See the final two chapters, although they don't discuss genre romance very much. The chapter on "Modern Romance" has as its main focus Jane Rule's Desert of the Heart (1964), which is definitely a love story, and could be considered to have a HFN ending, but Pearce chose it precisely because it she saw it as "very determinedly a love story without an ending [...] this refusal of a happy ending predicated upon a certain future [...] breaks the number one requirement of formula romance; furthermore, it refuses any notion of lasting self-fulfilment" (147). The final chapter takes as its central text Jeanette Winterson's The Passion.
Here are the chapter titles:
1. Introduction: The Alchemy of Love
2 Romance before the Eighteenth Century: The Gift of a Name
3 Courtship Romance: The Gift of Companionship
4 Gothic Romance: The Gift of Immortality
5 Wartime Romance: The Gift of Self-Sacrifice
6 Modern Romance: The Gift of Selfhood
7 Postmodern Romance: The Gift of the Fourth Dimension
See the final two chapters, although they don't discuss genre romance very much. The chapter on "Modern Romance" has as its main focus Jane Rule's Desert of the Heart (1964), which is definitely a love story, and could be considered to have a HFN ending, but Pearce chose it precisely because it she saw it as "very determinedly a love story without an ending [...] this refusal of a happy ending predicated upon a certain future [...] breaks the number one requirement of formula romance; furthermore, it refuses any notion of lasting self-fulfilment" (147). The final chapter takes as its central text Jeanette Winterson's The Passion.
Here are the chapter titles:
1. Introduction: The Alchemy of Love
2 Romance before the Eighteenth Century: The Gift of a Name
3 Courtship Romance: The Gift of Companionship
4 Gothic Romance: The Gift of Immortality
5 Wartime Romance: The Gift of Self-Sacrifice
6 Modern Romance: The Gift of Selfhood
7 Postmodern Romance: The Gift of the Fourth Dimension