These bestselling, serially produced novels of love and happiness target female readers who may devour dozens per month, purchased in drugstores and supermarket check-out lines as well as bookstores. While often scorned for formulaic plots and patriarchal ideologies, they inspire intense readcr loyalty while working out fundamental questions of gender and sexuality. This has led to reevaluations of the genre in cultural studies and feminist readings like Janice Radway’s (1992) Reading the Romance.

The romance has its roots in fictions of love and fantasy that have been staples of American book and magazine publishing as well as Hollywood. The romance also derives its accessibility from paperback production and mass marketing (even libraries buy paperback romances to keep up with reader demand). Romances have also created alternative modes of circulation and discussion through clubs and book trading and stores that buy and sell used copies in bulk.

While similar genres cater to readers in other cultures, this has become a major phenomenon in American publishing for imprints like Harlequin, Avon, Fawcett and Pinnacle who create multiple lines to facilitate niche marketing; they have also moved into cable television. BET and others have produced series for African Americans; Hispanic and Asian consumers draw on materials produced outside the US as well.

Among the different romance series available are those that promote varying degrees of sexual intimacy from chastity to explicit involvement. Others use special historical settings (Victorian America, the West, Regency England) or exotic locales. Still other series deal with family issues like engagement, pregnancy, divorce and paternal responsibility. Some may also intersect with Gothic horror and mysteries. In general, however, all offer a satisfying solution to travails and setbacks, generally enshrining heterosexual marriage and family as ideals.

Among authors especially associated with the romance are Nora Roberts, Elizabeth Lowell, Catherine Coulter and Kathleen Eagle (names are invariably WASPish albeit sometimes pseudonymous). Others slide over into wider mass marketing, like Danielle Steele. Elements of the romance as literature have also been explored in more innovative works by Joyce Carol Oates, among others.

Mass-market romances are also known for their distinctive cover art, usually showing a couple in an embrace in which the young, lovely yet vulnerable heroine perhaps struggles to escape the strong arms and piercing gaze of the dark, mysterious hero. The model Fabio, in fact, constructed his celebrity from his appearance on bodice-ripper covers.