The Uses of Closure. Some thoughts on Happily Ever After.

I have been disdainful of romance and erotic romance, and yet it is undeniable that it brings a huge number of women, and no small number of men, joy. These people are not idiots. They are not intellectual midgets who cannot cope with writing that reflects the harsher realities of the human condition. The sheer number of romance readers puts lie to the myth 1 I owe a debt of gratitude to Sarah Frantz, of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance for setting me a scholarly and intellectual challenge: to write about the functions of the 'happily ever after' ending in erotic romance and erotic fiction. She encouraged me to look at the conventions of romance  – not as an inhibition to creativity – but as instruments that perform their functions so precisely that romance outsells all other genres by orders of magnitude. This challenge has entailed reading a lot of romantic erotica, a lot of academic writing on the romance novel and delving back into the literary theorists to see if I could some new ways to frame the discourse. Umberto Eco would say, without a doubt, that a HEA ending is an almost pristine example [...]