Fatal Attractions: Rescripting Romance in Contemporary Literature & Film

Our apparently indestructible fascination with romance and its various cultural representations has, so far, been inadequately reflected in academic study across the disciplines. This original collection on the ‘rescripting’ of romance in popular culture redresses the imbalance by focusing on the changing nature of the genre in film and fiction.Fatal Attractions consider the cultural representation of romance in the wake of postmodernism and postcolonialism and offers clear evidence of romance as a ‘category under stress’. The contemporary nature of the texts discussed – such as Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction and Hotel du Lac – places it at the centre of many state-of-the-art debates concerning identity, gender, sexuality and desire. Viewing romance in the context of queer theory and AIDS, and challenging many popular psychoanalytic concepts such as ‘abjection’, the collection also makes a significant contribution to feminist and gay/lesbian discussions on the politics of romantic love.'Love is eternal, or so they say. This collection of fifteen original essays explores changing representations of romance in contemporary fiction, with particular attention paid to those texts which appear to challenge or subvert the institutionalized ideology of love: white boy meets and marries white girl, and they live happily ever after...the diverse mix of literary, film and occasional television texts offers some stimulating alternative approaches: feminist writing and criticism; postcolonial theory; queer theory; lesbian writing; and psychoanalytic structures of desire.' Kathrina Glitre, University of Reading for Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies