Pursuing Happiness: Reading American Romance as Political Fiction

Description

The dominance of popular romance in the United States fiction market suggests that its trends and themes may reflect the politics of a significant proportion of the population. Pursuing Happiness explores some of the choices, beliefs and assumptions which shape the politics of American Romance novels. In particular, it focuses on what romances reveal about American attitudes towards work, the West, race, gender, community cohesion, ancestral “roots” and a historical connection (or lack of it) to the land.

Author

Laura Vivanco is an independent scholar. The latest book, Faith, Love, Hope and Popular Romance Fiction (2020) is available for free. Her previous books include, Pursuing Happiness: Reading American Romance as Political Fiction (2016), explores Americans’ beliefs and attitudes as expressed in US romance novels, For Love and Money: The Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills & Boon Romance (2011). Laura has written a number of articles on popular romance fiction, covering topics as diverse as bodies, feminism, lingerie, the sexual symbolism of engagement rings and Georgette Heyer's depiction of early nineteenth-century Leeds.

Laura began her academic career at the University of St Andrews, where she gained her Ph.D. An interest in attitudes towards death in fifteenth-century Castile and my Death in Fifteenth-Century Castile: Ideologies of the Elites was published in 2004. Laura has also written articles on avian imagery and humoral iconography in Celestina, identified a chronicle source for Diego de San Pedro's Cárcel de Amor and suggested that some of the rather bizarre actions of the protagonist of his Arnalte y Lucenda may be understood as an imitatio Mariae.

 "Pursuing Happiness explores the ways that popular American romance novels engage such matters as US gender roles, attitudes toward disability, the myth of the frontier, individualism and community, and racial violence and discrimination. A thoughtful study with a refreshingly topical focus.” — Prof. William Gleason, Princeton University, co-editor of Romance Fiction and American Culture: Love as the Practice of Freedom?

“Pursuing Happiness is an insightful and entertaining look at the inherent, often invisible, politics that underlie America’s most popular genre of fiction.”— Isobel Carr, romance writer.

American Romance, US romance fiction, US Politics, American politics, romance novels.