Happily Ever After
The Romance Story in Popular Culture
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- USD 9.99
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- USD 9.99
Descripción editorial
"Find your one true love and live happily ever after." The trials of love and desire provide perennial story material, from the Biblical Song of Songs to Disney's princesses, but perhaps most provocatively in the romance novel, a genre known for tales of fantasy and desire, sex and pleasure. Hailed on the one hand for its women-centered stories that can be sexually liberating, and criticized on the other for its emphasis on male/female coupling and mythical happy endings, romance fiction is a multi-million dollar publishing phenomenon, creating national and international societies of enthusiasts, practitioners, and scholars. Catherine M. Roach, alongside her romance-writer alter-ego, Catherine LaRoche, guides the reader deep into Romancelandia where the smart and the witty combine with the sexy and seductive to explore why this genre has such a grip on readers and what we can learn from the romance novel about the nature of happiness, love, sex, and desire in American popular culture.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Roach (Stripping, Sex, and Popular Culture) looks at romance as "the prime cultural narrative of the modern Western world," but quickly narrows her focus to a study of romance fiction, in part to explain her own fascination with the genre. The first third of the book establishes Roach as a "critical engag e" with the questions raised by these books, and later chapters focus on her alternate career as published romance author Catherine LaRoche (Knight of Love) an experiment in hands-on research that turned out to be a "bucket of fun." The chapters that address the themes of romance fiction are light on analysis of contemporary books but heavy on defending the genre against claims that it lacks realism and diversity. Roach explores the central conundrums of the romance novel as both "deep truth and wish-fulfilling illusion," resolving "the problem of female desire in a patriarchal world" by imagining conclusions "where women are whole, safe, loved, sexually fulfilled, respected, in control of their choices, and happy." Her generous affection for the genre takes the teeth out of her hard critical questions, but Roach's attempt to do emotional justice to the genre should satisfy academics and fans alike.
