Making Meaning in Popular Romance Fiction ― An Epistemology

"The book examines mass-market romance fiction in the U.K., Canada, and the U.S. through four elements that undergird its functioning: capitalism, war, heterosexuality, and white Protestantism. Adopting Michel Foucault's idea of the "episteme," it arguesthat romance novels are a quintessentially twentieth and twenty-first century genre and rooted in the real world conditions (episteme) that correspond to the four elements above. As such, romance fiction provides a prismatic look at the struggles around globalization, "democratic" armed aggression, heteropatriarchy, and historically Protestant values, particularly as understood by the genre's readers and authors. This approach casts a fresh light on a genre that has hitherto been understood only in termsof structuralist paradigms or reader-response ethnographies" --