Читать книгу American Quaker Romances. Building the Myth of the White Christian Nation онлайн

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For their part, secular Quaker romances differ from Christian romances in that they are not restricted by the “closed-door” treatment to sexual acts, that is, they may be much opener in their depiction of sexual scenes, and their characters may also be more progressive in their behavior, the roles they perform and the moral principles that guide them. Their relationship with God may be outstanding, and their focus on the restorative power of faith of paramount importance, too, but there are also many cases of secular romances in which the characters’ belonging to the Religious Society of Friends only appears as a marker of exoticism, mentioned here and there and soon forgotten, because their faith adds little value to the characters’ motivations.

Within the romance industry, so-called inspirational or Christian romances are considered one of the bestselling subgenres (Barrett-Fox 2016: 348). In economic terms, the Christian market may be a “relatively thin slice of the romance market,” but Christian romance publishing is nevertheless “a vibrant one” (Markert 2016: 207), said to generate “upwards of $50 million in annual sales, which is not an insignificant sum” (Markert 2016: 261). Christian houses “initially entered the romance field in the mid- to late 1980s in response to the overt sexuality of secular romances flooding the market during the height of the romance revolution in the early to mid-1980s” (Markert 2016: 207-208). Matthew Kapell and Suzanne Becker concur that “[t]he rise in acceptance of IRF [Inspirational romance fiction] was the result of a backlash among fundamentalist Christians against the onslaught of sexual permissiveness” and the “growing feminist movement” that advocated women’s right to move out of domesticity and “into the workplace with equal status to men” (2005: 151). Similarly, Barrett-Fox and Donnelly agree that it was in the 1980s that Christian romances underwent a transformation caused by major changes in American society: