Description: An in-depth exploration of the key themes and changing cultural contexts of television romantic comedy, emphasising the central significance of women across the genre's development.
Brief description: Claire Nally is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature in the Department of English Literature, Linguistics and Creative Writing at Northumbria University, UK. She is the author of Steampunk: Gender, Subculture and the Neo-Victorian (Bloomsbury, 2019), co-editor or Bloomsbury Library of Gender and Popular Culture and Deputy Editor (including reviews) of the open access journal C21 Literature.
Review Quotes:
"This accessible study gives valuable visibility to a wide range of broadcast TV series chronically neglected as worthy of study. By unpicking different televisual narratives' significance in mediating an elusive tissue of everyday coupling relations and gender roles, Irwin simultaneously rescues women's stories of the post-second wave feminist moment from obscurity, both on and behind the screen. For these reasons and more, Love Wars offers an engaging read to fans as much as scholars." --Mary Harrod, Professor of French and Screen Studies, University of Warwick, UK
"Mary Irwin's Love Wars builds a corpus of the television romantic comedy that helps scholars understand the overlooked and underappreciated role the genre plays in television history." --Alison Wielgus, University of Wisconsin-Superior, USA "In this much-needed evaluation of television romantic comedy, Irwin draws together the threads of comedy and romance, along with the characteristics and situations of the rom-com genre across decades, to re-evaluate the cultures and reconsider the contexts of the time. Overall, this engaging and thoughtful monograph will be useful to a variety of media, screen, cultural history and gender scholars." --Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television