Fatal Attractions: Rescripting Romance in Contemporary Literature & Film

"Romance" is one of the most enduring of the "grand narratives". The impulse to consume those cultural constructions otherwise known as love stories is seemingly timeless and certainly insatiable. But in these post-colonial, post-modern times, how is the conventional love story faring? And what does its continuing appeal tell us about the culture in which we live? In this collection, the contributors consider the ways in which the codes and conventions of traditional romance, as a genre, are being rewritten and subverted in contemporary literature and film. Romance, it seems, is no longer an agent of cultural orthodoxy, perpetuating the institutions of monogamy, the family, heterosexuality and marriage - it can also, at least to some extent, destabilize those orthodoxies, and call them into quesstion, through burlesque, explicitly "feminist" texts, queer readings and so on. Romance, the contributors argue, is a category under stress. Can the love story - in fiction and in film - survive in an age of postmodernism, AIDS and queer theory? And if it can, what (utopian) political agenda might it serve?