Publisher's Synopsis
This book is a study of the production and consumption of popular romance. It sets out to challenge the existing prejudices about "escapist literature" by exploring one of its most stigmatized forms: the fiction created by popular women writers. At the same time, it questions prevailing assumptions about the popular romance genre as being nothing more than a mode of collusion with patriarchy. Instead, the genre is assessed in terms of its historical origins and its wider ideological structures, or political unconscious.;Drawing on a content analysis of melodramatic romance of 1930s magazines, a feminist materialist approach to the works of Catherine Cookson, and an asssessment of recent bestselling romances of the 1970s and 1980s, Bridget Fowler suggests that the romance can be seen as the dream-book of the family, encoding in its more formulaic fictions, the symbolic annihilation of industrial capitalism through rural retreat or, in its newer versions, images of women as "idols of production", combining fulfilled love and entrepreneurial success.
