The article focuses on the often overlooked literary potential of romance novels compared to other genres like mysteries and science fiction. Topics include the societal perception of romance novels, the philosophical critique of Western literary values, and a detailed analysis of Maureen Bronson's "Delta Pearl" within the framework of Jantzen's poetics of natality.
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According to philosopher Grace M. Jantzen, “a constitutive feature of the western symbolic is a preoccupation with death and, with it, a longing for other worlds.” She further claims that “it is this obsession with death, largely suppressed, which is acted out in the violent and death-dealing structures of modernity, structures of violence which have been well-learned from our classical past” (Jantzen 2004, 5). More will be said about this later, but this symbolic may account for what forms of fiction have been accorded the status of “literature” throughout history—and account for what forms of literature are now regarded as merely escapist genre fiction for a socially marginalized sex. As will be seen, the typical romance novel plot offers a contrast to the “western symbolic” and its preoccupation with death. In fact, particularly insightful romance novels exhibit what Jantzen calls a “poetics of natality,” or a reconfiguration of origins and ends that, as philosopher Maxwell Kennel succinctly summarizes, “requires a focus on life here and now, against the dissociative desire to seek refuge in other abstract, transcendent, or eternal worlds” (Kennel 2023, 163). (27-28)
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