- Title
- The Valentine Wars
- Creator
- Dryden, Therese
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2019
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- This project examines the contentious subject of feminism in the popular romance genre. Historically critics have accused the genre of being oppressive to women while others insist that it is a genre that empowers women. Having grown uneasy with the politics I have unconsciously espoused in several of the category romances I have written for Harlequin Mills & Boon, I wanted to explore if it was possible to write a romance novel with a feminist sensibility, and, if so, how that could be done. This was the rationale for writing The Valentine Wars, which is a single-title romance novel that targets the American market. It details the story of single mother Ellen Butler when she returns to her hometown of Valentine, Pennsylvania, after an absence of eleven years, with her six-year-old daughter, and her ensuing romance with Sean Fraser. In the exegesis I explore the issue of female oppression and empowerment via the figure of the single mother heroine in the contemporary American romance novel. The situation of a lone woman raising a child on her own automatically brings to the fore questions surrounding gender roles, ideas of the family, and equality between the sexes. Referencing a corpus of ten contemporary romance novels, I investigate how these single-mother heroines are portrayed, and ask whether these depictions can be considered either empowering or oppressive to women. A granular analysis of the corpus revealed the ideological inconsistency of the genre. There were novels that provided a direct protest against patriarchal oppression by dramatizing the injustices a patriarchal society inflicts upon a single-mother heroine, while others subscribed fiercely to traditional gender roles and models, and in some cases there were novels that did both, highlighting the genre’s complexity. My research demonstrates that, while the romance genre is too big and unwieldy to be called either feminist or anti-feminist, it is possible for individual romance novels to incorporate a feminist ethos. This research directly influenced the manner in which I reworked and edited The Valentine Wars in an attempt to create a complex feminist novel.
- Subject
- romance; feminism; creative writing; genre fiction
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1407961
- Identifier
- uon:35797
- Rights
- Copyright 2019 Therese Dryden
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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