Popular Romance and/as Genre
Katie Deane
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From romance-only bookstores to BookTok Bestsellers, Romantasy fandoms to Dark Romance debates, the past five years have seen a dramatic increase in the visibility of one of the most-read fiction genres in North America: Popular Romance. This course will use three interconnected ways of thinking about genre – as aesthetic forms, as material objects, and as communities – to examine what Romance is, how Romance is made, and what Romance does. Over the course of the semester, we’ll discuss issues critical to the genre in the context of its historical development in the U.S. and Canada, from the narrative function of the happy ending, to the inclusion of explicit sexual content and fights for more diverse representation. We will ask both what the Romance genre can tell us about social, material, and technological shifts in North America, as well as how genres form, operate, and reproduce. Students will come away with a foundational understanding of Popular Romance for further academic study, experience in digital research methods, and the vocabulary to address other transmedial popular genres.
close11 Class schedule
Regular appointments