This Decal Course focuses on the contemporary romance genre—a genre that publishes and sells more books than any other but receives little respect from literary and academic critics. Emphasizing romance literature’s reflection of the culture that produces and consumes it, this course aims to develop a scholarly analysis of contemporary romance. By situating selected romance novels in their contexts of production and consumption as well as critical reception, this course will provide a framework for understanding why romance novels have been and often remain the object of ridicule, why people still read them, and what they reveal about US-American culture.