Romance Writing

Romance Writing explores the changing nature of both the romance genre and the discourse of romantic love from the seventeenth century to the present day. It is the first major historical engagement of romantic love, as both genre and discourse, since the 1940s. Faced with the challenge of writing a ls"cultural historyrs" for what is commonly understood to be one of lifers"s most universal, a-historical and cross-cultural phenomena, Lynne Pearce has invoked the concept of the gift to calculate lovers"s ls"added valuers" at different cultural / historical moments. Building upon those philosophical traditions which have argued for the powerfully transformative nature of romantic love, Pearce shows how -- in the history of literature -- lovers have utilized its spark to change not only themselves, but also their worlds, through acts of creativity and heroism. The ls"gift of lovers" ranges from the simple ls"gift of a namers" in the seventeenth century, through notions of immortality, self-sacrifice and selfhood in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries, through to the liberating temporal and spatial dislocations of the postmodern age. The opening chapter, ls"The Alchemy of Lovers", also undertakes an in-depth engagement of the changing nature, and meaning, of romantic love. Providing a judicious blend of close reading and cultural history, Romance Writing will be essential reading for undergraduate students as well as postgraduates and scholars working in the field; it will also be of interest to the general reader.

Lynne Pearce is Professor of Literary Theory and Women's Writing, University of Lancaster