The popularity of romance fiction is such that it constitutes nearly one quarter of new paperback fiction printed in the world. Its success depends on its ability to reflect and articulate the reader's aspirations for a better life and stands at the same time as a testament to her alienation. This fresh look at the romantic fiction seeks to discover the reason for its appeal by combining analysis of the poetics of the genre with a study of the real reader's intervention.

A major new collection of essays examining the problems of representing the Holocaust in fiction. The essays assembled here deal with the relations between the discourses of fiction (or imaginative reconstruction), philosophy, historiography and theory; with the impact of different national contexts on representational strategies; with the 'idioms for the unrepresentable' evolved by contemporary novelists and playwrights and with the continuing centrality of notions of authenticity and legitimacy to writing which takes the Holocaust as its theme.