Genre and authorship in the popular romance novel: a theoretical exploration.

Contemporary popular literature is often conceptualized in predominantly generic terms - we speak of the detective, the popular romance novel or the thriller as if one such text or one such author cannot relevantly be distinguished from another. Such a generic conceptualization, which is widespread in both the practice and the study of contemporary culture, tends to obscure the individual popular text and/or author. In this project this conceptualization of popular literature is problematized on the basis of a mainly theoretical exploration of the relationship genre-authorship in the contemporary popular romance genre. This project builds upon an earlier study (2011) of the relation genre-authorship in the oeuvre of contemporary popular romance author Nora Roberts. In the current project the results of the earlier study's extensive corpus analyses are interpreted and substantiated on the basis of contemporary literary theories about genre and authorship. In this way the often neglected or ignored mutual relevance of literary theory and popular literature is substantiated.

Keywords:The popular romance novel, Popular literature, Literary theory, Author, Authorship, Genre, Nora Roberts

Disciplines:Theory and methodology of literary studies