Popular romance novels are a twentieth- and twenty-first century literary form defined by a material association with pulp publishing, a conceptual one with courtship narrative, and a brand association with particular author-publisher combinations. The theme of romantic love in romance novels forms the basis of a drama involving the extra-private worlds of the protagonists (financial, civic, and familial). The framework of the romantic relationship allows the genre to study the challenges these spheres face over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A comprehensive look at the genre's history and diversity, as well as its reception in different readership communities, undergirds this analysis of three tropes involving the romance hero--capitalist, soldier, and heterosexual. The analysis proves the genre's struggle with an economic, political, and social ideology that has gathered force over the last hundred years. Though popular as well as academic critiques of the genre disparage its formulaic sexual content or its attachment to the ideology of middle class morality, its very nature as "commodity literature" helps challenge conservative thought on capitalism, national defense strategies, and sexual orientation. The dissertation also considers the impact of the dust jackets and paperback covers of romance novels on non-romance readers. A survey of this material history suggests that it has contributed to derogatory opinions on the genre; in particular, the genre has been indicted because of the "bodice-ripper" covers that adorn many romance novels rather than for the actual content. A look at reader and author discussions on the genre, alongside textual analysis of selected works, proves that romance fiction is not fixated on a clichéd plot and descriptions of sexual intercourse; it involves complex themes that are disguised as stereotypical genre elements. Readers' online debates demonstrate how this romance "formula," albeit a function of the genre's commodification, engages them in addressing quandaries related to societal preoccupations. The concluding study of romance reading in India further supports the possibility of multiple, even liberating, readings that can empower romance readers.
Readers and authors debate the divided identity of romance novels (as consumer product or literature) with intriguing regularity. The idea is pursued in an All About Romance board debate on the possible decline in the quality of historical romance novels over the last few years. (243)
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Laura V. and Robin, however, add that readers might be mistaken in believing that academia is the group that is most dismissive of romance novels. Robin, in fact, recalls that the friend who introduced her to the genre during her years at grad school is now an academic. (252)
I'm including this because I suspect that the Laura V. in question was me (I did post on the AAR message boards around this time as "Laura V").
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the HEA represents what Freud identifies as the life instinct in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. (256)
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The responses of all readers in this discussion (even the ones that only posted refusals to read novels without HEAs) reveal the real function of the genre’s attachment to the much disparaged “unrealistic” HEA: combating the fear of death and any challenge to marriage (the most prevalent social structure of human propagation, i.e., of immortality). In other words, these discussions are revealing the HEA to be an enactment of the life versus death instinct. As Freud explains, the former drives us toward pleasure and procreation, while the latter opposes or counters it; romance novels may be regarded as part of a cultural form that participates in the first (The Pleasure Principle (1920)). (259)
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The depiction of sexuality in romance novels has often led to the vilification of the genre and is another topic that is of particular interest to both readers and authors. In a long, dynamic multilog on the All About Romance board in 1997, readers both critiqued and defended the developments in the depiction of sexual desire in romances. (260)
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The desire for realism in language rests on the readers’ understanding that purple prose depictions of sexual encounters foster an unnecessarily obscurantic style; the style perpetuates an image of the genre as farcical. In perhaps a significant challenge to Radway’s observation that romance readers see language as transparent, these readers demonstrate a resistance to its mythologizing, though the resistance is based on their preference for realism. (269)
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As these various commentaries on fidelity, violence, sexual mechanics, sex talk, and gender representation demonstrate, readers on the AAR and the Avon Authors board subscribe to a shifting code of realism. (271)
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every few weeks see the beginning of a thread in which readers—and authors—discuss the attitudes of their friends, co-workers, family members, and others toward romance novels. The posts range from exasperation to resentment and from resignation to belligerence. These multilogs reflect readers’ experiences with the social perception of romance novels and provide participants communal reassurance about reading them. (274)
Here's the abstract:
I realise that the tags added here are rather limited. However, more detailed tags are provided for other works by Kamblé, including Making Meaning in Popular Romance Fiction: An Epistemology and "Branding a Genre: A Brief Transatlantic History of Romance Novel Cover Art" which draw on it. As far as I can tell, though, "Chapter Five: The Reading Public and Public Reading" (237-298) has not appeared in a different form, so I've added more tags which relate to it, and I'll include quotes from it below:
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I'm including this because I suspect that the Laura V. in question was me (I did post on the AAR message boards around this time as "Laura V").
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