Category: Book Reviews

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…

In this compilation of a series of his talks, feminist philosopher Tom Digby seeks to demonstrate that war-reliant societies are steeped in “cultural militarism,” one…

Romantic love and the religion of Islam have often been combined in western popular fiction to create the necessary element of the “exotic.” This is…

New Directions in Popular Fiction is an omnifocal deep dive into specific histories, genres, locations, and formats within the scope of popular fiction publishing. The…

Scholarship into the culture of romantic love has tended to put an emphasis on defining the constitutive elemental concepts (culture and romantic love) and answering…