A love story with a happy ending, the romance novel is as old as the form of the novel itself. The modern romance novel emerged with Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740), and scholars have studied the relationships of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century romance novels with imperialism, Orientalism, and anti-sentimental modernism. The popular romance novel, a mass-market form predominantly written by and for women, is a twentieth-century phenomenon. Critiqued by feminist thinkers, it has responded to changing social and sexual mores, and with the advent of digital publishing, it has proliferated and diversified, with an equal diversity of scholarship beginning to emerge.
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