All the Right Reasons: Romance Fiction in the Public Library

In The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction (2021), Kristin Ramsdell states that:

Building on the defenses of the genre in Dangerous Men, Adventurous Women (1992), the essay anthology Krentz had edited at the start of the decade, “All the Right Reasons” outlines the evolution of the popular romance from the paperback dime novels or “penny dreadfuls” of the nineteenth and early twentieth century to the fully-fledged bestselling hardcovers of today and its ultimate recognition as a legitimate literary genre: one to be valued in its own right because, like the other genres of popular fiction, it “preserves the heroic traditions and affirms our core values and beliefs” (Krentz 165). A powerful, articulate argument for genre fiction as a whole and for romance in particular, “All the Right Reasons” was and remains an indispensable work of advocacy, and should be read by anyone serious about the genre. (385)