Review: Love Stories Now and Then. A History of Les romans d’amour, by Marie-Piere Luneau and Jean-Phillipe Warren

Grounded in bibliographical research, Love Stories Now and Then includes more than 100 romance novels, and thoughtful, contextualized descriptions and interpretations.It offers English-speaking readers a glimpse into French-Canadian (Québécois) romance novels, and works from France, England, and the United States which dominated the Québécois romance corpus and influenced its development.(Located in Eastern Canada, the province of Quebec houses approximately one quarter of Canada's population.)Insisting that love is not that spontaneous and free, Luneau's and Warren's (2024) book consists of six chapters, a preface to the English Edition, conclusion, and notes.The authors provide a comprehensive survey from the 1830s onwards, giving marginalized French-Canadian writers, especially those from the province of Quebec, a voice.To keep this romance genre as circumscribed as possible, Luneau and Warren defined 'romance novel' by drawing on Ellen Constans' (1999) three invariants (novel must consist of a single love story whose unfolding structures the entire narrative; two protagonists are designated as a couple from the very first pages onwards and are a couple at the denouement; the unfolding narrative includes this sequence: meeting, disjunction and final conjunction).Additionally, novels had to be written in French by Quebec authors, be circulated beyond the periodical press, and published in book-format (26).Different texts that elucidate the birth of romantic imagination in Quebec were also included, because they delineate the development of Québécois romance novels from the end of the 19 th century to World War II (27).Focusing on six major periods (1830-1860,1860-1920,1920-1940, 1940-1965, 1965-2000, since 2000), their book addresses many questions about love.Chapter One comprises five sections that explore 'love and adventure', 'the language of love', 'the heart's reason that reason knows', 'God', and 'respectable love'.We learn that the romance genre was viewed with suspicion and its rise hampered.To illuminate its inception, Luneau and Warren take readers on a detour via gothic novels (heroine is often