Abstract
This chapter investigates the changing character of contemporary romance through the immensely popular works of Danielle Steel. Victorian lines drawn between family and corporation, self and marketplace, have long provided propulsion for the romance formula. In Steel’s universe, however, readers experience an erasure of these lines. The notion of love becomes inseparable from the machinations of high finance. This chapter investigates how Steel dramatically alters the contemporary romance (and reader expectations that in turn extend beyond the confines of these novels).
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Works Cited
Becker, Gary. “A Theory of Marriage,” in Economics of the Family: Marriage, Children, and Human Capital. Ed. Thomas Scultz (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 299–351.
———. “A Theory of Social Interactions.” The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 82, No. 6 (November–December 1974), pp. 1063–1093.
Benham, Lee. “Benefits of Women’s Education Within Marriage,” in Economics of the Family: Marriage, Children, and Human Capital. Ed. Thomas Scultz (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 375–394.
Bergeron, Suzanne. “Governing Gender in Neoliberal Restructuring: Economics, Performativity, and Social Reproduction,” in Gender and Global Restructuring: Sightings, Sites, and Resistances. Eds. Marianne H. Marchand and Anne Sisson Runyan (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 66–78.
Boltanski, Luc and Eve Chiapello. The New Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Gregory Elliott (New York: Verso, 2007).
Bown, Alfie. Advancing Conversations: Srećko Horvat Subversion! (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2017).
Brockling, Ulrich. The Entrepreneurial Self: Fabricating a New Type of Subject (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2015).
Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2015).
Cawelti, John. Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1977).
Clune, Michael. American Literature and the Free Market, 1945–2000 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Comaroff, Jean. “The Politics of Conviction: Faith on the Neo-liberal Frontier,” in Contemporary Religiosities: Emergent Socialities and the Post-Nation-State. Eds. Bruce Kapfereer et al. (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010).
Di Leo, Jeffrey and Uppinder Mehan. “Introduction: The Wrath of Capital,” in Capital at the Brink: Overcoming the Destructive Legacies of Neoliberalism (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Publishing, 2014), pp. 11–30.
Drucker, Peter. Managing Oneself (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Press, 2008).
Ehrenreich, Barbara. Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America (New York: Picador, 2010).
Ellis, Kate Ferguson. The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1989).
Elson, Diane. “Talking to the Boys: Gender and Economic Growth Models,” in Feminist Visions of Development. Eds. C. Jackson and R. Pearson (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 155–171.
Feiner, Susan. “Toward an Erotic Economy of Sharing,” in Out of the Margin: Feminist Perspectives on Economics. Eds. Edith Kuiper and Jolande Sap (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 151–166.
Freiden, Alan. “The U.S. Marriage Market,” in Economics of the Family: Marriage, Children, and Human Capital. Ed. Thomas Scultz (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 352–374.
Gilbert, Jeremy. “What Kind of Thing is ‘Neoliberalism’?” New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics, Vol. 80, No. 80 (2013), pp. 7–22.
Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto,” in Cultural Studies Reader: Third Edition. Ed. Simon During (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 314–337.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011).
Hengehold, Laura. The Body Problematic: Political Imagination in Kant and Foucault (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2010).
Hinnant, Charles H. “Desire and the Marketplace: A Reading of Kathleen Woodiwis’s The Flame and the Flower,” in Doubled Plots: Romance and History. Eds. Susan Strehle and Mary Paniccia Carden (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), pp. 147–164.
Horvat, Srećko. The Radicality of Love (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2016).
Illouz, Eva. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (New York: Polity, 2007).
James, Robin. Resilience & Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism (New York: Zero Books, 2015).
Jameson, Fredric. Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1992).
———. “Culture and Finance Capital.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Autumn 1997), pp. 246–265.
Jones, Ann Rosalind. “Mill & Boon Meets Feminism,” in The Progress of Romance: The Politics of Popular Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1986), pp. 195–218.
Kamble, Jayashree. Making Meaning in Popular Romance Fiction: An Epistemology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
Kanter, Rosabeth Moss. When Giants Learn to Dance (New York: Free Press, 1990).
Koritz, Amy and Douglas Koritz. “Symbolic Economics: Adventures in the Metaphorical Marketplace,” in The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Interface of Literature and Economics. Eds. Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 408–420.
Lindisfarne, Nancy and Jonathan Neale. “Masculinities and the Lived Experience of Neoliberalism,” in Masculinities Under Neoliberalism. Eds. Andrea Cornwall, Frank G. Karioris, and Nancy Lindisfarne (London, UK: Zed Books, 2016), pp. 29–51.
Lovink, Geert. Networks Without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media (New York: Polity, 2012).
Makovicky, Nicolette. “Me, Inc.? Untangling Neoliberalism, Personhood, and Postsocialism,” in Neoliberalism, Personhood, and Postsocialism: Enterprising Selves in Changing Economies (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 1–17.
Martin, Emily. “Flexible Survivors.” Cultural Values, Vol. 1, No. 4 (October 2000), pp. 512–517.
Millman, Marcia. Warm Hearts and Cold Cash: The Intimate Dynamics of Families and Money (New York: Free Press, 1991).
Modleski, Tania. Loving with a Vengeance: Mass Produced Fantasies for Women (New York: Routledge, 2007).
Peck, Janice. The Age of Oprah: Cultural Icon for the Neoliberal Era (New York: Routledge, 2008).
Phipps, Alison. The Politics of the Body: Gender in a Neoliberal and Neoconservative Age (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2014).
Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press).
Regis, Pamela. A Natural History of the Romance Novel (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
Ritzer, George and Nathan Jurgenson. “Production, Consumption, Prosumption: The Nature of Capitalism in the Age of the Digital ‘Prosumer’.” Journal of Consumer Culture, Vol. 10, No. 1 (2010), pp. 13–36.
Rivers, Caryl and Rosalind C. Barnett. The New Soft War on Women: How the Myth of Female Ascendance Is Hurting Women, Men—And Our Economy (New York: TarcherPerigree, 2015).
Roach, Catherine. Happily Ever After: The Romance Story in Popular Culture (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2016).
Rodgers, Daniel T. The Work Ethic in Industrial America 1850–1920 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1979).
Rose, Nikolas. Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Sandel, Michael. What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of the Market (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013).
Schultz, Thomas. Investing in People: The Economics of Population Quality (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982).
Sedlacek, Tomas. Economics of Good and Evil: The Quest for Economic Meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Street (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Smith, Rachel Greenwald. Affect and American Literature in the Age of American Literature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Soros, George. “The Worst Market Crisis in 60 Years.” Financial Times, 22 January 2008, https://www.georgesoros.com/essays/the_worst_market_crisis_in_60_years/. Accessed 20 July 2017.
Spillman, K. Elizabeth. “The ‘Managing Female’ in the Novels of Georgette Heyer,” in New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction. Eds. Sarah S.G. Frantz and Eric Murphy Selinger (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2012), pp. 84–99.
Steel, Danielle. Full Circle (New York: Dell, 1985).
———. Heartbeat (New York: Delacorte Press, 1991).
———. Five Days in Paris (New York: Delacorte Press, 1995).
———. Irresistible Forces (New York: Dell, 2000).
———. The Wedding (New York: Dell, 2001).
———. Coming Out (New York: Dell, 2007).
———. Power Play (New York: Dell, 2015).
———. Magic (New York: Dell, 2017).
———. The Mistress. (New York: Dell, 2017).
———. Past Perfect (New York: Delacorte Press, 2017).
Streeck, Wolfgang. How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System (New York: Verso, 2016).
Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds (Norwell, MA: Anchor, 2005).
Toffler, Alvin. The Third Wave (New York: Bantam Books, 1980).
Ventura, Patricia. Neoliberal Culture: Living with American Neoliberalism (New York: Routledge, 2012).
Vivanco, Laura. Pursuing Happiness: Reading American Romance as Political Fiction (Penrith, CA: Humanities-EBooks LLP, 2016).
Walzer, Michael. Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
Weisser, Susan Ostrov. The Glass Slipper: Women and Love Stories (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013).
Zwick, D., et al. “Putting Consumers to Work: Co-creation and New Marketing Govern-Mentality.” Journal of Consumer Culture, Vol. 8, No. 1 (2008), pp. 163–196.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Blouin, M.J. (2018). Danielle Steel and New Home Economics. In: Mass-Market Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism, 1972–2017. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89387-7_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89387-7_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-89386-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-89387-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)