Special Topics Paper - Romance through History

For my special topics paper, I decided to do a deep dive into romance throughout history to get a better understanding of where the romance genre has been, where we are now, and how we got from then to now. I mostly wanted to stay within a certain range and thought it best not to go too far, so I decided to go only so far as the 1900s for my research. Here's a bit of an idea of where we went from the 1900s to now.

In the 1920s, we had a surge of regency books, where Jane Austin made a comeback 100 years after her stories, but that didn't have as much detail about the time period since they were written during that period, but we had several other authors who wrote books with more details about that time period in their writing. We also had romance books covering some scandalous topics, such as premarital consummation and abortions.

Moving into the 1950s and 1960s, we started to see many romance books portraying financially responsible women who have jobs and want a compassionate marriage between them and their partner, being that they both share equal responsibility in their household and marriage. We also see a few LGBTQIA+ books pop up covering relationships that are not the conventional heterosexual relationship for the time period. It gave others the ability to not feel so alone and to explore their relationships and how they thought about others romantically, but these books also portrayed the negative side, being that very few accepted relationships that weren't considered the heterosexual norm for the time.

Looking at the 1970s to the 1980s, we start to see short stories and books set in the West. This goes to show more focus on the relationship between the two in the book since they have to work together out in the West since they are so isolated. The short story format also shows how the world was changing, that life in general had gotten busier, and that more and more people were moving into the workforce, which the book industry made books for easy convince by creating shorter stories and creating them as pocketbooks, or books that are made to fit in your pocket.

Following into the 1990s, we started to see more books portray women in working positions and being on an equal playing field as men, and that both of them working business people, and that there can be friction between them. This is where we start to see the stories of dislike and distrust in the beginning and our characters coming to care for each other from mutual understanding. We also see many adventure stories portraying these characters pop up, as well as many portraying fantasy and science fiction as well. 

Overall, we have built up our romance stories to today, and we still portray a lot of these kinds of parts in our stories from the past. The romance genre is always changing, and what is popular now may not be popular in the future, but we can see where the genre has come from in the past hundred years, and we can see where it continues to grow from here.