Women Writers and the Hero of Romance studies the nature of the hero and his meaning for the female seeker, or quester, in romance fiction from Wuthering Heights to Fifty Shades of Grey. The book includes chapters on Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Sheik, and the novels of Ayn Rand and Dorothy Dunnett.

Hazard and Somerset: Off Duty is a collection of short stories. It includes the following: “Tickets to the Gun Show” Emery Hazard just wants to take his boyfriend to a concert, but some people are assholes. (Takes place before Guilt by Association) “When the Road Rises Up” Hazard and Somers go on their first vacation as a couple, but when no one can explain the sound of a crying child at night, Hazard decides to investigate. (Takes place before Reasonable Doubt) “Little Stoics” Somers is going to get a book signed by Hazard’s favorite author. He just has to keep Hazard from escaping physical therapy first. (Takes place before Criminal Past) “Hazard and Somerset: Off Duty” Six vignettes featuring Hazard and Somerset in daily life. (Takes place after Criminal Past) Please note that three of these stories were distributed in a preliminary form to mailing list subscribers. “Hazard and Somerset: Off Duty” is exclusively available in this collection.

Originally published in 1984, Reading the Romance challenges popular (and often demeaning) myths about why romantic fiction, one of publishing's most lucrative categories, captivates millions of women readers. Among those who have disparaged romance reading are feminists, literary critics, and theorists of mass culture. They claim that romances enforce the woman reader's dependence on men and acceptance of the repressive ideology purveyed by popular culture. Radway questions such claims, arguing that critical attention "must shift from the text itself, taken in isolation, to the complex social event of reading." She examines that event, from the complicated business of publishing and distribution to the individual reader's engagement with the text. Radway's provocative approach combines reader-response criticism with anthropology and feminist psychology. Asking readers themselves to explore their reading motives, habits, and rewards, she conducted interviews in a midwestern town with forty-two romance readers whom she met through Dorothy Evans, a chain bookstore employee who has earned a reputation as an expert on romantic fiction. Evans defends her customers' choice of entertainment; reading romances, she tells Radway, is no more harmful than watching sports on television. "We read books so we won't cry" is the poignant explanation one woman offers for her reading habit. Indeed, Radway found that while the women she studied devote themselves to nurturing their families, these wives and mothers receive insufficient devotion or nurturance in return. In romances the women find not only escape from the demanding and often tiresome routines of their lives but also a hero who supplies the tenderness and admiring attention that they have learned not to expect. The heroines admired by Radway's group defy the expected stereotypes; they are strong, independent, and intelligent. That such characters often find themselves to be victims of male aggression and almost always resign themselves to accepting conventional roles in life has less to do, Radway argues, with the women readers' fantasies and choices than with their need to deal with a fear of masculine dominance. These romance readers resent not only the limited choices in their own lives but the patronizing atitude that men especially express toward their reading tastes. In fact, women read romances both to protest and to escape temporarily the narrowly defined role prescribed for them by a patriarchal culture. Paradoxically, the books that they read make conventional roles for women seem desirable. It is this complex relationship between culture, text, and woman reader that Radway urges feminists to address. Romance readers, she argues, should be encouraged to deliver their protests in the arena of actual social relations rather than to act them out in the solitude of the imagination. In a new introduction, Janice Radway places the book within the context of current scholarship and offers both an explanation and critique of the study's limitations.

Byronic Heroes in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing and Screen Adaptation charts a new chapter in the changing fortunes of a unique cultural phenomenon. This book examines the afterlives of the Byronic hero through the work of nineteenth-century women writers and screen adaptations of their fiction. It is a timely reassessment of Byron's enduring legacy during the nineteenth century and beyond, focusing on the charged and unstable literary dialogues between Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and a Romantic icon whose presence takes centre stage in recent screen adaptations of their most celebrated novels. The broad interdisciplinary lens employed in this book concentrates on the conflicted rewritings of Byron's poetry, his 'heroic' protagonists, and the cult of Byronism in nineteenth-century novels from Pride and Prejudice to Middlemarch, and extends outwards to the reappearance of Byronic heroes on film and in television series over the last two decades.

From dreams of Prince Charming or dashing military heroes, to the lure of dark strangers and vampire lovers; from rock stars and rebels to soulmates, dependable family types, or simply good companions, female fantasies about men tell us a great deal about the history of women. In Heartthrobs, Carol Dyhouse draws upon literature, cinema, and popular romance to show how the changing cultural and economic position of women has shaped their dreams about men. When girls were supposed to be shrinking violets, passionate females risked being seen as 'unbridled', or dangerously out of control. Change came slowly, and young women remained trapped in a double-bind: you may have needed a husband in order to survive, but you had to avoid looking like a gold-digger. Show attraction too openly and you might be judged 'fast' and undesirable. Education and wage-earning brought independence and a widening of horizons for women. These new economic beings showed a sustained appetite for novel-reading, cinema-going, and the dancehall. They sighed over Rudolph Valentino's screen performances as tango-dancer or Arab tribesman and desert lover. Women may have been ridiculed for these obsessions, but, as consumers, they had new clout. This book reveals changing patterns of desire, and looks at men through the eyes of women.

Women's Writing in Twenty-First Century France is the first book-length publication on women-authored literature of this period, and comprises a collection of challenging critical essays that engage with the themes, trends and issues, and with the writers and their texts, of the first decade of the twenty-first century. PART ONE: Women’s Writing in Twenty-First-Century France: Trends and Issues 1. Women’s writing in twenty-first-century France: introduction, Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye 2. What ‘passes’?: French women writers and translation into English, Lynn Penrod 3. What women read: contemporary women’s writing and the bestseller, Diana Holmes PART TWO: Society, Culture, Family 4. Vichy, Jews, enfants cachés: French women writers look back, Lucille Cairns 5. Wives and daughters in literary works representing the harkis, Susan Ireland 6. (Not) seeing things: Marie NDiaye, (negative) hallucination and ‘blank’ métissage, Andrew Asibong 7. Rediscovering the absent father, a question of recognition: Despentes, Tardieu, Lori Saint-Martin 8. Babykillers: Véronique Olmi and Laurence Tardieu on motherhood, Natalie Edwards PART THREE: Body, Life, Text 9. The becoming of anorexia and text in Amélie Nothomb’s Robert des noms propres and Delphine de Vigan’s Jours sans faim, Amaleena Damlé 10. The human-animal in Ananda Devi’s texts: towards an ethics of hybridity?, Ashwiny O. Kistnareddy 11. Embodiment, environment and the re-invention of self in Nina Bouraoui’s life-writing, Helen Vassallo 12. Irreverent revelations: women’s confessional practices of the extreme contemporary, Barbara Havercroft 13. Contamination anxiety in Annie Ernaux’s twenty-first-century texts, Simon Kemp PART FOUR: Experiments, Interfaces, Aesthetics 14. Experience and experiment in the work of Marie Darrieussecq, Helena Chadderton 15. Interfaces: verbal/visual experiment in new women’s writing in French, Shirley Jordan 16. ‘Autofiction + x = ?’: Chloé Delaume’s experimental self-representations, Deborah B. Gaensbauer 17. Beyond Antoinette Fouque (Il y a deux sexes) and beyond Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)? Anne Garréta’s sphinxes, Owen Heathcote 18. Amélie the aesthete: art and politics in the world of Amélie Nothomb, Anna Kemp 19. Conclusion, Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye

Analyzes romantic fiction and its depiction of women within its historical context and as part of the history of ideas about women. This volume discusses such areas as: early years - class and wealth; and the twenties - sex and violence.