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- Title
“Like Bush Fire in My Arms”: Interrogating the World of Caribbean Romance.
- Authors
Morgan, Paula
- Abstract
The early 1990s added a new event to the Caribbean literary scene. Caribbean authors have been ushered into "a world of Caribbean Romance," mass-produced fiction in a Caribbean Caresses series commissioned by multinational sellers of romances. These include the interplay between the formulaic narrative and the individual expressions offered by the Caribbean writers; the fictional portrayals of gender constructs and their impact on the negotiation of heterosexual unions within this diverse social milieu. The romance in its myriad forms has faced criticism based on moral issues, its power to seduce the individual into "applying its values, appropriate enough to the artificial world treated by the writer, to a real world in which pain has genuine sharpness and the romantic pose is little more than a pallid gesture." The traditional romance novel encodes submission to sadism and suffering as the appropriate avenue to prepare a young girl for adulthood. The ultimate objective of the romance novel is marriage, which is associated with the relinquishment of any sense of autonomy and acceptance of a severely circumscribed role limited exclusively to the domestic sphere.
- Subjects
WEST Indies; ROMANTICISM in literature; CARIBBEAN literature; COMMUNICATION; SADISM in literature; CIVILIZATION
- Publication
Journal of Popular Culture, 2003, Vol 36, Issue 4, p804
- ISSN
1540-5931
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/1540-5931.00046