Shakespeare, in the Tempest and Midv1_ixsummer Night’s Dream
Despite the comparison of these Shakespeare plays to Greek tragic poetry, The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream are romances, not tragedies. Nonetheless, both romance and tragedy are genres to which this novel is deeply indebted.
As sociologists, we study and teach about women’s devalued place in society. But the stigma against the romance genre is so strong that even our background as scholars in the sociology of gender wasn’t enough to inoculate us against the stigma. If anyone was going to know better, it should have been us.
Greyson and Lois establish the pervasive and deeply ingrained pejorative attitude toward the popular romance novel. Admit their own assumptions about the genre mirrored that of our culture.