ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is a study of the historical romance genre in both its popular and literary manifestations. The idea that the ideological foundations of romance are unstable and uncertain is not without its precedents. The crucial insight of theories of speech acts and performativity can be represented by the figure of something turning back on itself both in the sense of a circuitous repetition or retracing and of an unravelling or undoing. The 'logic of iterability' which the concept of performativity names and recognizes allows us to consider anew the ubiquity and apparent inexhaustibility of the romance genre as the result of an inherent failure ever to secure its terms with any finality. The book is principally motivated by feminist and antihomophobic politics in its efforts to interrogate the terms and discourses of heterosexual hegemony.
