This project explores how the nineteenth-century marriage plot, beyond being merely a genre trope, functions as an affective narrative structure for readers, and, therefore, helps to emotionally transform readers into political actors. By evaluating key literary works alongside new theoretical viewpoints from affect, feminist, queer, and popular romance scholars, I identify how this neglected area of scholarship offers a compelling glimpse into why and how fiction shapes readers. Each chapter traces how the marriage plot engages emotionally with readers, beginning with Austen’s manipulation of the reader through free indirect discourse in Emma, through Gaskell’s deployment of point-of-view and the gaze in North and South, and in Middlemarch, Eliot’s expansion of the nineteenth-century conceptualization of intimacy through narrative catharsis. I conclude by demonstrating how current mass-market romance novels set in the nineteenth century continue this emotional and political work on contemporary readers. Drawing on archival letters from romance readers to authors, I examine how romance novels create transhistorical, affective ties between the political issues of the nineteenth century and the present day. I argue that love stories in the nineteenth century novel as well as in its modern descendent, the mass-market romance novel, transform the personal politics of readers by engaging their emotions and allowing them a space to imagine and shape more just futures.
The fifth chapter is about "Sensual Politics: Modern Romance Novel Reading, Historical Representation, and Affective Historical Memory."
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I argue that the nineteenth-century marriage plot and the mass market romance novel emotionally reorient readers toward their own romantic and sexual desires and their agency over these desires, and that this emotional transformation is inherently political for their everyday lives and communities. Reading love stories requires readers to engage emotionally and imaginatively: challenging their feelings, their positionality (interpersonally and communally), their sense of their own desires (both romantic and sexual), and their agency as desiring subjects. (2)
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I argue that mass-market historical romance novels seek to challenge and change modern readers’ imaginations and conceptions of the nineteenth century, specifically on issues of gender, sexuality, and race. (3)
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In “Sensual Politics: Modern Romance Novel Reading and Reimagination of the Victorian Past,” I demonstrate how contemporary mass-market romance novels set in the nineteenth century reimagine the past and reshaping present day readers’ affective memory of history. Through the assistance of the Romance Writers of America academic research grant, I was able to examine archival letters from romance novel readers to romance novelists and discover how fictional historical reimaginations impact readers’ conceptions of and emotional connections to the historical past. In particular, the archive revealed not only how readers learn about history from romance novels, but also how they emotionally engage with these representations of history as “real.” I call this connection across time and space where readers emotionally engage with the representations of the historical past affective historical memory. Readers of historical romance, whether the history is grounded in factual information or pure fantasy, use this affective historical memory to create ties to the past and the present. Hence, I argue that, despite popular conceptions of romance as mindless swill, romance novels in their reshaping of affective historical memory, seek to fashion political readers, actively engaged with issues of gender, race, and sexuality. Romance reading is markedly different from other genres and plots: it is based on the ideals of optimism, hope, and imagination. (30)
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In the end, my research found itself focused on three primary collections: the Pamela Daoust (aka Katharine Kincaid) Collection (a historical romance novelist primarily active in the late 1980s to late 1990s), the Dorothy Daniels Collection (a prolific best-selling author of historical gothic romances from 1965 to 1975), and finally the collection of issues of Romantic Times (1981-2018), romance genre magazine and newsletter, which featured letters from readers on a semi-regular basis. Given these limitations, rather than a quantitative approach to the collections of the BPCL, mine is qualitative. Simply put, I am more concerned about what romance novel readers had to say to their favorite authors rather than the sheer volume of letters, or in evaluating the fan comments compared to the text of the novels, many of which are out of print. (128)
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These letters depict readers trying to emotionally grapple with the violent reality of history presented, perhaps even in minimized form, by their romances. In fact, many of the letters were from fans of Daoust’s historical romances about Native Americans (the “Indian Romance” was a popular genre in the 1990s) who remarked on how their perceptions on Westward expansion had changed. Even though some letters adopt a sense of sympathetic, timeless universal humanism or an appeal to their faiths to understand the plight of marginalized groups, other letter writers seem much more politically aware, particularly noting the ongoing injustices toward Native Americans. (141-142)
Here's the abstract:
The fifth chapter is about "Sensual Politics: Modern Romance Novel Reading, Historical Representation, and Affective Historical Memory."
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