Category: Book Reviews

Romance comic books had already become popular by the time that Ogden Whitney started contributing to them. The genre appeared when Jack Kirby and Joe…

Markert’s work focuses on the history of romance publishing in an American context, from a business perspective. His research, explained in a modest “Methodological Note,”…

“When it comes to sexuality in the disabled, dismissal is apt to turn into outright repression” states Nancy Mairs in her essay Sex and the Gimpy…

Amish romances became a part of the mainstream romance industry with the commercial success of Beverly Lewis’ 1997-1998 trilogy The Heritage of Lancaster County (Cordell…

In Love, Inc., Laurie Essig stakes the claim that “romance is a privatized solution to what in fact are structural and global matters” because it…

Catherine Roach’s book-length scholarly exploration, Happily Ever After: The Romance Story in Popular Culture (2016), is partly a memoir, partly scholarly analysis, and all a…

Faye Halpern’s monograph, Sentimental Readers: The Rise and Fall of a Disparaged Rhetoric, re-examines sentimentality and the sentimental novels of nineteenth-century America. This re-examination structures…

In Beth Driscoll’s The New Literary Middlebrow, she re-examines both the term middlebrow as well as its surrounding cultural practices in our contemporary moment. While…

The Trouble with Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power by David Shields is, in some ways, a lengthy meditation on marriage, being…

More than two decades ago, chick lit was proclaimed the newest subgenre of romance, considered by some writers and critics so defiant of genre conventions…