The romance novel, as a genre, has been unjustly ignored or unwisely underestimated by many critics out of prejudice and/or ignorance even though it has been extensively admired by readers. This paper focuses on two contemporary American romance novels: It Ends With Us (2016) and its sequel It Starts With Us (2022) by Colleen Hoover. This paper defends this genre, refuting the two main claims established to denounce it: the unrealistic aspect of romance fiction and the familiarity of the plotline of it. In the light of the psychoanalytical and literary theory, this paper highlights how Hoover widens the parameters of the romance novel, creating a romance story which introduces realistic, psychological terms such as: love-bombing, gaslighting, silent treatment, and hoovering used by psychologists. Moreover, it inspects the unconventional resolutions of the plotlines of the two chosen novels. Hence, this paper fills in the gap of critical attention to a crucial genre as romance fiction and celebrates its essential significance.
I don't think I'd classify Hoover's It Ends With Us as a romance, since Hoover
ends It Ends With Us (2016) with a divorce between the two lovers Lily and Ryle which makes her romance writing lift above the accusation of HEA targeted at romance novels. Furthermore, in It Starts With Us (2022), Lily and Atlas’s marriage is not guaranteed as 100% percent successful. (62)
but that seems happy enough, and the article has a lot of discussion of the romance genre, so I'm including this.
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Hoover’s two chosen novels articulate the psychological terms: love-bombing, gas lighting, silent treatment, and hoovering which are part of abusive cycles as established by psychology. Many psychologists have pointed out love-bombing as a part of a cycle of abuse and as a kind of psychological manipulation which calls for excessive warning (Beri 26). A detailed presentation of the situations, which exemplify each psychological term, is furnished in Hoover’s novels as part of the plotline. These abusive cycles are also referred to as a trajectory of coercive control (CC) which is present in intimate relationships and usually starts with love-bombing as a means of CC and escalates to include gaslighting in its different ways, including, but not confined to, technology abuse (Rose et al. 195). Stark explains that CC involves repeated patterns of verbal, psychological, sexual, and technological abuse beside physical abuse. (62-63)
Here's the abstract:
I don't think I'd classify Hoover's It Ends With Us as a romance, since Hoover
but that seems happy enough, and the article has a lot of discussion of the romance genre, so I'm including this.
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