This paper examines a corpus of English-language threesome or ménage romances in the subgenre of erotic romance in a digital format targeted to adult audiences. The most striking feature of these powerful literary texts aimed at titillating and pleasuring readers is their reliance on repetition as the ground rule of romance. The titles studied here all recycle certain well-known elements of e-romance, such as alternating first-person narration (or, alternatively, internally focalized third-person), wealthy love partner, and heightened erotic tension, but they also bring in the added element of multi-partner romance instead of pornography’s focus on the act of sex alone. While these threesome romances highlight strongly erotic scenarios and explicit sex scenes, they do not satisfy themselves with merely sex, but also feature a deeply romantic, consensual and committed relationship forming between the female protagonist and her two male suitors. Despite the erotic make-up familiar from pornography, the stories are monogamous and conservative at heart and as such, fairly traditional popular romance narratives operating within the heterosexual matrix.

This dimension of the happily-ever-after romance as a mandatory part of these stories clearly differentiates them from sexual act-oriented pornography, and as such represents an interesting amalgam of sex and romantic love removed from the time-honoured equation of two people at the centre of the romance. For the purposes of this collection, my question concerns the power of these literary texts. How does their power emerge and how does it operate on the level of the text and on the level of reading as can be gleaned from their textual construction?