New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction: Critical Essays Sarah S.G.Frantz and Eric MurphySelinger, Editors. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012

New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction: Critical Essays Sarah S.G. Frantz and Eric Murphy Selinger, Editors. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012.In his pioneering study of popular fiction, Adventure, Mystery and Romance (1976), John Cawelti characterizes formulaic romance as the "feminine equivalent of the adventure story" (41). He concludes: "No doubt the coming age of women's liberation will invent significantly new formulas for romance, if it does not lead to a total rejection of the moral fantasy of love triumphant" (42). In 1982, Tania Modleski, author of Loving With a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women observes "One cannot find any writings on popular feminine narratives to match the aggrandized titles of certain classic studies of popular male genres" (11). Author of Love's Sweet Return: The Harlequin Story (1984) Margaret Ann Jensen explains fiction and literature scholars have failed to produce critical essays on romance fiction because it is "vilified as is no other category of popular fiction" (25). Nearly thirty years later, Jonathan Allen, in the June 2013 issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies notes "Popular Romance Studies is a new enough field that the canon of relevant scholarship has yet to be established" (1). Evidence of this is illustrated by the content of The Journal of American Culture's March 2013 special issue on love and romance-the guest editor describes popular romance novels as "the most recognizable media form of romance... so pervasive that it has its own genre with several subgenres and dominates the publishing field" (2). Yet this special issue contains no critical essays on popular romance fiction.No matter. In their introduction to New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction - Critical Essays, Frantz and Selinger, editors and contributors to the book, offer a fascinating, comprehensive, and surprisingly concise history of scholarship on popular romance fiction. The slow maturation of scholarly work on romance fiction is due, they argue, to the obstacles the genre must overcome: it is sentimental and emotional, written and read by women, and embraced by the mass-culture marketplace (3). Happily, this volume marks a move away from a defense of formulaic romance fiction to a more nuanced and self-assured apologetic.Seventeen remarkably erudite and instructive essays are organized into four parts. Part One, "Close Reading the Romance," provides a cultural context for romance fiction including a historical romance novel set in the Middle East, lessons on how to read the romance novel with the heart and mind, an interrogation of the rewriting of masculinity within the erotic paradigm of dominance and submission, and a compelling argument for the numerous hegemonies-beyond patriarchal structures and feminist criticism-that plague romance fiction. …