When you pick up the latest Emily Henry novel, or settle in for an evening with the newest volume of your favorite romantasy, you are taking part in a process stretching back two millennia. The ancient Greeks considered it a highlight of one's life to hear with one's own ears the words of the great romantic poets of their day. The Romans enjoyed sprawling romantic epics that only reunited their lovers after continent-spanning struggles against foreign armies, pirates, and treacherous monarchs. The Middle Ages sung hushed stories of lust far from the ears of the Church, while its great poets probed the darker boundaries of courtly love, and the writers of the seventeenth century delighted in giving young women ten-volume romances, delivered over the course of a decade, to fill their bookshelves and lonely hours. Writing about love, its complexities, and resolutions, has been a part of the literary tradition since its inception, but it is only in the last three centuries that the format has grown into the publishing juggernaut we know today. From the intensely observed novels of Jane Austen, through the great Sensation Novels of the 1860s that fused romance and mystery, and into the great industrial and marketing machine that was Mills & Boon and Harlequin at their height, new developments in publishing have linked up with new ideas about womanhood, sex, and romance, to produce an ever-evolving approach to the romance novel, culminating in our own modern Golden Age, where more people from more backgrounds are writing more types of romance than ever before for a readership than is larger than it has ever been, and is consuming its favourite literary form in convenient new formats. A History of Romance Novels: From Trembling Innocents to Hunky Werewolves explores the long story of our love affair with love stories, during both its eras of creative flourishing, and the long periods of industrially motivated stagnation, to give even the most dedicated romance reader a few new veins to mine, and a few more characters to fall in love with. AUTHOR: Dale DeBakcsy has spent the last quarter of a century collecting stories from forgotten corners of history and bringing them to life. In 2013, he founded the Women in Science Archive as a permanent home for rigorous but readable profiles of the great women scientists of yesterday and today, many of which have found their way into the four collections of Trailblazing Women in STEM books he has written for Pen & Sword. His other great interest is in the realm of intellectual history, particularly how cultural movements interface with the large-scale social structures of their eras. To this end, he has written about the history of philosophy (Godless Nerdistry, A Cartoon History of Humanism), music (A History of Women in Music), and literature (Trembling Innocents and Lonely Nurses: A History of the Romance Novel). His most recent title is an analysis of all of Elton John's albums (Elton John: Album By Album), the culmination of 35 years of being an Elton superfan. When not writing or teaching, Dale can be found at home with his wife, cat, and chicken in Castro Valley, California, and every so often on the plains of Azeroth, doing the just business of the Horde. 12 b/w illustrations
