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The nineteenth-century fashionable novel has a number of parallels to the Regency romance novel, including its painstaking attention to verisimilitude and material detail, enduring popularity with women readers, poor reputation as formula literature, and scornful reception by critics and scholars. [...] My own experience in reading popular literature confirms the durability and specificity of the Regency image[...].
Andrew Elfenbein finds another parallel in the production values of silver fork novels and category romance, noting, "Like today's Harlequin romances, silver fork novels assimilated the mentality of the assembly-line to artistic production. One novel virtually identical to the next poured from Colbum's presses.'" [...]
Despite these similarities, the fashionable novel and the popular romance are not identical or even closely related. It appears that the association is usually made to indicate a negative judgment, as scholars make little attempt to hide their disdain for romance. (146)
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The problem with the identification of the fashionable novel with romance is not simply a matter of distinguishing between genres; the comparison has become a kind of shorthand for critical disparagement, conjuring up the negative adjectives most commonly hurled at popular romance — formulaic, trite, antifeminist, mass-produced, commodified. The fashionable novel currently labors under a number of burdens: the pejorative tag of "silver fork," the poor reputation bestowed by critics like Hazlitt and Carlyle, the association with notoriously unscrupulous publishers like Henry Colburn, the paucity of representative texts in print, the inaccessibility of primary texts (most of which reside in rare book rooms and microfiche drawers), and the limited scholarship available on the genre and its writers (much of which lies buried in period studies and biographies of more canonical authors). Although growing interest in the fashionable novel is remedying this last difficulty, the genre should not be further handicapped by a misleading identification with another marginalized and frequently vilified category of popular literature. (150)
EBSCOhost does not give a direct url accessible without a login but the identification number there is AN 32181214.
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