Pierini, F. (December, 2020). Olive Skin, Chocolate Eyes: The Legacy of The Sheik on Descriptive Patterns of the Italian Romantic Hero in Harlequin Short Contemporaries. Journal of Popular Romance Studies, 9.
The author examines current Harlequin short contemporaries and contends that the Italian male hero serves as the designated indicator of otherness, in both positive and negative ways, within this category. In this paper she claimed that Harlequin short contemporaries are a literary category in which conventional Western perceptions of Middle Eastern cultures collide with popular ideas about Southern European machismo.
The author uses E.M. Hull’s The Sheik (1919) as a text of reference for the construction of Arab and Southern European male exoticism. This paper represented a set of narrative patterns about Italian heroes that are unique to the literary descriptions, which stage an endless series of charming and wealthy winemakers with exotic accents and large families, as well as a series of traditional and time-honored images about the mysterious, alluring but unreliable nature of Italian romantic hero.
This literary analysis highlighted the intersection of popular notions about Southern European machismo and typical literary stereotypes about Middle Eastern cultures based on their presumed discontinuity with other cultures of the modern world. The author looks at how Italian heroes are portrayed based on a complicated mix of gender, ethnicity, nationality, and culture.