Description
Book Synopsis In the twenty-first century, the romance genre has gained a growing academic response, including the creation of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance. Popular romance has long been so ignored and maligned that seemingly every scholarly work on it opens with a lengthy defense of the genre and its value for academic study. Even the early scholarly works on the genre approach it in ways that, while primarily respectful, make sweeping generalizations about popular romance, its texts, and its readers.
This essay collection examines the position of the romance genre in the twenty-first century, and the ways in which romance responds to and influences the culture and community in which it exists. Essays are divided into six sections, which cover the genre''s relationship with masculinity, the importance of consent, historical romance, representation, social status and web-based romance fiction.
Table of ContentsIntroduction—Popular Romance in the 21st Century: Time to Claim Its
Susan Fanetti
Part One: Problematic Masculinities
Healing Toxic Masculinity in Sweatpants Season by Danielle Allen
Jonathan A. Allan
From Darcy to Dickheads: Why Do Women Love the Bad Boy?
Ashleigh Taylor Sullivan
Part Two: Navigating Consent After #MeToo
Tingles and Shivers: First Kisses and Intimate Civility in Eliza Redgold's Historical Harlequin Romances Pre–and Post-#MeToo
Debra Dudek, Elizabeth Reid Boyd, Madalena Grobbelaar, and Rose Williams
I Thought You'd Never Ask: Consent in Contemporary Romance
Courtney Watson
Part Three: History and Historicity
"Say, could that lass be I?" Outlander, Transmedial Time-Travel, and Women's Historical Fantasy
Ashley Elizabeth Christensen
"Place the glass before you, and draw in chalk your own picture": The Recasting of Jane Eyre
Lucy Sheerman
Part Four: Representation Matters
"The Realness" in Jasmine Guillory's Sista Lit Rom Com Novels
Camille S. Alexander
Eating Disorders and Romance
Ellen Carter
The "Grandly and Inhospitably Strange" World of Autistic Heroines in Romance Fiction
Wendy Wagner
Part Five: Romance Tropes and Social Status
Women Policing Whiteness: Deviance and Surveillance in Contemporary Police Procedural Romance
Nattie Golubov
"I'm a mehfil, I'm a gathering to which everyone is invited": Reading "Outcast" Romances in Arundhati Roy's Fiction
Lucky Issar
Part Six: Romance Tropes in Online Spaces
The System That Loves Me: The State of Human Existence in Web-Based Romantic Fiction from Post-Socialist China
Jin Feng
Original Slash, Romance, and C.S. Pacat's Captive Prince
Maria Alberto
About the Contributors
Index
