Romance Fiction and American Culture

William A. Gleason is Professor of English at Princeton University, USA, and Eric Murphy Selinger is Professor of English at DePaul University, USA.

Since the 1970s, romance novels have surpassed all other genres in terms of popularity in the United States, accounting for half of all mass market paperbacks sold and driving the digital publishing revolution. Romance Fiction and American Culture brings together scholars from the humanities, social sciences, and publishing to explore American romance fiction from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first century. Essays on interracial, inspirational, and LGBTQ romance attend to the diversity of the genre, while new areas of inquiry are suggested in contextual and interdisciplinary examinations of romance authorship, readership, and publishing history, of pleasure and respectability in African American romance fiction, and of the dynamic tension between the genre and second wave feminism. As it situates romance fiction among other instances of American love culture, from Civil War diaries to Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks, Romance Fiction and American Culture confirms the complexity and enduring importance of this most contested of genres.

Bringing together scholars from the humanities, social sciences and publishing, this collection adds historical depth and specificity to the American cultural history of twentieth- and twenty-first-century popular romance fiction. The contributors examine the genre's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century contexts, the relationships between love and race, the emergence of LGBTQ romance, the dynamic tension between romance fiction and second-wave feminism, and the practical and rhetorical aspects of the romance industry.

Table of contents to come.