Abstract
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book reviews critiques of romance fiction that find it lacking in artistry and identifies the instances within the field that do the opposite, often by challenging the notion that working within genre conventions necessarily limits a novel. It explores gendered reasons for the relative scarcity of author studies for popular romance and surveys the extant literature using Nora Roberts as the primary example. The book also reviews the existing social scientific research on romance novels, readers, and authors from the last four decades. It focuses on thematic issues that characterize romance novels or frequently arise in discussions of the genre: class, wealth, materialism, gender, sexuality, romantic love, romance as it overlaps with and articulates a new form of religion, and race and ethnicity. The book examines representations of sex, gender, and sexuality in contemporary romance novels.
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