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Creating Identity: The Popular Romance Heroine’s Journey to Selfhood and Self-Presentation

Friday, September 22, 2023 | 6pm to 7:30pm

25 West 43rd Street, 10th Floor, Room 1000
between 5th & 6th Avenues, Manhattan

In Creating Identity, Prof. Jayashree Kamblé examines the romance genre, with its sensile flexibility in retaining what audiences find desirable and discarding what is not, by asking an important question: “Who is the romance heroine, and what does she want?” To find the answer, Kamblé explores how heroines in ten novels reject societal labels and instead remake themselves on their own terms with their own agency. Using a truly intersectional approach, Kamblé combines gender and sexuality, Marxism, critical race theory, and literary criticism to survey various aspects of heroines’ identities, such as sexuality, gender, work, citizenship, and race.

Ideal for readers interested in gender studies and literary criticism, Creating Identity highlights a genre in which heroines do not accept that independence and strong, loving relationships are mutually exclusive but instead demand both, echoing the call from the very readers who have made this genre so popular.

Purchase Book: https://iupress.org/9780253065704/creating-identity/

Author Bio

Jayashree Kamblé is Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College/CUNY. Prof. Kamblé is the author of Making Meaning in Popular Romance Fiction: An Epistemology (2014) and co-editor of the Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction (2021). She serves as the President of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance. After completing her second book, Creating Identity: The Popular Romance Heroine's Journey to Selfhood and Self-Presentation (Indiana University Press, 2023), she is now working on a history of BIPOC romance, with the research supported by an American Council of Learned Societies/Mellon fellowship and CUNY Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies grant.