(apologies for cross-posting)


Dear SCREEN-L subscribers,


I’m delighted to announce the publication of the edited collection *After
“Happily Ever After”: Romantic Comedy in the Post-Romantic Age*, available
now from Wayne State University Press.


No longer the idyllic fairy tale, today's romantic comedies ponder the
realities and complexities of intimacy, fortifying the genre's gift for
imagining human connection through love and laughter. Encompassing a rich
range of screen media from the last decade, these 15 scholarly essays
celebrate works that subvert and disrupt rom-com fantasy and formula so as
to open viewers' eyes along with our hearts. With a foreword by Tamar
Jeffers McDonald.


Download a PDF of the Introduction (“Love Actually: Romantic Comedy since
the Aughts”) and through June 2021 receive a 30% discount using promo code
SS21 on the WSUP site:
https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/after-happily-ever-after


Table of Contents:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XxQRfSd45q-wj7w7yZyxui3iLZi3Hmxp/view?usp=sharing


Trailer: https://youtu.be/A9D2PQuqvzQ


Featured on ABC Radio National's *The Screen Show* (segment starts 29:00):
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/the-screen-show/supernova,-rom-coms/13290694


Praise for the book:


The essays in this book document a level of generic activity that belies
the death notices so often read out for romantic comedy. Moreover, they do
so with analytical skill and rhetorical force.

– Diane Negra, University College Dublin, author of *What a Girl Wants?:
The Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism*


With a fresh focus on rom-coms that make use of alternative distribution
practices, disrupt conventional plotlines, or are non-traditional in
representational content—featuring queer, ethnically diverse, and/or
‘un-couples’—*After "Happily Ever After" *cogently illustrates that there
is still much to be learned from and about this oft-sidelined genre.

– Suzanne Leonard, Simmons University, author of *Wife, Inc.: The Business
of Marriage in the Twenty-first Century*


A scholarly comedy in two prologues and three acts, this wonderful book
starts by resisting the predictions of the doomsayers about the death of
comedy and ends up being a song to the vitality, diversity, and apparently
endless ability of romantic comedy to shift shape, to adapt, to survive—like
life itself if viewed through a comic lens.

– Celestino Deleyto, University of Zaragoza, author of *The Secret Life of
Romantic Comedy*


Contributors: John Alberti, Elizabeth Alsop, Tom Cunliffe, Ash Kinney
d'Harcourt, Alice Guilluy, Mary Harrod, Tamar Jeffers McDonald, Deborah
Jermyn, Betty Kaklamanidou, James MacDowell, Beatriz Oria, Sueyoung
Park-Primiano, Manuela Ruiz, Maria San Filippo, Martha Shearer, Maya
Montañez Smukler


About the editor:

Maria San Filippo is Associate Professor in the Department of Visual and
Media Arts at Emerson College, and Editor of *New Review of Film and
Television Studies*. She is author of the Lambda Literary Award–winning *The
B Word: Bisexuality in Contemporary Film and Television* (2013) and *Provoc*
auteurs* and Provocations: Selling Sex in 21st Century Media* (2021), both
published by Indiana University Press.


Wayne State University Press | Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media |
Film Theory and Criticism, Media Studies, Humor | May 2021 | 400pp |
978-0-8143-4674-7 | PB | $34.99

E-book available


Maria San Filippo
https://mariasanfilippo.net/
https://twitter.com/cinemariasf

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Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite
https://screensite.org/