The present chapter aims at getting to grips with the rise in contemporary erotic bestsellers by exploring the question of whether the tremendous success of EL James’s Fifty Shades can not only be considered an inspirational source for other authors but may have led to a newly emerging genre.
In doing so, novels that were related to Fifty Shades were taken into account by examining the network of Fifty Shades of Grey-purchases on Amazon. This analysis of meta data allowed for the identification of books that readers who bought Fifty Shades were likely to purchase as well. Based on a discussion of the shared structural, thematic and functional features of these novels, this chapter argues in favour of a newly emerging subgenre of the schematic romance in the aftermath of Fifty Shades – referred to as Erotic Romance. Based on the results of the present chapter, Erotic Romances seem to represent a combination and exaggeration of elements that are also present in different highly emotional forms of fiction, namely in (schematic) romances, in literary erotica close to pornography, as well as in (schematic) thriller and crime novels.
Kraxenberger's focus on Fifty Shades and novels published after it is problematic given that, as noted in the abstract of Jodi McAllister's chapter in The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction, "erotic romance" is "a literary category whose history has been largely ignored in the wake of the Fifty Shades-phenomenon."
Here's the abstract:
Kraxenberger's focus on Fifty Shades and novels published after it is problematic given that, as noted in the abstract of Jodi McAllister's chapter in The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction, "erotic romance" is "a literary category whose history has been largely ignored in the wake of the Fifty Shades-phenomenon."