Romance
Romance gets treated like a genre label and not much else, which is odd given how much work it does. Jayashree Kamblé’s *Making Meaning in Popular Romance Fiction* is a useful reminder that even the term “romance novel” deserves scrutiny, not just the books filed under it.
I liked that it takes the category seriously without pretending the category is tidy. People love to talk about romance as if it means one thing. It doesn’t, obviously. That’s half the problem and half the point.
I liked that it takes the category seriously without pretending the category is tidy. People love to talk about romance as if it means one thing. It doesn’t, obviously. That’s half the problem and half the point.
The label does a lot of quiet sorting before anyone even opens the book. That’s useful, but it also means romance gets flattened into a single promise when the category has always been messier than that. The interesting bit, to me, is not whether the term is tidy. It’s whether readers use that mess to find exactly the kind of story they want.