The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance—the idea that anything is possible.

—RAY BRADBURY

I’m going to open an essay critical of simplification with a simple statement: Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight books are not teen books, or fantasy fiction. They’re Romances. And before you build a complex argument to that simple statement, please bear with me and I’ll clarify.

There is a nearly ubiquitous human tendency to reduce things to their simplest elements, and nowhere is this more evident than in discussing literary genre. It doesn’t matter what the genre is; they all get a reductionist beating from the simplicity stick sooner or later. Thus, Science Fiction becomes rockets, and ray guns, and robots. Fantasy becomes unicorns, and elves, and faeries. Mystery becomes trench coats, and bullets, and dames. And then there’s Romance. That genre, or at least the perception of it, has been simplified more than any other, reduced well past the hallmark creations and the original broad definitions to a single simple image: that of the ripped bodice.

Answers.com says a “bodice ripper” is “a work of popular fiction characterized by scenes of unrestrained romantic passion.” That pretty much sums it up. Books in this category have managed the near-impossible feat of being identifiable by the same iconic imagery, almost regardless of differences in plot and story. There is a chesty, muscular, long-haired (but clean-shaven) he-man, clutching an equally chesty, long-haired, exceptionally beautiful woman in a Scar-lett O’Hara dress. There is usually a moon present, and the  …