Re:Why Are So Many Romances Set in the Regency Period?
by TheOtherHobbes on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @10:13AM
(#26014303)
#BLM has challenged that period in the UK and US. And it was a terrible period, with those vast idyllic country estates being built on the backs of slavery abroad and Enclosure of common land at home.
Slavery is being acknowledged now, but the Enclosures still don't figure in the national narrative.
But Regency Romance has been a money spinning genre for a very long time, and it's not more popular now than it used to be.
Nor is there any evidence of conscious narrative control by editors and publishers. There's far more evidence of that elsewhere - for example in both the mytho-feminist and techno-dystopian ends of contemporary SF.
But it's actually most obvious in period and class-specific movies and soaps, which the UK specialises in, and which are a very different genre to romantic fiction.
Here's the creator of Downton Abbey. He's now working on a US equivalent called - unsurprisingly - The Gilded Age. Could he possibly have an angle to sell?
Slavery is being acknowledged now, but the Enclosures still don't figure in the national narrative.
But Regency Romance has been a money spinning genre for a very long time, and it's not more popular now than it used to be.
Nor is there any evidence of conscious narrative control by editors and publishers. There's far more evidence of that elsewhere - for example in both the mytho-feminist and techno-dystopian ends of contemporary SF.
But it's actually most obvious in period and class-specific movies and soaps, which the UK specialises in, and which are a very different genre to romantic fiction.
Here's the creator of Downton Abbey. He's now working on a US equivalent called - unsurprisingly - The Gilded Age. Could he possibly have an angle to sell?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Fellowes