Happily Ever After

<p>Find your one true love and live happily ever after. The trials of love and desire provide perennial story material from the Biblical <i>Song of Songs</i> to Disney's princesses but perhaps most provocatively in the romance novel a genre known for tales of fantasy and desire sex and pleasure. Hailed on the one hand for its women-centered stories that can be sexually liberating and criticized on the other for its emphasis on male/female coupling and mythical happy endings romance fiction is a multi-million dollar publishing phenomenon creating national and international societies of enthusiasts practitioners and scholars. Catherine M. Roach alongside her romance-writer alter-ego Catherine LaRoche guides the reader deep into Romancelandia where the smart and the witty combine with the sexy and seductive to explore why this genre has such a grip on readers and what we can learn from the romance novel about the nature of happiness love sex and desire in American popular culture.</p>