A Review of Francesca Pierini’s Romancing Literature

Book Reviewed: Pierini, F. (2026). Romancing Literature: When Literary Fiction Meets Genre. Routledge. 124 pp. ISBN: 978-1041289821.

PDF Version.

If you study love, you have likely run into an invisible wall separating high literature from popular romance. The cultural models of love they reflect dictate which expressions of love, affection, passion, desire, and relationships are worthy of intellectual study and which are dismissed as lowbrow sentimentality.

Francesca Pierini’s book offers researchers across sociology, psychology, gender studies, and history a powerful new insight. She exposes how the boundary separating elite “literary fiction” from popular “genre romance” is not a measure of artistic or scholarly truth but a socially constructed hierarchy built on gender and class biases. For anyone seeking to understand how society dictates whose romantic experiences and expressions matter, Pierini’s work provides an essential analytical lens.

Beyond the High-Culture Gaze: How Literary Hierarchies Shape the Narrative Representation of Romantic Love

What makes one story about romantic love a “masterpiece of the human condition,” while another depicting similar emotional terrain is dismissed as “mere formulaic romance”? In this book, Francesca Pierini offers an exploration of how cultural institutions assign prestige to stories centered on romantic love, relationships, longing, and domestic life.

Pierini’s work in cultural studies, gender studies, and genre theory shows that the line between highbrow literary fiction and popular romance is not at all neutral. Instead, it is actively constructed through what literary fiction systematically rejects: the overtly emotional, the commercial, and the historically feminine.

For researchers across disciplines—whether studying pair-bonding in psychology, social distinction in sociology, or gender dynamics in history—Pierini’s book illustrates how cultural power structures dictate which expressions of romantic love are taken seriously.

Love on the Genre–Gender Axis

Pierini reveals that highbrow literature frequently secures its status through a process of active disavowal. To gain high-art legitimacy, a novel must distance itself from popular romance tropes, even when romantic love forms its central plot. For instance, by analyzing Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018), Pierini demonstrates how modern literary novels adopt the exact structural beats of popular romance while concealing them under the banner of literary realism. By stripping away the “romance” label, gatekeepers signal that romantic love is only worthy of intellectual attention when it is sanitized of popular, female-coded conventions.

For interdisciplinary researchers, this uncovers a subtle form of cultural policing: the emotional labor, vulnerability, and negotiation inherent in romantic relationships are validated only when framed through an elite, intellectualized lens.

Internal Literary Divides and the Decolonization Agenda

Pierini also expands current debates on decolonizing academic curricula and cultural institutions. While decolonization efforts rightly focus on dismantling Eurocentric power structures, Pierini argues that researchers must also examine internal divides within Western cultural production—specifically, how hierarchies between high art and popular culture replicate social inequality.

By policing the boundary of what constitutes “legitimate” art, gatekeepers dictate whose romantic lives warrant serious empathy. Popular romance novels—consumed by millions worldwide—frequently prioritize female pleasure, mutual care, and explicit emotional resolution. Dismissing these books devalues their predominantly female and working-class readership while narrowing our collective understanding of how romantic love is practiced and imagined across different social groups.

Decentering the High-Culture Gaze

Rather than evaluating popular narratives through the customary lens of traditional literary criticism, Pierini approaches her subject through genre scholarship. She treats popular romantic narratives as legitimate objects of study in their own right.

Examining global cultural trends—from dual-timeline narrative structures following A.S. Byatt’s Possession (1990) to the international digital fandom of Erin Doom’s The Tearsmith (2021)—Pierini tracks how romantic tropes circulate across borders. This cross-cultural reach demonstrates that the narrative demand for emotional safety, passion, and partnership transcends geographic boundaries. When researchers look past high-art biases, popular romance emerges as a rich site for studying how modern audiences navigate relationship ideals, emotional trauma, and romantic ethics.

Why Pierini’s Framework Matters for Love Studies

Francesca Pierini’s Romancing Literature is a timely call to dismantle “the wall separating literature for everyone from literature for women.” By showing how the divide between literary fiction and popular romance is deeply entwined with gender politics, the author provides an indispensable toolkit for contemporary critique.

For any researcher of romantic love, this book serves as a vital reminder: the stories a culture chooses to honor—or marginalize—profoundly shape how society defines, regulates, and values romantic partnership itself.

Literary Hierarchies as Reflections of Cultural Models of Love

Francesca Pierini’s core content in this book perfectly illustrates Victor Karandashev’s theoretical framework on the cultural models of romantic love. Karandashev defines cultural models of love as shared, culturally constructed systems of beliefs, values, norms, and emotional scripts that dictate how love is conceptualized, experienced, expressed, and evaluated within a given society or subculture. Rather than treating romantic love as a purely spontaneous or universal emotion, Karandashev demonstrates that cultural contexts provide specific cognitive and behavioral frameworks through which love is rendered meaningful or legitimate (Karandashev, 2017; 2022).

Importantly, these cultural models are not neutral; they are deeply tied to socio-economic classes and social groups. Different social strata prioritize distinct emotional and relational scripts:

• Elite and Higher-Status Classes: Often lean toward cultural models that privilege intellectualization, individual autonomy, existential nuance, and emotional self-control, viewing overt sentimentality or predictable narrative structures with skepticism.
• Working- and Middle-Class Groups: Frequently value cultural models that center emotional safety, explicit relational labor, mutual commitment, and practical, socio-economic stability—qualities that directly address the everyday precarity of working- and middle-class life.

How the “High-Culture Gaze” Polices Emotional Scripts

Pierini’s Romancing Literature powerfully illustrates how social literary hierarchies—what she terms the “high-culture gaze”—polices and reinforces these class-coded cultural models:

• Sanitizing Love through High Art: When romantic dynamics are written about under the badge of “literary fiction” (e.g., Sally Rooney’s Normal People or A.S. Byatt’s Possession), they align with elite cultural models. The narrative is rewarded with critical prestige because the romantic investment is framed through irony, existential angst, or stylistic complexity.
• Marginalizing Popular Romance: Conversely, popular genre romance openly embraces explicit happy endings, formulaic tropes, and intense emotional vulnerability. Because these tropes mirror the pragmatic and emotionally reassuring cultural models of broader social groups, elite gatekeepers dismiss them as “vulgar,” “commercial,” or “formulaic.”

Therefore, we ca see that Pierini’s analysis reveals that the cultural boundary surrounding popular romance is not merely a debate over aesthetic quality. It is a form of socio-economic and cultural policing: literary institutions grant legitimacy to romantic love only when it is mediated by an elite, high-status lens, while delegitimizing the emotional scripts that resonate most deeply with popular audiences.

References

• Byatt, A. S. (1990). Possession: A romance. Vintage.
• Doom, E. (2021). The tearsmith (M. Bastide, Trans.). Penguin Random House.
• Karandashev, V. (2017). Romantic love in cultural contexts. Springer.
• Karandashev, V. (2022). Cultural typologies of love. Springer.
• Pierini, F. (2026). Romancing Literature: When Literary Fiction Meets Genre. Routledge.
• Rooney, S. (2018). Normal People. Faber & Faber.