This paper examines a corpus of English-language threesome or ménage romances in the subgenre of erotic romance in a digital format targeted to adult audiences. The most striking feature of these powerful literary texts aimed at titillating and pleasuring readers is their reliance on repetition as the ground rule of romance. The titles studied here all recycle certain well-known elements of e-romance, such as alternating first-person narration (or, alternatively, internally focalised third-person), wealthy love partner, and heightened erotic tension, but they also bring in the added element of multi-partner romance instead of pornography's focus on the act of sex alone. While these threesome romances highlight strongly erotic scenarios and explicit sex scenes, they do not satisfy themselves with merely sex, but also feature a deeply romantic, consensual and committed relationship forming between the female protagonist and her two male suitors. (46)
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The first part of my discussion focuses on the basic trappings of threesome stories as a subgenre of the New Adult romance, after which I move on to discussing a close reading of one of the novels in an effort to highlight the typical mechanics of this form of digital literature, where the format is crucial to its make-up. My final remarks draw together my discussion and consider what this might mean overall for the act of reading, which, based on my analysis, emerges as both sexual in its own right as well as regulated by the digital format. (47)
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you do not just jump into a threesome without establishing common ground. In pornography, such a move would be possible, but not in erotic romance fiction. The rules of the genre, in other words, require this back and forth told in alternating first person narrative perspective (or alternatively, third person omniscient), which ascertains that each party relates their thoughts straight to the reader without leaving out any of the relevant angles out of the figuration. (53)
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Questions like “opacity” or “gap-filling” which Leech & Short mentioned as factors of the writer and reader’s creativity alike (Leech/Short 2007: 24), actually seem to have little function in contemporary popular romance writing. Readers are not expected to be creative, but rather, the texts are transparent in revealing what they need to communicate for the reader to be safe to enjoy themselves. Readers are served by the text and nothing is hidden. (54)
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