ABSTRACT
In the closing pages of Nell Stark's Homecoming, college-age heroines Rory and Sarah plan a summer get together in New York City. Both in its deliberate compositional moves and in its (perhaps unconscious) ideological self-contradictions, Homecoming is a fitting text through which to introduce this first collection of scholarly essays on romance fiction and American culture. Exploring romance novels and related forms of fiction through a contextual, interdisciplinary, specifically American focus, this chapter attends to texts, authorship, and publishing contexts from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first century. It gathers 20 cohesive essays by scholars of literature, history, religious studies, American studies, African American/black diaspora studies, business, and art history, from the United States, Canada, and Australia, with three specific aims that play out across all four sections. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
