In Cultural Populism, Jim McGuigan argues that in British cultural studies ‘there is populist sentiment, but hardly any “sentimentality” is discernible’. There is, however, an arena of British cultural studies that has always been concerned with ‘sentiment’ and that is the romance narrative. This article argues that the study of popular fictions has always been integral to the history of cultural studies, and that it established a site in which feminist voices would make gender politics intrinsic to the field. At a time when gender was not a central issue for either Literature or Cultural Studies, generic fictions written by and for women provided a site for research that was undeniably about female experience, and the analysis of those texts offered a strategy for asserting a feminist focus.

中文翻译：

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为阅读（和观看）垃圾辩护：女权主义者阅读浪漫史

吉姆·麦奎根（Jim McGuigan）在《文化民粹主义》中指出，在英国文化研究中“有民粹主义情绪，但几乎没有“情感”可辨别”。但是，有一个英国文化研究领域一直关注“情感”，这就是浪漫主义叙事。本文认为，通俗小说的研究一直是文化研究历史不可或缺的一部分，并且它建立了一个女权主义者的声音将性别政治纳入该领域的场所。在性别对于文学或文化研究而言都不是中心问题的时候，由女性和女性编写的通俗小说无疑提供了一个有关女性经历的研究场所，对这些文本的分析为主张女性主义的策略提供了策略。 。