ABSTRACT

This chapter traces the origins and development of the popular historical romance in the larger context of both historical fiction and the popular romance genre. Though the chapter considers the roots of the genre in works from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, its main focus is the genre’s expansion in the twentieth century from the British Regency romances of Georgette Heyer to novels encompassing a variety of time periods, locations, characters, and levels of erotic content. This chapter also examines scholarship on historical romance fiction from a variety of theoretical perspectives. The chapter concludes by assessing the increasing diversification of the genre in the early decades of the twenty-first century, and suggesting avenues for further scholarly study.