It’s the genre that gets no respect but the one that sells more books than any other: the romance novel. Often derided for their formulaic plots and cardboard heroes, romance novels attract an enormous readership, a readership that is almost exclusively women.
Why are romance novels (and readers of romance) the object of ridicule, and why do so many women read them anyway? This course will attempt to answer those questions by examining the evolution of the genre from its origins and exploring recent scholarship that analyzes the romance novel and the romance reader herself.
We will begin with the romance novel that refuses to grow stale: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Austen’s novel has spawned an array of derivative works, and we will study one of the most successful ones: Helen Fielding’s novel, Bridget Jones’s Diary.
We will also investigate Charlotte Bronte’s 19th century gothic romance, Jane Eyre (the film), and its 20th-century counterpart, Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca. Along the way, I will ask you to read one contemporary romance from a collection of “Desert Island Keepers” so that we can explore the array of subgenres in the now heavily segmented romance novel market.
Finally, we will examine the most controversial plot device in romance novels: sexual violence, and the current craze in romances: vampires, in two blockbuster romance novels that bookend the 20th century: E. M. Hull’s The Sheik, and the first novel in the paranormal Black Dagger Brotherhood romance series, Dark Lover. (NOTE–there is racism and an implied rape in The Sheik and explicit sex in Dark Lover, but these books are still required reading for this course).
Course Requirements: Five 30-minute quizzes (you get to drop one), one paper, one presentation, a “Desert Island Keeper” book review, and a final examination. There is a class participation component to the course that involves class discussions and/or blog posts. Since women (and men!) who read romance novels enjoy talking about them, I hope to make the class as interactive as possible.
