The second chapter, by Deborah Philips, entitled “Fifty Shades of Romance: The Intertextualities of Fifty Shades of Grey” examines the allegedly innovative publishing phenomenon by E.L. James considering its intertextual relation both with nineteenth-century romances and contemporary Mills and Boon novels which, Philips argues, clearly inspired James’s trilogy. Philips concludes that for all its apparent innovation, James’s novel continues to reinforce old structural patterns and ideologies already identified by feminist critics in the first wave of romance criticism. (19-20)
From the introduction to the volume: