This study approaches popular romance novels on the manifest level at which they are written and read. Using textual examples ranging from the nineteenth century to the present, personal interviews, and nonliterary texts such as reader magazines and websites, it explores romance reading strategies and readers' thought processes. Looking at the texts as the readers do and taking them seriously as novels—in terms of plot, language, and characterization—can provide a remarkably rich and complex psychosocial reading of female experience in our culture.
Chapter 1 gives a brief introduction and overview of the genre. Chapter 2 examines how the reader community has developed through the use of structural conventions, such as formulaic plot and language. Although the highly stylized nature of these elements is the chief target of the genre's detractors, the use of “predictable plot” and “purple prose” is one of the romance's most deliberate and important constructions. Chapter 3 explores the relationship between the romance writer, the heroine, and the reader, suggesting the symbiotic nature of the romance trinity: one element is always constructing another. By confronting this array of female identities, I posit that the romance articulates feminist principles more fully than is generally acknowledged: its concentration on female experience and the quest for fulfillment in patriarchal culture suggests important negotiations for both the writer and the reader. Chapter 4 suggests that the romance's portrayal of female sexual fulfillment in particular is (and has always been) its most radical message. By looking at the development of the narrative and linguistic strategies used to describe sexual experience in the romance, we can trace women's response to their own sexual and political liberation. Finally, Chapter 5 examines the romance's elaborate descriptions of material wealth and narratives of class mobility. This element of the romance is perhaps its most problematic, as issues of gender and capitalism—such as virginity as a commodity—continue to be worked out in the genre.
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