Kamblé’s chapter performs a metacriticism of the popular pillorying of romance through a survey of articles on the genre in popular print and other media. It documents how these fluff pieces create an image of the genre as lacking substance, focused on thoughtless sex, and written and read by silly women. She terms this journalism phenomenon a genre in itself, one that endlessly produces the “media romance.” (16)
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The twentieth-century discourse bemoaning romance fiction’s promiscuity and weaknesses (i.e., its lack of fidelity to any literary standards in favor of sexual frissons and sentiment) has appeared in newspapers, magazines, television, and movies, starting as early as the 1930s [...]. Gradually, this condemnation of romance fiction through parody has taken on a life of its own. It has become its own genre—the “Media Romance,” a fantastic combination of sexual comedy and literary tragedy. (269)
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To start, the chapter surveys a range of popular representations of romance fiction in print and audio-visual media and documents how the genre’s appearance becomes a springboard from which news, magazine, television, and movie writers (and some academics) have insisted on or alluded to its allegedly formulaic content without making much effort to research a fair sample of texts. Their dependence on the clichéd novel covers as forensic evidence of silly plots and overblown prose creates the parodic Media Romance. It is a maneuver through which the cover, a paratextual sign that means carnal and emotional love to romance readers, is mythologized into a new sign: intellectual vapidity and infantilized sexual desire. (270)
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Television shows (and movies), the poor cousins of literary fiction, often attempt to erase some of the stigma of being lightweight narratives by mocking other mass-market forms—even more so if they share a thematic similarity. This critique differs somewhat from that in the print media cited earlier, where the Media Romance emerges out of a belief that they have a duty to uphold cultural standards and keep out the lowbrow. But other media forms—CNN news magazines, sitcoms, movies—hope to show themselves in a better light by using familiar signifiers to disparage the genre. (282)
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The chapter closes with a discussion of scholarship which has focused on romance novels' paratextual elements (mostly cover art).
From the introduction to the volume:
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The chapter closes with a discussion of scholarship which has focused on romance novels' paratextual elements (mostly cover art).