Love Wars

Television Romantic Comedy

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by Mary Irwin

Type: Studies
Subject: Genre > Romantic films
Keywords: romantic comedy, television
Publishing date: 2025 (February 20, 2025)
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Collection: Library of Gender and Popular Culture
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 240 pages
5 ¾ x 8 ¾ inches (14.5 x 22 cm)

ISBN

978-1-78453-346-5

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Book Presentation:
This is the first dedicated overview of the international television romantic comedy genre, Mary Irwin builds on the critical work on cinematic romantic comedy to offer a dedicated critical analysis of the romantic comedy on the small screen.

Drawing on series from the 1960s to the present day, Irwin presents five themed chapters around the theme of romantic love, from searching for it and finding it to the love wars of the book's title to finding love later in life and in places you didn't expect. Chapters explore the genre's key recurrent themes: evolving attitudes to love, relationships, sex, class and money, feminism and post-feminism, changes in the nuclear family (dramatised through contrasting romantic relationships) and shifting discourses of masculinity, situating them within the specific socio-historic and cultural context in which the series are set.

Throughout, Irwin underscores the centrality of women, their friendships and their personal and professional lives and experiences to the television romantic comedy genre, demonstrating that it is prominence of female characters and their interests and concerns which have most significantly affected the genre's thematic focus. Crucially, this thematic approach allows for explorations both of similarities in representations to be found in series decades apart and the way in which such representations ebb and flow across time. Additionally, the international nature of the comedies selected also makes possible comparison beyond national boundaries.

About the Author:
Mary Irwin is a senior lecturer in Media and Communication at Northumbria University. She has also worked as a teaching fellow at the University of Stirling, a research fellow at University College London and most recently as a research fellow at the University of Warwick on the AHRC project 'A History of Television for Women in Britain, 1947-1989'.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.Angela Smith is Professor of Language and Culture at the University of Sunderland, UK. She has written numerous articles and book chapters on media discourses, gender, the portrayal of immigrants and the representation of politicians.

Press Reviews:
"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

See the publisher website: Bloomsbury Academic

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