Category: Book Reviews

“When it comes to sexuality in the disabled, dismissal is apt to turn into outright repression” states Nancy Mairs in her essay Sex and the Gimpy…

Amish romances became a part of the mainstream romance industry with the commercial success of Beverly Lewis’ 1997-1998 trilogy The Heritage of Lancaster County (Cordell…

In Love, Inc., Laurie Essig stakes the claim that “romance is a privatized solution to what in fact are structural and global matters” because it…

Catherine Roach’s book-length scholarly exploration, Happily Ever After: The Romance Story in Popular Culture (2016), is partly a memoir, partly scholarly analysis, and all a…

Faye Halpern’s monograph, Sentimental Readers: The Rise and Fall of a Disparaged Rhetoric, re-examines sentimentality and the sentimental novels of nineteenth-century America. This re-examination structures…

In Beth Driscoll’s The New Literary Middlebrow, she re-examines both the term middlebrow as well as its surrounding cultural practices in our contemporary moment. While…

The Trouble with Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power by David Shields is, in some ways, a lengthy meditation on marriage, being…

More than two decades ago, chick lit was proclaimed the newest subgenre of romance, considered by some writers and critics so defiant of genre conventions…

In Queer Experimental Literature, Tyler Bradway stakes the claim that ‘by eliciting uncritical affective responses in readers, queer experimental literature … strikes at the disembodied…

The literary fields of sociology, self-help, history, and popular culture have, for a long period, produced books about love and romance. The three titles above…