Romance in modern times is the most widely read yet the most
critically despised of genres. Associated almost entirely with
women, as readers and as writers, its popularity has been argued by
gender traditionalists to confirm women's innate sentimentality,
while feminist critics have often condemned the genre as a
dangerous opiate for the female masses. This study adopts the more
positive perspective of critics such as Janice Radway, and takes
seriously the pleasure that women readers consistently seem to find
in romance. Drawing on the social constructionist feminism of
Simone de Beauvoir, the psychoanalytical theories of Jessica
Benjamin, and a range of social theorists from Bourdieu to Zygmunt
Bauman, the book uncovers the history of romantic fiction in France
from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, and
explores its place in women's lives and imaginations. Romance is
not defined - as it usually is - solely in terms of its mass-market
form. Rather, the history of women's popular fiction is traced in
its full context, as one dimension of a literary story that
encompasses the mainstream or 'middlebrow' as well as 'high'
culture. Thus this study ranges from the formula romance (from the
pious but popular Delly to global brand Harlequin), through
'middlebrow' bestsellers like Marcelle Tinayre, Francoise Sagan,
Regine Deforges, to critically esteemed stories of love in the work
of such authors as Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Elsa Triolet, and
Camille Laurens. Criss-crossing the boundaries of taste and class,
as well as those of sexual orientation, the romance has been at
times reactionary, at others progressive, utopian, and
contestatory. It has played an important part in the lives of
twentieth-century women, providing both a source of imaginative
escape, and a fictional space in which to rehearse and make sense
of identity, relationship, and desire.
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