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According to Barrett-Fox and Donnelly, the term “inspirational romance” is used by U.S. booksellers to refer to romances “targeted at conservative, evangelical, Protestants” (2021: 192) and it is “synonymous, in terms of marketing in bookstores, with ‘Christian romances’” (2021: 206). Kenneth Paradis has more generally defined inspirational fiction (therefore including romances and other types of narratives) as a group of novels that can be read “homiletically, not as replacements for scripture, but as lenses that can mediate and focus certain aspects of scripture, guiding its integration into readers’ lives” (2020: 76; emphasis in the original), hence the use of the term “inspirational” to refer to them. Besides, Paradis, like Barrett-Fox and Donnelly, has pointed out that inspirational fiction constitutes a genre in which “the characters spend a lot less time having, or fantasizing about, or talking about, sex, and, instead, spend a lot more time worrying about the relationship of their romantic lives to their spiritual lives and its moral entailments” (2020: 73). However, some inspirational romances happen to deviate from the general rule that sex and taboo issues such as rape, abortion, murder or infidelity should not be dealt with; these have sometimes been grouped under the label “edgy inspirationals,” which I will also make use of.

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