The publication year is given inside the book as 2027, but it was released as an ebook in July 2026.
Here's the abstract:
Romancing Literature places literary fiction in dialogue with what it rejects — the feminine, the popular, and the romantic, disclosing deep-seated assumptions concerning artistic production and literary creation in relation to genre and gender.
The book explores how literary fiction articulates and defines itself through a dialectical relation with its others along both axes of genre and gender, revealing the seams separating it from, as well as connecting it, to them. It decenters the customary perspective grounded in literary fiction by investigating several works from the perspective of their interplay with other works categorized differently and diversely and by drawing theoretical resources from genre scholarship.
Romancing Literature builds on the movement to decolonize the university curriculum. Instead of focusing on (post)colonial relations of power, the book questions literary divides that reproduce and reinforce social distinctions between the masculine and the feminine as well as between the popular and the literary. It questions not only what we read but also how gender and genre hierarchies determine what counts as serious literature.
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The second essay reads Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018) in light of the narrative structure of the romance novel analyzed by Pamela Regis in A Natural History of the Romance Novel (2003). Normal People is a quintessentially current coming-of-age narrative that explores the romantic encounter and its effects upon the psyches and aspirations of two young people who experience the extraordinary luck (and misfortune?) of finding one another before becoming adults. [...]
By discussing the novel as a romance narrative, the essay argues for the importance and validity of a genre and the field of expertise attached to it – scholarship of the (popular) romance – that has developed, during the last decades, and especially since the beginning of the current century, important analytical tools for reading and understanding the representation of love in literary as well as popular narratives. Despite the undeniable revitalization generic forms of literature are currently undergoing, the romance – and its critics – tend to remain excluded from academic debates concerning such revival.
Hence, the essay seeks to make the field of literary fiction – and one of its most distinguished subgenres: the bildungsroman/coming-of-age form – and romance fiction – one of the least respected literary genres comprising the modern/contemporary spectrum of literary genres – dialogue with one another by analyzing the construction of love and romantic relationships in a current and composite narrative that incorporates elements borrowed from both genres. (13)
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The third essay [...] begins by discussing double-coded and dual-time narratives as postmodern literary “inventions.” After concisely illustrating the significant role A.S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990) played in establishing both forms in relation to the romance genre, the essay looks at Possession’s legacy in narratives that appropriated its narrative structure.
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The fourth essay discusses The Tearsmith ( Il Fabbricante di Lacrime), Erin Doom’s extraordinarily successful Young Adult romance novel published in 2021 to observe the current transnational movement of romantic tropes. The text unmistakenly refers to the Anglophone (Gothic) romantic literary tradition, with visibly detectable references to classic works such as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938).
The publication year is given inside the book as 2027, but it was released as an ebook in July 2026.
Here's the abstract:
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