As a field of scholarly inquiry, popular romance has long been such an ignored (at best) and maligned (at worst) genre that seemingly every scholarly work on it opens with a lengthy defence of, first, the genre itself, and, second, its value for academic study. This remains true even as the field expands and the body of research and analysis focused on popular romance steadily grows. I will make the same defense here, because we're not yet at the point where respect can be assumed. (1)
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Radway and Modleski, planting the seeds for scholarly inquiry into popular romance in the 1980s, established the frame of that study through an exclusively cultural lens and set up the genre as a field on which a duel between feminism and patriarchy played out.
This seems to have had the effect of locking romance into a solely cultural conversation, where individual novels and their writers and readers are little more than cogs in a cultural machine. This is merely the other side of the coin that declares romance to be "mass-produced," and each title churned out as if on an assembly line and conforming to a "tired and tiresome recipe." Radway and Modleski made a case for the significance of the genre but not for its texts. (2)
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As indie authors publish their work their way, and assign BISAC codes that identify their work as romance, and as readers are able to commune with each other online in large numbers and find likeminded fellow readers, a conversation - some might call it a conflict - has begun within the community of genre stakeholders focused on the question: must a love story end happily to be considered a romance? So far, most in the community say yes. Emphatically. But the very existence of that conversation, and of novels categorized as romance that bend, or outright flout, the HEA, suggests that there might someday be room for change on even this point (Barron) - and that would be a sea change of tsunami magnitude. (7)
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