https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5852-1122
-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Yi Shan, Zengtao Zhao, Discourses and Identities in Romance Fiction: Anglophone Visions from Madeira and the Canaries. Ed. by María Isabel González Cruz, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 60, Issue 4, October 2024, Pages 517–518, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqae065
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
As one key output of the research project ‘Discourse, Gender and Identity in a Corpus of Romance Fiction Novels set in the Canaries and Other Atlantic Islands’ funded by the Spanish government, this edited collection has both academic and practical value. The book systematically analyses the fixed generic features (such as the hierarchical differences between the Western/European subject and the Other in which the first is regarded as naturally superior) presented in modern and contemporary romance novels written by English-language authors and primarily set in either the Canary or Madeira Islands. It argues that romance novels not only serve a potent social function but also break away from the shackles of the discursive category of lowbrow fiction and the notoriety of erotic literature.
From 1900, influenced by feminist activism, female novelists began to call for social transformation and political reform through romance novels, even though this genre was often labeled with epithets such as ‘cheap’, ‘formulaic’, ‘lowbrow’ and ‘unrealistic’ (p. 238), as claimed by Inmaculada Pérez-Casal in Chapter 1, ‘Popular Romance Novels: Past, Present and Future’. The protagonists in these romantic fictions – with the hero usually being a native islander or an Englishman with family ties to the islanders while the heroine tends to be British – form international couples through cross-country marriages. Some critics in this collection, such as Jenni Simon and Hsu-Ming Teo, argue that these novels are essentially a genre reflecting and appealing to political progression: they ‘foster political demands for equality, particularly those relating to gender, sexuality and race’ (p. 233). At the same time, most of the romance novels analysed in the book have a strong sense of escapism in the guise of cross-border communication, tourism and marriage, and of racism from an Anglocentric or ethnocentric perspective, under the cover of a facade of egalitarianism.
