By exposing the theory of romance to the romance of theory, Diane Elam explores literature's most uncertain, least easily definable and most tenacious genre, assessing its implications for both feminism and the understanding of history. Arguing for a parallel between postmodernism's divided relation to modernism and romance's difficult stance towards realism, , first published in 1992, not only highlights how postmodernism questions our assumptions about historical time, it also reintroduces the figure of woman to the theory of both history and literature.