1st Edition
Romance Fiction and American Culture Love as the Practice of Freedom?
Since the 1970s, romance novels have surpassed all other genres in terms of popularity in the United States, accounting for half of all mass market paperbacks sold and driving the digital publishing revolution. Romance Fiction and American Culture brings together scholars from the humanities, social sciences, and publishing to explore American romance fiction from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first century. Essays on interracial, inspirational, and LGBTQ romance attend to the diversity of the genre, while new areas of inquiry are suggested in contextual and interdisciplinary examinations of romance authorship, readership, and publishing history, of pleasure and respectability in African American romance fiction, and of the dynamic tension between the genre and second wave feminism. As it situates romance fiction among other instances of American love culture, from Civil War diaries to Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, Romance Fiction and American Culture confirms the complexity and enduring importance of this most contested of genres.
Biography
William A. Gleason is Professor of English at Princeton University, USA, and Eric Murphy Selinger is Professor of English at DePaul University, USA.
"Gleason and Selinger's collection provides useful infomation on various aspects of the romance field and is suitable for those looking for an overview of the field of romance scholarship - the introduction, in particular, provides a concise overview. The ssays, which provide deep insight on individual writers, identity groups, and aspects of the industry, can be selected to accompany other course reasing or enhance research." -- Jessica Van Slooten, Uniersity of Wisconsin, Resources for Gender and Women's Studies: A Feminist Review
