Introduction: What Does It Mean to Say “Romance Novel”?

Abstract

Numerous studies on popular romance fiction, from Tania Modleski’s The Disappearing Act: A Study of Harlequin Romances (1980) to Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance (1984) and Pamela Regis’s A Natural History of the Romance Novel (2003), have expounded on the genre’s ideological and narrative elements. While Modleski understands the term to mean short novels published by the firm Harlequin, Radway does not quite define the genre, except to say that the “ideal romance” focuses “on a single, developing relationship between heroine and hero”; in practice, her analysis discusses one subset of popular romance fiction called the historical romance (Modleski 435, Radway 122). Regis conceptualizes a romance novel more broadly as “a work of prose fiction that tells the story of the courtship and betrothal of one or more heroines” (14).