Rethinking the Romance Genre: Global Intimacies in Contemporary Literary and Visual Culture by Emily Davis

Abstract

Emily Davis. Rethinking the Romance Genre: Global Intimacies in Contemporary Literary and Visual Culture. New York: Palgrave, 2013. Pp. 236. US$95. With a few notable exceptions such as Laura Chrisman's Rereading the Imperial Romance, the romance genre has received little sustained analysis from transnational or postcolonial perspectives. Even existing works such as Chrisman's are narrow in geographic scope and tend to focus on Victorian romance fiction. Emily Davis' Rethinking the Romance Genre represents an important step in studies of the genre, and the book is in particular a timely and significant resource for the study of contemporary romance from a postcolonial feminist perspective. Davis follows a tradition of scholarship on the romance that explores the genre's political complexities. Taking an even more positive stance than early scholarship in the field such as Janice Radway's Reading the Romance and Tania Modleski's Loving with a Vengeance, Davis argues that global romances provide crucial lessons for a transnational feminist politics ... in an era of flexible capitalism (2). While acknowledging, as have previous scholars, that popular literature is often politically compromised, Davis nevertheless insists that popular genres can be harnessed to radical politics. While she may be overstating the case somewhat--it is not exactly clear how the romances under her investigation provide crucial lessons for transnational feminism, for example--the book nevertheless successfully challenges the widespread views among scholars and pundits that romance is incompatible with politics or politically conservative. In the first part of her book, Davis examines utopian texts that use romance narratives to imagine national and transnational alliances. Specifically, this section studies South African, interracial, anti-apartheid romances of the 1980s and finds that they deploy problematic discourses of masculinist nationalism. Davis also examines texts that revise the colonial romance tradition (a love story between a Western white woman and a colonial male subject [22]) to overcome the limitations of the nationalist romance and envision the possibilities of transnational alliances, particularly between women from the North and South. The second part of Davis' book focuses on gothic texts that challenge the romance tradition. Davis argues that the romance is one of the favored forms of colonialist rhetoric and that anti-colonialist texts therefore use the gothic, romance's dark twin, in an effort to romance as an instrument of oppression passed on by colonialism to a contemporary neocolonial world system dominated by economic globalization (102). This portion of the text demonstrates impressive geographic and textual range and studies novels and plays set in the Caribbean, the Philippines, and India as well as contemporary film and television. The main problem with Davis' otherwise solid and important book is its tendency toward category errors. This occurs in her history of the romance genre early in the book and in her choice of romances for analysis later in the book. While the former may be more justifiable than the latter, both expose the underlying problem. In her brief history of the romance tradition in the introduction of her book, Davis traces the genre from Greek sources to medieval courtly narrative poems in twelfth-century France to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century novels. At this point in history, she suggests, the romance bifurcates into utopian stories (of romantic love in a feminized domestic sphere and masculinized adventures of nationalist heroes) and dystopian gothic stories representing associated with the social and economic changes of early modernity (6). Contemporary gothic romances, she argues, reflect fears about globalization--that is, enduring anxieties about modernity. …