Tag
Romance
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The Shape of Ménage à Trois to Come
“However much desire there is for the threesome to maintain its stability, the cultural force of homogenous marriage is strong.”
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Genre Juggernaut: Measuring “Romance”
For its scale and internal complexity alone, the literary genre of “romance” warrants more study than it has received.
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The Broken Promises of “Bridgerton”
The show portrays a racially diverse society, but papers over white-supremacist interracial sexual assault and violence. Was there another way?
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B-Sides: Gene Stratton-Porter’s “A Girl of the Limberlost”
All but forgotten today, Gene Stratton-Porter was—in the early 20th century …
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Quit Playing Games with My Heart
Robert first catches my eye from across the coffee shop. New to the neighborhood, I’m looking for a friendly face. But Robert—glaring back at me from over his mug …
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For the Love of Doughnuts
On the surface, Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie tells the story of Minerva and Cal, who fall in love with each other. Really, though, Bet Me is a story about a fat woman …
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American Romances, Russian Realities
Readers of contemporary Anglo-American romance novels expect a certain kind of happily ever after. The protagonist is supposed to find a good partner who …
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Robot and Juliet
What makes us fall in love with technology? In those enchanting early days, new tech can seduce with expanded horizons, allowing us to travel faster and farther, or connect across longer distances; and we appreciate this …
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Slavery Was No Opera
“This was no love story,” Nikky Finney cautions us in “Pluck.” The poem from her 1995 collection, Rice, is a repudiation of Hollywood’s insidious fantasies about sex and American slavery. Prompted by …
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Wild States of Being
A lacquered blue cube and a cat named Labes: these nonhuman characters shed unforgiving light on human frailty in the wrenching new novel by Italian writer Domenico Starnone, Ties, scrupulously …
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Disability and the Romance Novel
In the world of romance, love can and does heal all wounds. The scars of loss or romantic betrayal, the traumatic aftereffects of abuse or neglect …
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Jane Austen Meets Sci-Fi
After two hundred years of being known as a genius, Jane Austen is now a brand, a marketing phenomenon. According to Wikipedia—so this is more universally acknowledged than necessarily true—in 2015, 25 Austen-inspired works were released per month, which suggests that more people are writing such fan fiction than are reading it. Most of these…
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Virtual Roundtable on
“Description in the Novel”This roundtable on description in the novel took place on May 3, 2016, at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. Concluding the inaugural year of the Novel Theory Seminar, the roundtable featured presentations by Wai Chee Dimock, Heather Love, William Mills Todd III, J. Keith Vincent, and Cynthia Wall. To solicit brief position papers…
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The Bingewatch: “Love” Angeles
Despite today’s abundance of “quality television” programming, TV has yet to fully shed its reputation as a degraded medium. Why else would the binge have taken hold as a (if not the) prime metaphor for contemporary television viewing? Where the representative of televisual excess was previously the couch potato, a human-turned-tuber upon cathode-ray immersion, today’s TV-watching…
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Rotten Love
In the mid-1940s Fritz Lang made two films in quick succession, both starring the same trio of actors: Edward G. Robinson, Dan Duryea, and Joan Bennett. The first of these works has the more notable pedigree; The Woman in the Window (1944) was among the crop of Hollywood exports to France that would, along with…
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The Restless Storyteller: An Interview With Laura Bolaños Cadena
Historia Semanal de Amor y Pasión (Weekly Story of Love and Passion) is one of those pocket-size Mexican comic books you may have read or seen—they’re called historietas. The covers are illustrated in eye-popping colors, and the drama inside is high and often fast. One of the most twisty and gripping issues I’ve read contained…
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Virtual Roundtable on “Fifty Shades of Grey”
With over 29 million copies sold in trade paperback alone and translations afoot in languages from Arabic to Tagalog, the Fifty Shades trilogy …
