Romancing Literature (Routledge Focus on Literature)

Romancing Literature places literary fiction in dialogue with what it rejects — the feminine, the popular, and the romantic, disclosing deep-seated assumptions concerning artistic production and literary creation in relation to genre and gender. The book explores how literary fiction articulates and defines itself through a dialectical relation with its others along both axes of genre and gender, revealing the seams separating it from, as well as connecting it, to them. It decenters the customary perspective grounded in literary fiction by investigating several works from the perspective of their interplay with other works categorized differently and diversely and by drawing theoretical resources from genre scholarship. Romancing Literature builds on the movement to decolonize the university curriculum. Instead of focusing on (post)colonial relations of power, the book questions literary divides that reproduce and reinforce social distinctions between the masculine and the feminine as well as between the popular and the literary. It questions not only what we read but also how gender and genre hierarchies determine what counts as serious literature.