Loved by readers, happy endings have been and are equally loathed by critics. Indeed, their detractors point to the fact that they are limiting and conservative in the values and models they put forward: as the conventional conclusion to fairy tales and Victorian novels, the vehicle of patriarchal hegemony promoting conservative values such as marriage and heterosexuality, happy endings are said to be a burden for the novelist and the sure sign of the poverty of a text submitting to the pressure of a readership avid of easy rewards. Contributors to this book seek to explore, interrogate or debunk these assumptions from a variety of perpectives and to illuminate how happy endings may participate in a writer's asthetics and/or the economy of a text. This collection of essays investigates the formal and ideological dimension of happy endings over the last two hundred years. The study of a panel of texts pertaining to various genres and written at different periods points to the dynamic relationship between happy endings and the conditions in which they originate.