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Romance Writing

ISBN: 978-0-745-63004-5

December 2006

Polity

232 pages

Description
Romance Writing explores the changing nature of both the romance genre and the discourse of romantic love from the seventeenth century to the present day. Indeed, it is one of the first studies to approach romantic love as both genre and discourse in more than sixty years.

Faced with the challenge of writing a cultural history for what is commonly understood to be one of lifes most universal, a-historical and cross-cultural phenomena, Lynne Pearce has invoked the concept of the gift to calculate loves added value at different cultural/historical moments. Building upon those philosophical traditions which have argued for the powerfully transformative nature of romantic love, Pearce shows how in the history of literature lovers have utilized its spark to change not only themselves, but also their worlds, through acts of creativity and heroism. The gift of love ranges from the simple gift of a name in the seventeenth century, through notions of immortality, self-sacrifice and selfhood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, through to the liberating temporal and spatial dislocations of the postmodern age. The opening chapter, The Alchemy of Love, also undertakes an in-depth engagement of the changing nature, and meaning, of romantic love.

Providing a judicious blend of close reading and cultural history, Romance Writing will be essential reading for undergraduate students as well as postgraduates and scholars working in the field, while also offering much of interest to the general reader.

About the Author
Lynne Pearce is Professor of Literary Theory and Women’s Writing, University of Lancaster
Features
  • The first comprehensive study of the romance genre for over 50 years.
  • Introduces and examines romantic love in a wide range of texts, from the 17th Century to the present day.
  • By linking the texts with their social and cultural contexts, this is also a history of romantic love and its changing meanings over the past 300 years.
  • Will appeal to a wide student and scholarly readership within the humanities as both an original and cutting edge piece of scholarship and an introduction to a popular genre.