The Structure and Ideology of Romance Fiction

The Structure and Ideology of Romance Fiction PDF Author: Michael Andrew Young
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description

The Structure and Ideology of Romance Fiction

The Structure and Ideology of Romance Fiction PDF Author: Michael Andrew Young
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Romance of American Communism

The Romance of American Communism PDF Author: Vivian Gornick
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 178873551X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
“Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class.” So begins Vivian Gornick’s exploration of how the world of socialists, communists, and progressives in the 1940s and 1950s created a rich, diverse world where ordinary men and women felt their lives connected to a larger human project. Now back in print after its initial publication in 1977 and with a new introduction by the author, The Romance of American Communism is a landmark work of new journalism, profiling American Communist Party members and fellow travelers as they joined the Party, lived within its orbit, and left in disillusionment and disappointment as Stalin’s crimes became public. From the immigrant Jewish enclaves of the Bronx and Brooklyn and the docks of Puget Sound to the mining towns of Kentucky and the suburbs of Cleveland, over a million Americans found a sense of belonging and an expanded sense of self through collective struggle. They also found social isolation, blacklisting, imprisonment, and shattered hopes. This is their story--an indisputably American story.

Reading the Romance

Reading the Romance PDF Author: Janice A. Radway
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807898856
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Originally published in 1984, Reading the Romance challenges popular (and often demeaning) myths about why romantic fiction, one of publishing's most lucrative categories, captivates millions of women readers. Among those who have disparaged romance reading are feminists, literary critics, and theorists of mass culture. They claim that romances enforce the woman reader's dependence on men and acceptance of the repressive ideology purveyed by popular culture. Radway questions such claims, arguing that critical attention "must shift from the text itself, taken in isolation, to the complex social event of reading." She examines that event, from the complicated business of publishing and distribution to the individual reader's engagement with the text. Radway's provocative approach combines reader-response criticism with anthropology and feminist psychology. Asking readers themselves to explore their reading motives, habits, and rewards, she conducted interviews in a midwestern town with forty-two romance readers whom she met through Dorothy Evans, a chain bookstore employee who has earned a reputation as an expert on romantic fiction. Evans defends her customers' choice of entertainment; reading romances, she tells Radway, is no more harmful than watching sports on television. "We read books so we won't cry" is the poignant explanation one woman offers for her reading habit. Indeed, Radway found that while the women she studied devote themselves to nurturing their families, these wives and mothers receive insufficient devotion or nurturance in return. In romances the women find not only escape from the demanding and often tiresome routines of their lives but also a hero who supplies the tenderness and admiring attention that they have learned not to expect. The heroines admired by Radway's group defy the expected stereotypes; they are strong, independent, and intelligent. That such characters often find themselves to be victims of male aggression and almost always resign themselves to accepting conventional roles in life has less to do, Radway argues, with the women readers' fantasies and choices than with their need to deal with a fear of masculine dominance. These romance readers resent not only the limited choices in their own lives but the patronizing atitude that men especially express toward their reading tastes. In fact, women read romances both to protest and to escape temporarily the narrowly defined role prescribed for them by a patriarchal culture. Paradoxically, the books that they read make conventional roles for women seem desirable. It is this complex relationship between culture, text, and woman reader that Radway urges feminists to address. Romance readers, she argues, should be encouraged to deliver their protests in the arena of actual social relations rather than to act them out in the solitude of the imagination. In a new introduction, Janice Radway places the book within the context of current scholarship and offers both an explanation and critique of the study's limitations.

Romance Fiction and American Culture

Romance Fiction and American Culture PDF Author: William A. Gleason
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134806280
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 708

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Book Description
Since the 1970s, romance novels have surpassed all other genres in terms of popularity in the United States, accounting for half of all mass market paperbacks sold and driving the digital publishing revolution. Romance Fiction and American Culture brings together scholars from the humanities, social sciences, and publishing to explore American romance fiction from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first century. Essays on interracial, inspirational, and LGBTQ romance attend to the diversity of the genre, while new areas of inquiry are suggested in contextual and interdisciplinary examinations of romance authorship, readership, and publishing history, of pleasure and respectability in African American romance fiction, and of the dynamic tension between the genre and second wave feminism. As it situates romance fiction among other instances of American love culture, from Civil War diaries to Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, Romance Fiction and American Culture confirms the complexity and enduring importance of this most contested of genres.

A Natural History of the Romance Novel

A Natural History of the Romance Novel PDF Author: Pamela Regis
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812203100
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
The romance novel has the strange distinction of being the most popular but least respected of literary genres. While it remains consistently dominant in bookstores and on best-seller lists, it is also widely dismissed by the critical community. Scholars have alleged that romance novels help create subservient readers, who are largely women, by confining heroines to stories that ignore issues other than love and marriage. Pamela Regis argues that such critical studies fail to take into consideration the personal choice of readers, offer any true definition of the romance novel, or discuss the nature and scope of the genre. Presenting the counterclaim that the romance novel does not enslave women but, on the contrary, is about celebrating freedom and joy, Regis offers a definition that provides critics with an expanded vocabulary for discussing a genre that is both classic and contemporary, sexy and entertaining. Taking the stance that the popular romance novel is a work of literature with a brilliant pedigree, Regis asserts that it is also a very old, stable form. She traces the literary history of the romance novel from canonical works such as Richardson's Pamela through Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Brontë's Jane Eyre, and E. M. Hull's The Sheik, and then turns to more contemporary works such as the novels of Georgette Heyer, Mary Stewart, Janet Dailey, Jayne Ann Krentz, and Nora Roberts.

In The Name of Love

In The Name of Love PDF Author: Aaron Ben-Ze'ev
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191546534
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
We yearn to experience the idealized love depicted in so many novels, movies, poems, and popular songs. Ironically, it is the idealization of love that arms it with its destructive power. Popular media consistently remind us that love is all we need, but statistics concerning the rate of depression and suicides after divorce or romantic break up remind us what might happened if "all that we need" is taken away. This book is about our ideals of love, our experiences, of love, the actual disparity between the two, and the manners of coping with this disparity. A major study case of the book concerns men who have murdered their wives or partners allegedly 'out of love'. It is estimated that over 30% of all female murder victims in the United States die at the hands of a former or present spouse or boyfriend. How can murdering a loved one be associated with the assumed moral and altruistic love? Not only is love intrinsically ambivalent, but it can also give rise to dangerous consequences. Some of the worst evils have been committed in the name of love (as in the name of God). A unique collaboration between a leading philosopher in the field of emotions and a social scientist, In the Name of Love presents fascinating insights into romantic love and its future in modern society.

Critical Reading and Writing

Critical Reading and Writing PDF Author: Andrew Goatly
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136286977
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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Book Description
Critical Reading and Writing is a fully introductory, interactive textbook that explores the power relations at work in and behind the texts we encounter in our everyday lives. Using examples from numerous genres - such as popular fiction, advertisements and newspapers - this textbook examines the language choices a writer must make in structuring texts, representing the world and positioning the reader. Assuming no prior knowledge of linguistics, Critical Reading and Writing offers guidance on how to read texts critically and how to develop effective writing skills. Features include: * activities in analysis, writing and rewriting * an appendix of comments on activities * further reading sections at the end of each unit * a glossary of linguistics terms * suggestions for five extended writing projects. Written by an experienced teacher, Critical Reading and Writing has multidisciplinary appeal but will be particularly relevant for use on introductory English and Communications courses.

The Romantic Ideology

The Romantic Ideology PDF Author: Jerome J. McGann
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226558509
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
Claiming that the scholarship and criticism of Romanticism and its works have for too long been dominated by a Romantic ideology—by an uncritical absorption in Romanticism's own self-representations—Jerome J. McGann presents a new, critical view of the subject that calls for a radically revisionary reading of Romanticism. In the course of his study, McGann analyzes both the predominant theories of Romanticism (those deriving from Coleridge, Hegel, and Heine) and the products of its major English practitioners. Words worth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron are considered in greatest depth, but the entire movement is subjected to a searching critique. Arguing that poetry is produced and reproduced within concrete historical contexts and that criticism must take these contexts into account, McGann shows how the ideologies embodied in Romantic poetry and theory have shaped and distorted contemporary critical activities.

The Marriage Spell

The Marriage Spell PDF Author: Mary Jo Putney
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
ISBN: 9780345449191
Category : Large type books
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
New York Times bestselling author Mary Jo Putney is acclaimed by critics and readers alike for unforgettable storytelling and arresting characters. Now she introduces a Regency England you've never seen before, where dazzling magic is practiced in all but the highest reaches of Society, and where desire is the most mysterious and seductive force of all. One of the Duke of Wellington's most respected officers, Jack Langdon, Lord Frayne, takes his family's honor very seriously. He also hides a shameful secret: a talent for sorcery he has been raised to suppress and openly reject. But after an injury lands Jack at death's door, his only chance at survival lies with Abigail Barton, a peer's daughter and a skilled wizard. Her price: Jack's hand in marriage. It isn't long before Jack feels an irresistible attraction to his forthright new wife, whose allure is as intense as the reawakening magical abilities he can no longer deny. Abigail had to make a great sacrifice to perform a spell powerful enough to save Lord Frayne, and although she cannot help but be drawn to her reluctant husband's surprising sensitivity and kindness, she knows all too well his distaste for magic. Once she has Jack's name and the child she has always longed for, she is determined to live apart from him so that he can preserve his reputation-and so that she herself can stay true to her gifts. But neither Abby nor Jack reckons on the deep, long-simmering passions her spell ignites. They challenge each other's extraordinary powers and deepest desires for the sake of a love that may cost them all they cherish most. With breathtaking skill and vivid historical detail, Mary Jo Putney weaves a tale of enchantment, mystery, and romance that will forever hold you spellbound. From the Hardcover edition.

Women and Romance

Women and Romance PDF Author: Laurie Langbauer
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501723065
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
No detailed description available for "Women and Romance".