Women Writers and the Hero of Romance [Hardcover]

Women Writers and the Hero of Romance studies the nature of the hero and his meaning for the female seeker, or quester, in romance fiction from Wuthering Heights to Fifty Shades of Grey. The book includes chapters on Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Sheik, and the novels of Ayn Rand and Dorothy Dunnett.Acknowledgements Preface: In the Place of a Hero 1. Wuthering Heights: A Romance of Metaphysical Intent 2. Middlemarch: A Romance of Diffusion 3. Exotic Romance: the Doubled Hero in The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Sheik 4. The Hero as Expert: Ayn Rand's Romances of Choice 5. The Hero in 'Gouvernance': Family Romance in the Novels of Dorothy Dunnett Conclusion: Kingdoms of Romance in Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey Bibliography

Always incomparable, Judith Wilt has never been better. This revisionist genre study not of heroes or heroines exactly, but of hero-worship in a certain strain of romance fiction, is learned, scrupulous, wide-ranging, witty, confident, and captivating, full of more ideas per chapter than in many whole books, inhabiting the novels at issue from the inside out with a tenacious charm of exposition that renders a potentially controversial argument as disarming as it is startling. Garrett Stewart, James O. Freedman Professor of Letters, University of Iowa, USA

[A] provocative monograph.... engaging M. E. Burstein, CHOICE

Judith Wilt is the Newton College Alumni Chair Emerita at Boston College, USA. She has written books on George Meredith, Walter Scott, and Mary Arnold Ward, as well as the theme studies Ghosts of the Gothic, and Abortion, Choice, and Contemporary Fiction.