Gaily Ever After: Neo-Victorian M/M Genre Romance for the Twenty-First Century

Publication year
2020
Journal
Neo-Victorian Studies
Volume
13.1
Pages
242-269
Comment

The DOI was not working at the time I entered it, but it seemed the journal was in the process of entering DOIs, so I have included it here in the hope that it will work later.

Here's the abstract:

This article examines the subgenre of M/M (gay) genre romance set in the nineteenth century, focusing on a corpus of 2017 to 2018 novels as well as shorter works by authors K.J. Charles and Cat Sebastian. Their writings are rooted in the legacy of Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances and the history of M/M romance, a recent genre which owes as much to digital fanfiction as it does to queer publishers in the 1960s and 1970s. I explore the idea of a queer Happily Ever After as a topos and telos that allows the narratives to re-write the past through creating a happy queer ‘archive’, while also engaging critically with the representation of marginalised gender, sexual,and racial identities. Although there are problematic aspects to these portrayals, I posit that the passionate community of romance readers and writers shows a popular, affective, and truly neo-Victorian engagement with the nineteenth century.