Emotionality: Heterosexual Love and Emotional Development in Popular Romance

This book focuses on the projections of romantic love and its progression in a selection of popular romance novels and identifies an innovation within the genre’s formula and structure. Taking into account Giddens’s notion of ’confluent’ love, this book argues that two forms of love exist within these texts: romantic and confluent love. The analysis of these love variants suggests that a continuum emerges which signifies the complexity but also the formation and progressive nature of the protagonists’ love relationships. This continuum is divided into three stages: the pre-personal, semi-personal, and personal. The first phase connotes the introduction of the protagonists and describes the sexual attraction they experience for each other. The second phase refers to the initiation of the sexual interaction between the heroine and hero without any emotional involvement. The third and final phase begins when emotions such as jealousy, shame/guilt, anger, and self-sacrifice are awakened and acknowledged.

Eirini Arvanitaki received her PhD from the University of Hull. Since then, she has taught at the University of Hull, the University of Liverpool, the Hellenic Mediterranean University, and the University of Cyprus. Currently, she is teaching at the Hellenic Open University (School of Social Sciences). She has served as an Evaluator Expert of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships and has participated in several EU-funded projects. Her research interests lie in the fields of Gender, Sociology, Social Policy, Popular Romance Fiction, Gender Studies, Feminism, Cultural Sociology, and English Literature. She is the author of Masculinities in Post-Millennial Popular Romance (Routledge) and a co-editor of three books on pay gap between genders and working women and motherhood.