Here's a brief description from the introduction to the volume:
With "'On Thursdays We Shoot': Guns and Gender Binaries in Regency Romance[] Novels", Johanna Kluger reveals how the shooting woman breaks down the strict division between men's and women's spheres in the gendered world of the British Regency romance novel. (15)
And here are some quotes from the chapter:
The goal of this analysis is to understand the function of a shooting heroine within the context of the historical romance novel, specifically with regards to how she is perceived both by the audience and intradiegetically by the hero. How does a genre that is so focused on the female perspective present a heroine with a gun? What are the implications of a heroine who shoots for the construction of gender roles within the historical romance?
Tessa Dare's Spindle Cove series of historical romance novels, which consists of five full-length novels and several novellas published between 2011 and 2016, centres on the fictional village of Spindle Cove on the southern coast of England. For the sake of investigating representations of women, guns, and women wielding guns, I will focus on three of the books and therefore three sets of paired protagonists specifically: A Night to Surrender's Bram and Susanna, A Week to be Wicked's Colin and Minerva, and Do You Want to Start a Scandal's Piers and Charlotte. (163)
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as I will show, the shooting heroine is a part of a broader trend within the historical romance that is closely tied to the subgenre's balancing act between history and fantasy. (164)
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especially when reading a cohesive series like Spindle Cove where the characters are all connected, it becomes apparent that while the heroine is not only allowed but encouraged to break out of perceived gender roles, both "historical" and modern, she is not unfeminine. The hero never considers her to be too transgressively masculine and in fact often still specifically thinks of her womanly attributes when he considers his attraction to her - her figure, her softness, her submission to his strength or experience, while the heroine considers him in terms of both physical and sexual power. (173)
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The shooting woman [...] remains a historical fantasy that caters to contemporary tastes for escapism, a palatable challenge to an ostensibly long-defeated system of patriarchy that romance readers in the 21st century can comfortably enjoy without having to confront the constraints of their own lived reality. (178)
Here's a brief description from the introduction to the volume:
And here are some quotes from the chapter:
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