‘Like a Spotlight Was Trained on Me’: Breaking Dawn and the Twilight of Capitalism

Abstract

This article reads Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer in relation to the emergent 24/7 expectation of postmodern capitalism. The novel’s focus on sleeplessness and illumination, on sparkle and consumerism, points to a contemporaneous engagement with new modalities of twenty-first-century consumption and production. Consequently, the novel’s redefinition of the vampire as posthumanist warrior-consumer is merely the latest iteration of the connection of the otherness of vampirism to the mobility of capital.