This article explores the construction of the self in romance fiction written today and argues for a reading of romance and selfhood through a negativist lens, suggesting that romance is best understood as participating in the relational selfhood as the means by which happily-ever-afters are achieved. To that end, this article first surveys broad approaches to reader-centric scholarship of the romance from Janice Radway to the present and concludes that such scholarship understands the romance as working to build or construct a sense of social self for its characters and readers. This article argues that this understanding, while foundational to the field and useful in its own moment, face problems as the genre evolves in the present. Sketching some queer theoretical approaches to problems of identity from which this article takes its cues, this article then offers a negativist alternative. To that end, this article explores the negativist, disruptive potential for selfhood through romance fiction either disseminated on or written about the internet, and explores how the negativist lens evades the theoretical problems discussed earlier. Finally, this article concludes by offering a close reading of the 2020 novel The Love Study by Kris Ripper as a case in which a romance novel featuring the internet deconstructs its hero's selfhood to enable his happily-ever-after.
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I now argue that contemporary romance—specifically, internet-oriented romance fiction—tends to take up as a central thematic concern the unbuilding of selfhood on the part of both the reader and characters within the fiction. [...] By unbuilding, I do not mean something as literal as suicide nor something as radical as complete ego death, but instead gesture at a disruption of a stable self-identity with stable and inviolable borders. The purpose I see such disruption of the self and its borders serving is intimately bound up with the ending all proper romances share: “In a romance, the lovers who risk and struggle for each other and their relationship are rewarded with emotional justice and unconditional love” (Romance Writers). The process of unbuilding the self in a romance, I argue, enables that reward by unbuilding those aspects of relational selfhood that preclude union with another person.
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The two primary methods of disrupting the self I’ve observed in this section are: first, the subversion of archetypes (especially gendered archetypes) on which the positivist view of romance depends, and so the creation of space for different kinds of characters to connect with each other in meaningful ways in the absence of traditional divisions; and second, by encouraging participants to lean into a transindividualist ethic wherein stories emerge as part of an interpretive and narrative process, a negotiation with other participants in a story.
Here's the abstract:
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