This comprehensive collection of original essays on popular romance fiction delivers on the promise of its title. The succinct and insightful introductory essay by co-editors…
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In the introduction to Women and Romance: A Reader, Susan Ostrov Weisser inquires whether romantic love weakens or empowers women. “Is it a debilitating illusion,…
Comments closedAs Barbara Fuchs acknowledges in the first line of Romance, “romance is a notoriously slippery category” (1). This compact book, part of Routledge’s New Critical…
Comments closedIt’s been almost a century since E. M. Hull’s Sheikh Ahmed ben Hassan made the brooding, hypersexual sheikh a central figure in Anglophone romance, first…
Comments closedPopular Romance Studies is a new enough field that the canon of relevant scholarship has yet to be established. The expansive, interdisciplinary nature of the…
Comments closedReview: For Love and Money: The Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills & Boon Romance, by Laura Vivanco
Nearly thirty years ago, Margaret Ann Jensen wrote Love’s $weet Return: The Harlequin Story (1984), perhaps the first full-length academic study of category romance fiction.…
Comments closedLynn Neal’s book Romancing God: Evangelical Women and Inspirational Fiction is an important book for scholars of popular romance, even if they never intend to…
Comments closedWhenever I write about the romantic comedy film genre, I start by underlining the absence of adequate academic references, especially regarding contemporary films. Fortunately, during…
Comments closedTen years ago, when I was seeking a publisher for the book manuscript that would eventually become Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual…
Comments closedReview: Virgin Territory: Representing Sexual Inexperience in Film, edited by Tamar Jeffers McDonald
The scholarship on virginity is surprisingly sparse for a subject so ubiquitous in cultural narratives and so rich in interpretative possibilities. Apart from two general…
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