Romance Fiction and American Culture: Love as the Practice of Freedom?

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- List of Figures -- Notes on Contributors -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Love as the Practice of Freedom? -- Part I Popular Romance and American History -- 1 Pamela Crosses the Atlantic -- or, Pamela Andrews's Story Inaugurates the American Romance Novel -- 2 "He Filled My Heart with Doubt": The Southern Belle's Love and Duty in the Civil War -- 3 Postbellum, Pre-Harlequin: American Romance Publishing in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century -- 4 "I'm Not the Only Lesbian Who Wears a Skirt": Lesbian Romance Fiction and Identity in Post-World War II America -- 5 Strange Stirrings, Strange Yearnings: The Flame and the Flower, Sweet Savage Love, and the Lost Diversities of Blockbuster Historical Romance -- 6 Scripting Black Love in the 1990s: Pleasure, Respectability, and Responsibility in an Era of HIV/AIDS -- Part II Romance and Race -- 7 Kara Walker: American Romance in Black and White -- 8 Love Prevailed Despite What American History Said: Agape and Eros in Beverly Jenkins's Night Song and Through the Storm -- 9 Flipping the Script: Romancing Zane's Urban Erotica Conseula Francis -- 10 Orientalism, Freedom, and Feminism in Popular Romance Culture -- 11 Saving China: The Transformative Power of Whiteness in Elizabeth Lowell's Jade Island and Katherine Stone's Pearl Moon -- Part III Art and Commerce -- 12 Henry James's "The Velvet Glove" and the Iron Fist: Transatlantic Cultural Exchange and the Romance Tradition -- 13 Branding a Genre: A Brief Transatlantic History of Romance Novel Cover Art -- 14 Love the Market: Discourses of Passion and Professionalism in Romance Writing Communities -- 15 When I Paint My Masterpiece: Bob Dylan, Ekphrasis, and the Art of Susan Elizabeth Phillips -- Part IV Happy Endings