A failed romance: reading masculinity and love in David Karanja's The Girl was Mine

Abstract

Popular art is not just about entertainment, and this paper explores some of the pertinent issues that one genre of popular fiction, romance, signals. Using the novel The Girl was Mine as a backdrop, the paper concentrates on masculinity as a way out of an essentialised gender analysis that confines the genre of romance to the category of woman, as demonstrated in the mentioned critical works. Masculinity is a fictional construction, and this article attempts to explore how David Karanja has used the genre of romance to perpetuate it within the context of Kenyans' everyday life. A move towards men and masculinity is a project of levelling the playing field of romantic fiction.