Popular romance fiction constitutes the largest segment of the global book market. Bringing together an international group of scholars, The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction offers a ground-breaking exploration of this global genre and its remarkable readership. In recognition of the diversity of the form, the Companion provides a history of the genre, an overview of disciplinary approaches to studying romance fiction, and critical analyses of important subg...

Despite the prejudices of critics, popular romance fiction remains a complex, dynamic genre. It consistently maintains the largest market share in the American publishing industry, even as it welcomes new subgenres like queer and BDSM romance. Digital publishing originated in erotic romance, and savvy online communities have exploded myths about the genre's readership. Romance scholarship now reflects this diversity, transformed by interdisciplinary scrutiny, new critical approaches, and a...

"What have I in common with Jews? I hardly have anything in common with myself!"--Franz KafkaKafka's quip--paradoxical, self-questioning, ironic--highlights vividly some of the key issues of identity and self-representation for Jewish writers in the 20th century. No group of writers better represents the problems of Jewish identity than Jewish poets writing in the American modernist tradition--specifically secular Jews: those disdainful or suspicious of organized re...

Since the 1970s, romance novels have surpassed all other genres in terms of popularity in the United States, accounting for half of all mass market paperbacks sold and driving the digital publishing revolution. Romance Fiction and American Culture brings together scholars from the humanities, social sciences, and publishing to explore American romance fiction from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first century. Essays on interracial, inspirational, and LGBTQ romance attend to the di...

Yehuda Amichai (1924–2000) was the foremost Israeli poet of the twentieth century and an internationally influential literary figure whose poetry has been translated into some 40 languages. Hitherto, no comprehensive literary study of Amichai's poetry has appeared in English. This long-awaited book seeks to fill the gap.Widely considered one of the greatest poets of our time and the most important Jewish poet since Paul Celan, Amichai is beloved by readers the world over. Beneath t...

An Unwilling Guest by Grace Livingston HillA wonderful wholesome romance“Oh, I love him!” she said to herself, though not aloud, for it was a secret - too dear and sacred to be trusted even to darkness and dust.“I love him better than my soul, and he has gone, gone, gone, forever probably! He does not love me. At least not in that way. But I am glad, glad that he cares for my soul. Oh, what shall I do?”Over and over again her heart cried thi...

Much of A.M. Klein's finest prose is to be found in the mass of uncompleted work that he abandoned at the time of his breakdown, and that became accessible only when his papers were deposited in the National Archives. Notebooks offers a generous selection of this work, revealing previously unsuspected facets of Klein's character and artistry.The fiction, criticism, and memoirs collected here focus on Klein's exploration of the role of the artist. The works illuminate crucial period...

In this book, Sephardism is defined not as an expression of Sephardic identity but as a politicized literary metaphor. Since the nineteenth century, this metaphor has occurred with extraordinary frequency in works by authors from a variety of ethnicities, religions, and nationalities in Europe, the Americas, North Africa, Israel, and even India.Sephardism asks why Gentile and Jewish writers and cultural figures have chosen to draw upon the medieval Sephardic experience to ...

Addressing a neglected dimension in postcolonial scholarship, Oliver Lovesey examines the figure of the postcolonial intellectual as repeatedly evoked by the fabled troika of Said, Spivak, and Bhabha and by members of the pan-African diaspora such as Cabral, Fanon, and James. Lovesey’s primary focus is NgÅ©gÄ© wa Thiong’o, one of the greatest writers of post-independence Africa. NgÅ©gÄ© continues to be a vibrant cultural agitator and innovator who, in contrast to many other public intellec...

Bar Kokhba led the Jewish rebellion against Rome in 132–135 A.D., which resulted in massive destruction and dislocation of the Jewish populace of Judea. In early rabbinic literature, Bar Kokhba was remembered in two ways: as an imposter claiming to be the Messiah and as a glorious military leader whose successes led Rabbi Akiba, one of the great rabbinic authorities of Jewish tradition, to acclaim him the Messiah. These two earliest images formed the core of most later perceptions of Bar K...

This book proposes that the idea of the Jews in European cultures has little to do with actual Jews, but rather is derived from the conception of Jews as Christianity's paradigmatic Other, eternally reenacting their morally ambiguous New Testament role as the Christ-bearing and -killing chosen people of God. Through new readings of canonical Russian literary texts by Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Babel, and others, the author argues that these European writers—Christian, secular, and Jewish—ba...

Contributing to the conversation regarding Angela Carter's problematic relationship with what she viewed as the interrelated traditions of surrealism and psychoanalysis, Scott Dimovitz explores the intricate connections between Carter's private life and her public writing. He begins with Carter's assertion that it was through her "sexual and emotional life" that she was radicalized, drawing extensively on the British Library's recently archived collection of Carter's private papers, journa...