Romance fiction and American culture: love as the practice of freedom?

Since the 1970s, romance novels have surpassed all other genres in terms of popularity in the United States.

Apparently recession proof, they now account for half of all mass market paperbacks sold and generate a whopping $1.36 billion in yearly sales.

Bringing together scholars from the humanities, social sciences, and business, this collection adds historical depth and specificity to the American cultural history of twentieth- and twenty-first-century popular romance fiction.

The volume begins by foregrounding the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century contexts in discussions of the publication and readership of American romance fiction, Christianity, and the debates surrounding art and commerce.

Essays on African American and interracial romance and the emergence of LGBTQ and m?nage romance attend to the diversity of the genre, while new areas of inquiry are suggested in examinations of the romance industry and the representation of marriage not only as an ideal, but also as a fraught and disputed enterprise.

In the 1970s, the appearance of erotically explicit historical romance inspired feminist protests outside Avon Books.

Romance Fiction and American Culture situates the complex, often vexed relationships between feminism and romance in specific historical, racial, and publishing contexts as it examines the complexity and endurance of this most contested of genres.