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This book explores the poetics of contemporary romantic fiction, but in a way that reveals the real reader as an active, culturally competent subject. In its analysis, it shows that the genre borrows the narrative elements of the realist bourgeois novel - the conventions of time, place and individual characterisation - but appropriates them in such a way as to redeploy them within a preordained and constant narrative structure of more ancient forms. The narrative constantly oscillates between the IS of experience and the OUGHT of what bourgeois society promised women and invariably failed to provide. The quest, therefore, is not for the man but for esteem/recognition, and the villain is society. The romantic novel is a singular combination of fantasy and reality, tradition and experience, both collective and individual, and the success of the genre depends on its ability to reflect and articulate the reader's aspirations for a better life and to stand at the same time as a testament to the reader's alienation.