginning, the Beatles’ music was full of wordplay and winks, guided by comedic influences ranging from rhythm and blues, British radio, and the Liver...

The Beatles are known for cheeky punchlines, but understanding their humor goes beyond laughing at John Lennon’s memorable “rattle your jewelry” dig at the Royal Variety Performance in 1963. From the beginning, the Beatles’ music was full of wordplay and winks, guided by comedic influences ranging from rhythm and blues, British radio, and the Liver...

The Beatles are known for cheeky punchlines, but understanding their humor goes beyond laughing at John Lennon’s memorable “rattle your jewelry” dig at the Royal Variety Performance in 1963. From the beginning, the Beatles’ music was full of wordplay and winks, guided by comedic influences ranging from rhythm and blues, British radio, and the Liver...

The congruous timing of Taylor Swift’s and the Beatles’ 2021 multiplatform media is an occasion to investigate comparable generic storytelling strategies, especially as they related to gender. Identifying the melodramatic romance of Swift’s All Too Well opens up similar dimensions of the Beatles’ media narrative, especially as articulated in Paul M...

This chapter addresses the Beatles’ complex gendered and sexual appeal to audiences and the evolution of fan identification processes in the 1960s and beyond. The chapter unites the growing body of scholarship that treats issues of gender and sexuality in relation to the Beatles and their fans. After consideration of the theoretical difference betw...

This article explores the historical context, inspirations, and legacy of Paul McCartney's 1968 White Album song, “Blackbird.” We discover heretofore unexplored connections to the 1926 pop standard, “Bye Bye Blackbird,” as well as the potential for the Beatles' song to house a civil rights message, the nest McCartney tries to build for “Blackbird”...

The Beatles’ White Album is a musical expression of getting naked, revealing anxiety and doubt in songs that fetishize objects and role play while representing impotence and cuckolding. Anxiety and ambivalence about sexual performance track alongside other attitudes toward time, including nostalgia about the past and an ineffectual desire to move f...

Just as they did with musical innovation, once the Beatles mastered a fashion, they were on to the next one. The ability to change, to be "in the trend" rather than in front of or behind it, is a key factor in the sustained popularity of the Beatles and their cultural iconography. Whether they had matching suits or matching mustaches, the Beatles'...

This chapter outlines a "girls' studies" pedagogy for teaching Young Adult literature in the university/college classroom.

Bruce Springsteen's film noir-informed innovations on Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978) betray his effort to confront hard truths about powerlessness in working-class American culture. These are the same dark themes available in filmmaker David Lynch's contemporaneous 1970s output and that which followed in subsequent decades. Beginning with Spri...

In this chapter, we argue that Ella is a "make-do" girl, a discursive construction of girlhood that defies the "can-do"/ "at-risk" binary. The essay is organized around iconic tropes that the 2015 Cinderella borrows from Disney's 1950 animation: the introduction of orphaned Ella con­nected to nature and animals; the stepmother's villainy and stepsi...

This chapter considers the Beatles' ongoing appeals to girls and girl culture in 1967, when they are thought to have turned away from direct addresses to their girl fans. This is evidenced by a rhetorical analysis of the Sgt. Pepper, along with reception data from Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart and Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders. Fans of the Beatl...

The final chapter examines closure as a melodramatic device. Facilitated by supernatural coincidence and romantic, heterosexual couplings, the similar endings of Jane Eyre and the Twilight Saga reinforce the relationship between the nineteenth century and contemporary girl culture. The promise of a happy ending is a major point of appeal among girl...

This book examines melodramatic impulses in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga, as well as the series’ film adaptations and fan-authored texts. Attention to conventions such as crying, victimization, and happy endings in the context of the Twilight-Jane Eyre relationship reveals melodrama as an empowering mode of commu...

This chapter explores one of Paul McCartney’s most rhetorically effective appeals to United States audiences—his Romantic vision of racial harmony readily available in his mega-hit with Stevie Wonder, “Ebony and Ivory” (1982), as well as his collaboration with Michael Jackson in “Say, Say, Say” (1983). The idealism of those duets echoes into twenty...

The Beatles are probably the most photographed band in history and are the subject of numerous biographical studies, but a surprising dearth of academic scholarship addresses the Fab Four. New Critical Perspectives on the Beatles offers a collection of original, previously unpublished essays that explore 'new' aspects of the Beatles. The interdisci...

In the 1960s, those famous throngs of Beatlemaniacs screamed in their seats and chased after the Fab Four in the streets. But the Beatles continue to appeal to many contemporary girls, whose fandom is still expressed in public via the Web. To theorize the Beatles’ lasting popularity among female youth, this chapter first considers the Beatles’ rela...

Even Disney is bored with the prince. Snow White perched on a well, wishing he would come. Sleeping Beauty waited for his redemptive kiss to wake her up. Ariel traded voice and tail for the legs she hoped would get his attention. But instead of hanging on for a lipped-locked happily ever after with a charming man, twenty-first-century princesses Ra...

The relentless suffering of the melodramatic heroine opens up space for a critical examination of narrative structure in this chapter. Melodrama’s narrative form positions the heroine as an innocent persecuted by villainy; this narrative sequence continues to confirm frustration with powerless social positions. The chapter concludes by briefly cons...

This chapter makes a case for a theory of melodrama in girl culture, justifying the use of Twilight texts as a vehicle for the investigation. Beginning with Twilight’s relationship to Jane Eyre, the saga’s predecessor and most dominant intertext, I develop a definition of the distinctive nineteenth-century melodrama, which gave rise to a mode that...

This chapter continues to show how melodrama exposes postfeminist paradoxes related to female empowerment. In Jane Eyre and Twilight, nightmares and female vampire villains antagonize Jane’s and Bella’s psyches. In the cinematic saga, when this villainy is visualized on-screen, such gothic remnants are externalized in dramatic ways that make the cr...

Following a discussion of sexual agency vis-à-vis music, I explore the intimacy-building consequences of melodramatic confession, along with the agential nature of feelings. This chapter argues that moral feelings function as emotional agency, the consequence of confessional revelations that expose secret social taboos. Brontë’s and Meyer’s female...

As one of melodrama’s most vital expressions, music encourages empathy for a girl character’s desiring, but anxious heterosexual gaze. This chapter explores references to music in Jane Eyre and Twilight. In the literary texts, music simultaneously cues the protagonists’ insecurities and accentuates their sexual longings. Although Bella’s desire for...

Female villains who function as doubles for the protagonist are an empowering component of melodrama in girl culture—but so is crying. This chapter explores crying as melodrama’s most denigrated convention. Examining the form and function of suffering and tears in both Jane Eyre and the Twilight Saga shows how these melodramatic conventions validat...

This chapter introduces the concept of the powerless and victimized heroine in melodrama, situating the literary Jane Eyre and Bella Swan in their historical moments. When they recognize their own inadequacies, the protagonists’ self-consciousness is a response to restrictive discourses of “successful” Victorian and postfeminist girlhood. And as th...

This article explores the melodramatic expression of lesbian girlhood and teen romance in Disney's Tangled (2010) and Disney Pixar's Brave (2012), as well as "Meripunzel" femslash, fan-authored romantic pairings of the animations' female protagonists. First, Anne Sexton's poem, "Rapunzel," offers a literary precedent for exploring lesbian themes in...

I cried and curled up in my bed. I was so sad I didnt come out of my room all weekend. Then when I went back to school my friends said they did the same the thing. After I got over the shock I read on and cried when Bella saved him. I want to see new moon throught (sic) his POV Responding to Stephenie Meyer’s New Moon (2006) in an online discussion...

Using the Twilight Saga as a representative text, my chapter first explores con­tradictory depictions of female adolescent agency, particularly in the context of intimate relationships, in popular culture. Noting how Bella's conflicts speak to adolescent girlhood, I suggest Twilight addresses tensions consistent with other well-known depictions of...

This chapter explores how sound works along with filmic image in Hardwicke's Twilight, Weitz's New Moon, and Slade's Eclipse to position the viewer in relation to Bella's perspective. Of particular concern are the uses of voiceover as Bella's narration, an area illuminated by French scholar Michel Chion's work on cinematic sound. Ultimately, I sugg...