The book was reviewed in The Guardian. An article on romantic fiction by Risbridger can be found here.
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This is not an exhaustive history of the romance novel. Nor is it even a comprehensive summary of the romance novels of now.
It is, if anything, a romance novel itself - or, at least, a love story. Maybe it's a love letter? If it's a love letter, it has a message-in-a-bottle quality: I'm flinging this out into the world hoping that it's going to wash up at exactly your feet. (1)
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it's impossible to think critically about romance novels - why we love them, why people hate them, why we write them, why we read them - without a feminist lens. To turn critical attention on romantic fiction is, I hope, a feminist act: to give these works, chiefly by and for women, the thoughtful and careful unpacking that other literatures might take for granted. Equally, it's impossible to credibly call yourself any kind of feminist while dismissing romantic fiction. (7-8)
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If love is the most important thing, and to me it was and is, I want books that think that too.
I want books that know love is enormous and vital and frightening, love is always frightening, because love is always the same shape as loss. Love is the same shape as loss, and desire has the same all-consuming hunger as death. (22)
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It isn't exactly that all romance novels have to have a happy ending. It's just that the ones I love mostly do. And it seems, too, that we're in a happy ending phase of romantic fiction right now.
We probably won't always be. In the past it was fashionable for romantic fiction to end badly and sadly and weepily, but perhaps the world was less bleak then. (24)
I don't think this is actually an "academic" book, but I thought I'd create an entry in case it's along the same lines as Rachel Anderson's The Purple Heart Throbs: The Sub-Literature of Love or Mary Cadogan's And Then Their Hearts Stood Still: An Exuberant Look at Romantic Fiction Past and Present.
The book was reviewed in The Guardian. An article on romantic fiction by Risbridger can be found here.
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