Modules

'Reader, I Married Him': The Evolution of Romance Fiction from 1740 to the Present (EAS3225)

30 credits

This module explores the history of the most commercially successful and least critically respectable of genres, the romance novel. While romance only took on its modern form in the 1930s, romance writers have always drawn upon the models provided by older fictions. This module maps out the historical links which connect Richardson, Austen, and the Brontës to their modern imitators and successors, investigating what has been changed, gained and lost along the way, in order to uncover how and why the popular love story has come to occupy such a controversial place within contemporary fiction. This module has no pre-requisites.