The Grotesque and the Gothic: The Literary Lineage from Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio” to Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight”

This article provides an analysis of the conceptual and thematic resonances between Sherwood Anderson’s modernist masterpiece, “Winesburg, Ohio” (1919), and Stephenie Meyer’s vampire novel, “Twilight” (2005). Moving beyond the premise of direct influence, it argues that Meyer’s work inhabits and reinterprets a tradition of American small-town literature fundamentally shaped by Anderson. The exploration is deepened across four key areas: the small town as a crucible of isolation and secrecy; the adolescent protagonist as a central consciousness; the modernist “grotesque” reconfigured as the supernatural outcast; and the thematic preoccupation with repressed desire and the struggle for communication. By examining these intricate parallels, this article demonstrates how “Twilight” functions as a contemporary, gothic-inflected iteration of the existential and social anxieties that Anderson first mapped onto the American psychological landscape.