ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book argues that the excess characteristic of romance extends beyond the dreams of marketing agents to surface within the "literary" novels of high culture as a signature of postmodernism. While periodicity attempts to make the past representable as "past," romance and postmodernism attempt to be flagrantly anachronistic, upsetting our ability to recognize the past as past, challenging the way we "know" history. Rather, the "quest" of this discussion is for the implications of the intersection of romance and postmodernism in the term "postmodern romance." In using this neologism, the book suggests two things: romance should be considered as a postmodern genre; and postmodernism is romance. If romance evokes an unrepresentable other side to history, realism displaces the problem of unrepresentability from history onto gender.
