Feminist Irony or Poisonous FANTASY?: Category Romance and the Conscious Reader

Publication year
1992
Pages
165-178
Comment

In "Romance Fiction" (2002) Kay Mussell, writing in The Greenwood Guide to American Popular Culture (volume IV), states of this article by Margolis that:

Examining category romances of the mid-1980s, Harriet Margolis argues in "Feminist Irony or Poisonous FANTASY?: Category Romance and the Conscious Reader" that emerging romances exhibited far more feminist notions than many critics assumed. She suggests that these changes were largely a product of reader preferences and that readers were developing a more self-conscious and sometimes ironic view of romance conventions that made them more perceptive critics and more selective consumers of the fiction. (Mussell, "Romance Fiction", 1576)