Romance Fiction and American Culture: Love as the Practice of Freedom?

Description

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. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of Figures Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction: Love as the Practice of Freedom? Part I Popular Romance and American History 1 Pamela Crosses the Atlantic; or, Pamela Andrews’s Story Inaugurates the American Romance Novel 2 “He Filled My Heart with Doubt”: The Southern Belle’s Love and Duty in the Civil War 3 Postbellum, Pre-Harlequin: American Romance Publishing in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century 4 “I’m Not the Only Lesbian Who Wears a Skirt”: Lesbian Romance Fiction and Identity in Post–World War II America 5 Strange Stirrings, Strange Yearnings: The Flame and the Flower, Sweet Savage Love, and the Lost Diversities of Blockbuster Historical Romance 6 Scripting Black Love in the 1990s: Pleasure, Respectability, and Responsibility in an Era of HIV/AIDS Part II Romance and Race 7 Kara Walker: American Romance in Black and White 8 Love Prevailed Despite What American History Said: Agape and Eros in Beverly Jenkins’s Night Song and Through the Storm 9 Flipping the Script: Romancing Zane’s Urban Erotica Conseula Francis 10 Orientalism, Freedom, and Feminism in Popular Romance Culture 11 Saving China: The Transformative Power of Whiteness in Elizabeth Lowell’s Jade Island and Katherine Stone’s Pearl Moon Part III Art and Commerce 12 Henry James’s “The Velvet Glove” and the Iron Fist: Transatlantic Cultural Exchange and the Romance Tradition 13 Branding a Genre: A Brief Transatlantic History of Romance Novel Cover Art 14 Love the Market: Discourses of Passion and Professionalism in Romance Writing Communities 15 When I Paint My Masterpiece: Bob Dylan, Ekphrasis, and the Art of Susan Elizabeth Phillips Part IV Happy Endings 16 “Jesus loves your girl more than you do”: Marriage as Triangle in Evangelical Romance and Puritan Narratives 17 Christian Romance Novels: Inspiring Convention and Challenge 18 Love as the Practice of Bondage: Popular Romance Narratives and the Conundrum of Erotic Love 19 Queer Romance in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century America: Snapshots of a Revolution 20 Having it Both Ways; or, Writing from the Third Perspective: The Revolutionary M/M/F Ménage Romance Novel Index