The romance novel has the strange distinction of being the most popular but least respected of literary genres. While it remains consistently dominant in bookstores and on best-seller lists, it is also widely dismissed by the critical community. Scholars have alleged that romance novels help create subservient readers, who are largely women, by confining heroines to stories that ignore issues other than love and marriage.

Pamela Regis argues that such critical studies fail to take into consideration the personal choice of readers, offer any true definition of the romance novel, or...

Describing Early America is a study of William Bartram's Travels, Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, and J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer that situates them within two important intellectual traditions: the literature of travel and the science of natural history. Pamela Regis contends that the travel genre provided the narrative framework on which these texts were built, but that natural history offered much more: a way of looking at the world, a way of describing what the authors saw, and an overarching scheme...