I've now written up a series of posts at my blog about each of the essays in the collection. The first of them is here and it contains links to all of the others.
Monday, December 28, 2015
Update on "Women and Erotic Fiction" ed. Kristen Phillips
I've now written up a series of posts at my blog about each of the essays in the collection. The first of them is here and it contains links to all of the others.
Monday, December 14, 2015
CFP: PopCAANZ (Sydney, Australia) 2016 Conference
PopCAANZ 2016 Conference
Call for papers
PopCAANZ 7th Annual International Conference
29 June-1 July 2016
Sydney University Village, Sydney, Australia
Deadline for proposals: 1 March 2016
The full CFP can be found here. It invites
academics, professionals, cultural practitioners and those with a scholarly interest in popular culture to send a 150 word abstract and 100 word bio to the area chairsIn the case of popular romance that's:
Jodi McAlister: popularomance@popcaanz.comConference information is here.
Saturday, December 12, 2015
New to the Wiki: Women's Uses of Romance Novels (including m/m)
- Foster, Guy Mark, 2015.
- 'What To Do If Your Inner Tomboy Is a Homo: Straight Women, Bisexuality, and Pleasure in M/M Gay Romance Fictions', Journal of Bisexuality, Published online first. Abstract:
"Criticism [...] often argues that such narratives merely substitute two male bodies for a male/female pair without substantively altering the emotional and sexual dynamics of the relationship. Hence, the male lovers in such narratives are simply acting out a heterosexual fantasy of gay male intimacy. To challenge this view, this essay turns to revisions to Freudian understandings of bisexuality. In so doing, it attempts to relocate this pleasure in the repudiated male identities and homosexual object cathexes that all women are urged to give up in the pre-Oedipal phase as a condition of assuming (hetero)normative gender and sexual subjectivities."
- Moody, Stephanie, 2016.
- “Building Social Worlds: Examining Women’s Uses of Romance Novels.” Literacy in Practice: Writing in Private, Public and Working Lives. Eds. Patrick Thomas and Pamela Takayoshi. New York: Routledge. 32-45.
Sunday, November 22, 2015
New to the Wiki: Romance Fiction v. Real Life
- Iwai, Gaku, 2015.
- "Wartime Ideology in 'The Thimble': A Comparative Study of Popular Wartime Romance and the Anti-romance of D. H. Lawrence." Études Lawrenciennes 46.
- Kempf, Rachel Erin, 2015.
- "Dirty Words: The Writing Process of 'Smutshop'." The University of Texas at Austin, Master of Fine Arts. ["I worked at Siren-BookStop, Inc. for three years, cleaning up manuscripts and penning gay werewolf erotica [...] It was the best and worst job I’ve ever had — the best because I got paid to write and spend my workday making dirty jokes, and the worst because real sex isn’t porn sex, and real women aren’t romance heroines, and love and relationships are messy and complicated and when you spend all day boxing it into the confines of a highly formulaic genre, you’re bound to start getting some messed-up ideas about how your love life ought to be"]
- Meyer, Michaela D. E., 2015.
- "Living the Romance through Castle: Exploring Autoethnography, Popular Culture and Romantic Television Narratives". The Popular Culture Studies Journal 3.1&2: 245-269. [This includes a discussion of romance fiction, not just television romantic narratives]
- Moody, Stephanie, 2016.
- "Identification, Affect, and Escape: Theorizing Popular Romance Reading." Pedagogy 16.1: 105-123. Abstract
- Slušná, Zuzana, 2015.
- "Postfeminism, Post-romantic and New Patterns of Feminity [sic] in Popular Culture." European Journal of Science and Theology 11.6: 229-238.
Sunday, November 08, 2015
Romance Research in the Canary Islands and Australia
In the Canary Islands, Dr. María-Isabel González-Cruz (Associate Professor, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain) is leading a project on:
Discourse, Gender and Identity in a Corpus of Popular Romance Fiction Novels on the Canaries and Other Atlantic Islands [Discursos, género e identidad en un corpus de novela rosa inglesa ambientada en Canarias y otras islas atlánticas] (Reference FFI2014-53962-P)-----
The novels in this corpus are all set, wholly or partially, in the Atlantic islands (mostly the Canaries) and are written by English Harlequin/ Mills & Boon female authors. The project begins with a corpus of 20 novels set in the Canaries, while the corpus on Madeira and other islands has just begun to be built, including only 2 novels at the moment. The texts cover a time span of almost five decades, from 1958 to 2004, which allows for an analysis of the evolution of their discourse.
The protagonists are usually a native islander hero, or an Englishman with local ancestors, who falls in Jove with an English heroine who either visits or settles temporarily on one of the islands, which are typically described as a paradise with very different sociocultural traditions. Both the narrator and the characters are aware of the sociocultural and linguistic differences and often make reference to them. This provides an interesting framework and material to carry out a variety of analyses related to a number of challenging issues, including identity and otherness, paradise discourse, and intercultural and even linguistic contact, since the texts are written in English but interspersed with Spanish and Canarian (also Portuguese) terms and expressions. These words and phrases perform different communicative functions and reach a wide international readership who become familiar with them. This may contribute, to some extent, to their diffusion and eventual adoption by readers of English or other speech communities, as González-Cruz (2011b) has argued. [...]
In short, our purposes in this Research Projects are as follows:
- to carry out an interdisciplinary study of the texts we have compiled so far
- to keep searching for more books in order to enlarge both corpora, the main Canarian corpus and the one referring to other Atlantic islands,
- to make a comparative analysis of the novels set in this area.
I don't know which novels are included in the 20-book corpus. Can you think of any books you think should be included? I can pass on any suggestions.
-----
Dr Lisa Fletcher recently announced on the RomanceScholar listserv that she's
part of a research team just awarded a 3-year (2016-2018) Australia Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project grant of A$316,000 to study 21st-century Australian popular fiction, including romance. This interdisciplinary project brings together researchers from the University of Queensland (Kim Wilkins, David Carter), the University of Melbourne (Beth Driscoll), and the University of Tasmania (me).-----
Our project summary: This project intends to conduct a systematic examination of 21st-century Australian popular fiction, the most significant growth area in Australian trade publishing since the turn of the century. Its three areas of investigation are the publishing of Australian popular fiction; the interrelationships between Australian popular fiction and Australian genre communities; and the textual distinctiveness of Australian popular novels in relation to genre. Research is designed to centre on 30 novels across three genres, building a comprehensive picture of the practices and processes of Australian popular fiction through detailed examination of trade data, close reading of texts, and interviews with industry figures.
The maps of Australia and the Canary Islands came from Wikimedia Commons and are either in the public domain or made available under a Creative Commons licence.
Friday, October 23, 2015
New to the Wiki: The "Coming Soon" Edition
proffers innovative case studies on representations of cross-religious and cross-cultural romantic relationships in a selection of late medieval and twenty-first century Orientalist popular romances. Comparing the tropes, characterization and settings of these literary phenomena, and focusing on gender, religion, and ethnicity, the study exposes the historical roots of current romance representations of the east, advancing research in Orientalism, (neo)medievalism and medieval cultural studies. Fundamentally, Representing Difference invites a closer look at medieval and modern popular attitudes towards the east, as represented in romance, and the kinds of solutions proposed for its apparent problems.
- Morrissey, Katherine, 2015.
- “Steamy, Spicy, Sensual: Tracing the Cycles of Erotic Romance.” Women & Erotic Fiction: Critical Essays on Genres, Markets & Readers. Ed. Kristen Phillips. Jefferson: McFarland, 2015. 42-58.
- Veldman-Genz, Carole, 2015.
- "Selling Gay Sex to Women: The Romance of M/M and M/M/F Romantica." Women & Erotic Fiction: Critical Essays on Genres, Markets & Readers. Ed. Kristen Phillips. Jefferson: McFarland, 2015. 133-149.
I'd be grateful if anyone could let me know which of the other essays in the volume should also be included:
- Introduction: Shattering Releases (Kristen Phillips)
- From Black Lace to Shades of Grey: The Interpellation of the "Female Subject" into Erotic Discourse (Simon Hardy)
- Refiguring Penetration in Women’s Erotic Fiction (Amalia Ziv)
- Erotic Pleasure and Postsocialist Female Sexuality: Contemporary Female "Body Writing" in China (Eva Chen)
- Good Vibrations: Shaken Subjects and the Disintegrative Romance Heroine (Naomi Booth)
- On Not Reading Fifty Shades: Feminism and the Fantasy of Romantic Immunity (Tanya Serisier)
- Permissible Transgressions: Feminized Same-Sex Practice as Middle-Class Fantasy (Jude Elund)
- The Politics of Slash on the High Seas: Colonial Romance and Revolutionary Solidarity in Pirates Fan Fiction (Anne Kustritz)
- Male Homoerotic Fiction and Women’s Sexual Subjectivities: Yaoi and BL Fans in Indonesia and the Philippines (Tricia Abigail Santos Fermin)
- Selling Authentic Sex: Working Through Identity in Belle de Jour’s The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl (Victoria Ong)
- Sexing Education: Erotica in the Urban Classroom (Alyssa D. Niccolini)
Monday, October 12, 2015
RWA Academic Research Grant 2016
Every year the Romance Writers of America offer funding for research into the genre.
The objectives of the program are:Here are some more details of who's eligible to apply:
- To support theoretical and substantive academic research about genre romance texts and literacy practices.
- To encourage a well-informed public discourse about genre romance texts and literacy practices.
and
- Amount: up to $5,000. Funds will be calculated/awarded in U.S. dollars.
- Tenure: April 1, 2016 through March 31, 2017
- Completed applications to be submitted to RWA in both e-mail (RTF) and hard copy format.
- Decisions will be announced in March 2016.
The RWA Research Grant Program is open to faculty at accredited colleges and universities, independent scholars with significant publication records, and dissertation candidates who have completed all course work and qualifying exams. No candidate need be a member of the RWA.This is definitely not limited to academics in English literature:
Appropriate fields of specialization include but are not limited to: anthropology, communications, cultural studies, education, English language and literature, gender studies, linguistics, literacy studies, psychology, rhetoric, and sociology. Proposals in interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary studies are welcome. The ultimate goal of proposals should be significant publication in major journals or as a monograph from an academic press. RWA does not fund creative work (such as novels or films).There's more information on the RWA website.
Sunday, October 11, 2015
Romance in the Archives
On 2 October Sarah Wendell posted a podcast of her interview of
Caryn Radick, who is the Digital Archivist and the Special Collections and University Archives at Rutgers University [...] has a cool research project where she is investigating how romance writers use archives, and she’s also very interested in depictions of archivists in fiction from the romance genre and other genres as well.The transcript was put online on 4 October and I thought I'd pick out the bits most directly about Caryn's research.
Caryn: [...] I’ve been focusing on whether romance writers use archives when they’re writing their works, because when I was younger I started reading historical romances, and I learned quite a bit of history from them, so I figured somebody must be doing the research, and from what I understand, they do.
Sarah: So you’re looking at how romance writers use historical archives in their writing.
Caryn: Correct. [...] I constructed a survey which I was fortunate enough to be able to circulate through Romance Writers of America, and I got some really good responses. [...] Yeah, a lot of people who responded to the survey, a lot of them just really, said they really want to get those details of time and place correct, but they also like to get a voice that represents the time period or place that they’re looking at. One of the things I really appreciated was there was a certain amount of, of reverence and enthusiasm for using archival materials which reflects what it was like for me when I was first getting into the profession. The, the aspect of, wow, this is a diary that somebody wrote in the nineteenth century, and I can’t believe you’re letting me touch this.
Sarah: Yes!
Caryn: That’s fine! It, it’s great. Most indicated that they would really love it if there was more information available online, which wasn’t exactly a surprise, because I think the expectation these days is that things are online. People are a little surprised when you tell them that, no, actually, you’re going to have to come in to see that, or, you know, we can try to give you some information, but it, it’s not going to be available online. And another aspect that, that didn’t surprise me was that some people were very enthusiastic or wanted to know more about how to use archives, but they felt that they didn’t quite know how to get started, which is, which is pretty common. [...]
Caryn: [...] So, back in, I think it’s 2011, 2012, romance hit the archivists’ radar when Protected by the Prince by Annie West came to our attention, because the heroine of that book is an archivist, and, you know, being surprised that this –
Sarah: You guys must have been like, wait, what? Seriously? She’s us? Woohoo!
Caryn: Yes. She’s an archivist, and we’re, yay, there’s an archivist! Wait, oh. She’s wearing glasses. Oh, she’s kind of frumpy. [Laughs] [...] so it was kind of a moment of fun for, for the archives community, where suddenly, hey, there’s discussion about, there’s this book, it’s got an archivist heroine, probably a little bit making fun of the book and, and as I said, the stereotype of the archivist in it, and there was, there was even a, a blog had a contest to write your own archival romance, and there were a few other discussions, and then it kind of just went its own ways, as things do, but since I had read romance when I was younger and I, I’ve known some romance writers and I’ve gone to a couple of the events, it was in the back of my mind at the time that, you know, actually, now that I think about it, I know that romance writers that I’ve met seem to also be pretty detail-oriented and care about getting the, their novels right, and I started wondering if they use archives, and I suspected they did.
Saturday, October 10, 2015
New to the Wiki: The Canary Islands, Fatherhood, First World War Romance, Interracial Romance, Orphans, SEALS
- Items whose titles are hyperlinked are currently available free online in their entirety.
- Chelton, Mary K., 2015.
- "Readers' Advisory: There Seem to be More SEALs in Romance Fiction than in the US Navy, and if so, Why Does it Matter?" Reference & User Services Quarterly 55.1: 21-24. Abstract
- Edlins, Mariglynn.
- "Superhero, Sleeping Beauty, or Devil? The Making of Orphan Myths and Public Administration". [What stories exist that might influence how street-level bureaucrats think about children who are separated from their parents? [...] In this paper, I explore the narratives of superhero stories, romance novels, and horror films in order to identify the orphan archetypes they portray.]
- González-Cruz, Maria-Isabel. 2015.
- "Love in Paradise: Visions of the Canaries in a Corpus of Popular Romance Fiction Novels". Oceánide, Journal of the Spanish Society for the Study of Popular Culture SELICUP, vol. 7.
- Jagodzinski, Mallory, 2015.
- Love is (Color) Blind: Historical Romance Fiction and Interracial Relationships in the Twenty-First Century. PhD dissertation, Graduate College of Bowling Green State University. [This dissertation analyzes three historical romance novels — Secrets of a Scandalous Heiress by Theresa Romain (2015), The Duke of Shadows by Meredith Duran (2008) and The Heiress Effect by Courtney Milan (2013)]
- King, Laura, 2015
- ‘The Perfect Man: Fatherhood, Masculinity and Romance in Popular Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain’, in Love and Romance in Britain, 1918-1970, ed. Alana Harris and Timothy Willem Jones (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 41–60.
- Potter, Jane, 2015.
- "‘Khaki and Kisses’: Reading the Romance Novel in the Great War." Reading and the First World War: Readers, Texts, Archives. Ed. Shafquat Towheed and Edmund G. C. King. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 29-44. Excerpt
Wednesday, September 30, 2015
Teaching Romance at Ithaca College
Ithaca College's Jennifer Wofford will be teaching a seminar on romance this semester (fall 2015):
Reading Popular Romance
Jennifer Wofford
Theme: Inquiry, Imagination, and Innovation; Perspective: Social Sciences
CRN 24024 ICSM 10824-01, TR 04:00 PM-5:15 PM, M 12:00 PM-12:50 PM
U.S. Representative Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.) introduced a bill in 2014 proposing to prohibit the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) from funding any project relating to the research of love or romance (H.R.5155). Yet, popular romance is the highest selling book genre in the world today, representing the largest share of sales revenue in the industry. Moreover, 84% of romance readership are women. Popular romance is a women’s industry, perhaps the largest in the US. Yet a US legislator made a point of crafting a law against it. Why? This courses uses popular romance as both a cultural subject and as a vehicle of inquiry into readers and reading. It asks questions like: What is romance? Who are our heroines? What is a reader? Why are women reading and writing these stories? How have archetypes and plot lines changed since the 1960s, when mass market romance novels emerged, and what does that say about fans of the genre? What’s the relationship between literature and commerce? Should popular romance be studied? If so, for what purpose?
Saturday, September 26, 2015
Last Call: PCA Romance Proposals (Oct. 1 Deadline)
--Eric Selinger
In my young and dapper days (see above) I didn't worry much about conference deadlines, either from the proposal side--sure, sure, I'll get it done; don't bother me while I'm thinking--or from the side of the conference organizer. Older and wiser, I worry...but you can help!
Next Thursday, October 1, is the deadline for you to propose a talk for the PCA National Conference in Seattle, March 22-26. The Romance Area is looking for papers on love, romance, and the popular culture of romantic love: any medium, any period, anywhere in the world.
We have several special events lined up this year, including a panel on diversity in historical romance featuring authors Rose Lerner, Koko Brown, and Lori Witt (more may join them!) and a screening of the full, completed version of Love Between the Covers, the documentary film by Laurie Kahn.
Papers already accepted cover a wide range of topics and media: popular romance novels, queer readings of classic texts, masculinities and heroes, rape discourse and the discourse of desire, paranormal romance and urban fantasy, romance pedagogy, and more.
Please check out the Romance Area Call for Papers for more details and topic ideas, and if you have any questions about whether a topic would be appropriate, just ask!
Saturday, September 19, 2015
New to the Wiki: Genre Labels Affect Translation; Romance and PTSD
- Bianchi, Diana and Adele D'Arcangelo, 2015.
- 'Translating History or Romance? Historical Romantic Fiction and Its Translation in a Globalised Market', Linguistics and Literature Studies 3.5: 248-253.
- They look in particular at two translations into Italian of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander. The first, "At a paratextual level [...] was clearly interpreted as a romance" while the second seemed to indicate that the novel was historical fiction. The differences were not only external:
In particular, the several cuts, omissions and general manipulation of the first translation indicate that translating a book as a ‘romance’ authorizes radical interventions of a kind that are more typical in the most formulaic type of romantic fiction such as the Harlequin romances [...]. The second translation, on the contrary, does not present substantial cuts and remains, on the whole, fairly close to the source text. (251)
- Holden, Stacy E. and Charity Tabol, 2015.
- 'In Sickness and In Health: Representations of PTSD in Post-9/11 Romance Novels', albeit 2.1.
The novelists writing these tales do not craft a character with whom a veteran would identify, and this is in part because of what Johnson notes are the “parameters of the genre,” which demand a Happily Ever After. But, as we argue in this article, it is also because the American public is unwilling to accept disabled veterans whose lives—and basic dispositions—have been ineluctably changed by the US decision to go to war. Ultimately, romance novels that focus on disabled veterans who find healing in love reveal a widely held fantasy about PTSD. Although offering a simulacrum of the sequelae of combat trauma, a closer examination of the text reveals some misinformation about combat-related PTSD. And so, contemporary romances expose a general reluctance in the US to accept wounded warriors with chronic difficulties.
Thursday, September 17, 2015
Teaching Tainted Lit: Sneaking Romance Into the Classroom
- Losano, Antonia, 2015.
- "Sneaking It In at the End: Teaching Popular Romance in the Liberal Arts Classroom," Teaching Tainted Lit: Popular American Fiction in Today's Classroom, ed. Janet G. Casey (Iowa City: U of Iowa P), pp. 77-88.
Losano details the difficulties she had teaching popular romances. On her first attempt she introduced Heyer's Frederica to a "senior seminar course on canonicity and literary aesthetics" (81) but
Unfortunately, Heyer's novel was received with only derision and contempt. [...] The kicker came [...] when one student confessed that he didn't actually think much of either [...] Pride and Prejudice or Frederica. Maybe if he'd read Pride and Prejudice in a different context, he argued, he wouldn't have noticed that it was just about romance and not much else. Much of the rest of the class nodded in agreement. (82)
That did set Losano's teaching of popular romance back for a while, but she kept trying and eventually found more productive ways to bring popular romance fiction into the classroom. There's an excerpt of her article here.
Friday, September 11, 2015
Help an Academic Out: "Till Death Us Do Part"
Daniel K Judd is
a professor looking for the history of the phrase: "Until death do us part." I'm also researching what the wording of the various denominations would have been in America from 1830 - 1850. Thank you for any help you may be able to provide.Anyone got any ideas/information they could share with Daniel?
[Edited: Emma Barry mentioned on Twitter that it's in the Book of Common Prayer. A quick Google turns up this, from the 1789 U. S. Book of Common Prayer:
I M. take thee N. to my wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part, according to God's holy ordinance; and thereto I plight thee my troth.Also via Twitter, Ros Clarke's got us back to the 11th century and the Order for Consecration of Marriage: Sarum Use:
I N. take thee N. to my wedded wife, to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death us depart, if holy Church will it permit, and thereto I plight thee my troth.
Ros thinks " 'till death us depart' [...] was said in English not Latin, so no translation needed by Cranmer, though he put 'do part'. Don't know when that shift happened, though."]
Tuesday, September 08, 2015
Something Old, Something New (Romance Teaching 2/2)
--Eric Selinger
Quick Recap: the "old" is me, the "new" is the set of texts I just finished teaching in a summer romance class. I blogged about three of those in part 1--Maya Rodale's Dangerous Books for Girls, Laura Florand's The Chocolate Thief, and A Bollywood Affair by Sonali Dev--and now I'll post about the rest, in the order I taught them.
Book #4: Sherry Thomas, My Beautiful Enemy. I had heard great things about this novel for months, but hadn't read it, so I put it on my summer syllabus. It's a historical novel set partly in China and partly in England, and it moves around chronologically between the 1881 and the early 1890s; it's also, as Thomas has said, an homage to the wuxia martial arts fiction and film that the author grew up on, which I take to be an instance of "Romance" (in Northrop Frye's sense) from a non-Western tradition.
- What Went Well: I find this a beautiful, haunting novel: one of those romances I keep thinking about long after I've finished it. We had a great discussion of the heroine, and of what Thomas does (and does not do) with her biracial heritage; we had a great time discussing the hero and contrasting him with those of our first two novels, using and then complicating the "alpha" and "beta" terminology that you find in romance reviews. The tone and structure of the novel were sharp contrasts as well, so students began to glimpse the variety available within the genre. Wonderful discussion of the novel's allusions to other narratives and texts, especially to the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl, which comes up a few times, and to The Heart Sutra, an engraving of which turns out to be central to the plot. (I'm a sucker for allusions.) One Chinese student offered some great observations about how the novel deals with its paired generic inheritance (wuxia and Western romance fiction); unfortunately, due to medical issues, she was only there for a portion of the discussion, and we didn't really finish it.
- What Went Less Well: I'd originally had students order both My Beautiful Enemy and its non-romance prequel, The Hidden Blade. When it became clear that students were falling behind in the reading, I dropped the prequel, but simply knowing there was one threw some students off, and they struggled to see My Beautiful Enemy as a stand-alone text. Others found the novel's structure, which loops around between two time-frames, difficult to follow when reading quickly for class. None was prepared for our allusion discussion, but that didn't really surprise me. It's not as though the Heart Sutra is an easy text to think through, no matter the context!
- What I'd Do Differently Next Time: I'd really like to teach the pair of novels, as originally planned, and I want to find some way to think through and set up the Buddhist side of the novel more effectively, the way I do with Christian / Biblical contexts for other novels.
- What Went Well: Great discussion of the novel's problematic packaging, which does not offer any image of the black hero, Martin; great discussion of the novel's themes and politics, which students thought stood in sharp contrast with that packaging. Several students in the class deal with depression or bipolar disorder, and they were fascinated by the text, although one was quite wary until she read that the author was fictionalizing her own experience; several students were fascinated by the differences between how this British novel dealt with race and homosexuality vs. what they'd have expected from an American interracial m/m romance. Beecroft's blog posts about folk culture were helpful in giving context to the novel and in thinking about the ways the novel might be framing popular romance writing as similar to folk culture practices (rather than commercial / luxury culture practices, as in the Florand novel). We had fun watching YouTube clips of Morris dancing, too.
- What Went Less Well: Blue-Eyed Stranger works well both as a love story and as a novel of ideas, a book about historical romance as a genre (albeit refracted through discussions of historical re-enactment, Morris dancing, and folk music sessions). I put it on the syllabus before Beverly Jenkins's historical novel Captured to set up and give us terms to talk about the Jenkins, but in retrospect, it might have worked better afterwards, since it ended up preempting some of the things students might have said about that book.
- What I'd Do Differently Next Time: In the fall I'm going to teach the first book from Beecroft's new trilogy, Trowchester Blues, and in the winter I'll probably try the third one. Nothing jumps out at me as a different approach to try for this one, other than perhaps to assemble a better set of audio-visual supplements (dancing and music and Vikings) to show my students. It might also be interesting to teach all three books together at some point--I've thought about doing that with Victoria Dahl's Talk Me Down, Start Me Up, and Lead Me On, which work well together and would teach well together, too.
6) Beverly Jenkins, Captured. In the ten years I've been teaching romance, almost every survey class I've done has featured a novel by Beverly Jenkins. Usually it's been Something Like Love, which was the first novel I read by her, and which teaches beautifully, because a version of what the novel is doing with history (filling us in, revising our sense of the past) takes place within the text itself, as characters use stray bits of knowledge to make things happen in their fictional world. I tried Captured when it first came out, but then went back to Somethig Like Love; this year I decided to try Captured again, because I was trying to play up the armchair travel settings of my course, and it's a pirate romance set in the Caribbean during the American revolution.
- What Went Well: a great discussion of the novel's cover and back-cover copy, which use genre tropes in ways that the novel itself often avoids or varies; good comparison / contrast work in terms of the hero, the heroine, the barriers, and other elements; a very interesting discussion of the romance novel (this particular one and the genre more generally) as alternative historiography.
- What Went Less Well: the cover discussion was fascinating, but when it started again the second day, things began to drag; several extravagant moments in the novel's plot drew skepticism from students, and here (as elsewhere) I found myself wondering whether this novel wouldn't teach better if I had it paired with another pirate romance, so that the particular tropes of that subgenre were more visible as conventions which Jenkins then plays with.
- What I'd Do Differently Next Time: Captured is the third Jenkins novel I've taught, and for my students I'd have to say that it taught almost as well as Something Like Love, and better than Topaz. There are several others I'd like to try--Indigo, which has been re-released as an e-book, and The Taming of Jessie Rose, which has also come back out now--and I'd also like to begin pairing Jenkins's African American historical romances with some of the new voices in that subgenre. (I'm thinking here especially of Piper Huguley's Migrations of the Heart series, and of the Brightest Day anthology.) Since the discussion of romance as historiography went so well, I'd like to try assigning my students Hsu-Ming Teo's essay on that topic, from the New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction anthology, even though it focuses on a novel from a different author and time-period, Bertrice Small's The Kadin.
- Note to Self: Try teaching The Kadin sometime alongside Magnificent Century, the Turkish soap opera.
7) Meljean Brook, Riveted. Although my students split on many of our novels--some liking the book, some wary or resistant or simply disengaged--there was unanimous enthusiasm for our last novel, the steampunk romance Riveted. Students loved the world-building, the characters, and the politics of the novel; they were both fascinated by it and emotionally caught up in it.
- What Went Well: great discussion of gender in the novel, especially its construction of masculinity; interesting discussion of disability and sexual politics; the genre-hybridity of the book, which nods to the history and conventions of "scientific romance" (as science fiction used to be called) as well as to the popular romance novel.
- What Went Less Well: nothing, really. A win all around.
- What I'd Do Differently Next Time: I'm teaching this novel in the fall, actually, in a unit on romance and SF/Fantasy. I'll be teaching it between Alexis Hall's Prosperity , a "queer steampunk western set in a city in the sky," and The Midnight Hunt, a lesbian werewolf romance by L. A. Raand (AKA Len Barot / Radclyffe). My only concern is that one week might not be enough time to do the book justice, but we'll see how it goes!
Something Old, Something New (Romance Teaching 1/2)
--Eric Selinger
The "something new" would be the syllabus for my now-completed summer course on popular romance fiction, which was almost entirely composed of books I was teaching for the first time. My regular-term syllabus had grown a little stale, and I wanted to shake things up a bit; in fact, I'm teaching yet another round of new novels in the fall term, starting next week. What I want to do today is briefly recap my thoughts about each of the books I just taught, so that others who have the chance to teach courses on popular romance--either a full term on the genre or just a unit, with one or two books--can see at least a bit of what I did and how it went.
My romance courses are offered through the DePaul English department, and take what I'd call a "literary studies" approach to the novels: a lot of close reading, some literary history, some exposure to the critical debates that surround the genre. For the past few years I've built my courses around a spine of topics provided by Laura Vivanco's For Love and Money: the Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills and Boon Romance. We read one of her chapters (the Introduction, Modes, Mythoi, Metafiction, Metaphors, the Conclusion), and then a novel that reads well in light of the terms and topics discussed in the chapter. In the remaining weeks of the quarter I generally assign a bit more secondary reading--some essays from JPRS; some chapters from Thomas J. Roberts's An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction--but the heart of the class is the Vivanco text, which teaches (in my experience) extraordinarily well, both to general-education undergraduates and to more sophisticated and demanding English majors, MA students, and so on.
This summer I tried a different secondary text, which we read all at once at the start of term, and then a bunch of novels that I'd only read once, so that I didn't really know in advance how I'd frame them. Here's how it all played out:
1) Maya Rodale, Dangerous Books for Girls: the Bad Reputation of Romance Novels, Explained. Unlike Vivanco's monograph, which is a work of literary scholarship, Rodale's book is a sort of apologia for romance fiction: a defense of the genre which draws on literary and cultural history, on some surveys she conducted, and on her own experiences as a romance reader and author. It's written in short, lively chapters, and although they laughed at some memorable copyediting goofs--the sisters in Sense and Sensibility face a life of "gentile poverty"--students found the book quite readable.
- What Went Well: students who had no idea there was any opprobrium attached to the genre got a useful introduction to that disdain and its deep history, which has roots in enduring fears about female authorship and reading; students acquired a useful set of terms and talking points to use when discussing cover art, dominant heroes, and certain types of sex scenes; students found it interesting to test Rodale's claims about the "dangerous" aspects of the genre in general--a genre she frames as written by women, about women, and for women--against the particulars of the novels we read, including our one m/m romance (a subgenre she does not discuss at any length).
- What Went Less Well: like Beyond Heaving Bosoms, the apologia by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan from some years ago, Dangerous Books for Girls worked best for students who knew something about the genre already, and who wanted their own fondness for it to be validated. Skeptical students--those with political concerns about the genre and those with aesthetic concerns--mostly remained skeptical as they read the book and in the discussions that followed; students who follow current blog and social media debates about diversity in the genre (sexual and racial / ethnic) thought that the book glossed over problematic issues; students were honestly puzzled, when we got to our m/m novel, as to why that subgenre had been discussed so little in our set-up material. Starting with Rodale seemed to push the class toward discussions of why women read these books rather than the more literary approaches I prefer; in terms of those why women read discussions, I was personally disappointed with the negative way that Rodale talks about Janice Radway's Reading the Romance, since many of the ideas in Dangerous Books for Girls--ideas from Rodale and from the readers / bloggers / authors she quotes--ultimately have their roots in Radway's analysis.
- What I'd Do Differently Next Time: Because I'm mostly interested in literary approaches to the genre, I find the Vivanco a more amenable frame text for my class. If I were to teach Rodale again, I'd probably want to teach it as a primary text in its own right, late in a quarter, as part of the romance apologia genre. I might put it alongside Beyond Heaving Bosoms and Love Between the Covers, the documentary film from the Popular Romance Project, or beside Catherine Roach's forthcoming Happily Ever After: the Romance Study in Popular Culture, which is more critical but related in its "what's the appeal" approach. In any case, I'd want students to have a few novels under their belts first, so that they'd be reading Rodale's book in light of the fiction, rather than reading the fiction in light of the Rodale.
2) Laura Florand, The Chocolate Thief. Laura Florand is one of the professor / authors who taught a course on popular romance fiction at Duke University last spring; The Chocolate Thief is the first of her novels set in and around the world of high-end chocolatiers in Paris.
- What Went Well: The novel hinges on a romance between Sylvain, the French hero who makes artisanal luxury chocolates, and Cade, the American billionaire heroine who stands to inherit Corey Chocolates, low-end mass market confections sold at Walmart and drugstores (think Hershey bars). The Parisian setting and the chocolate focus were perfect ways to introduce and talk about issues of conventionality in romance culture (including romance fiction); the contrast between his chocolates and hers proved a lovely way to talk about the distinctions between literary and mass-market fiction, and the ways in which this particular romance novel negotiated between their respective appeals.
- What Went Less Well: Not much! This book taught extremely well. Some students found the hero and / or the heroine a bit too genre-conventional for their tastes, but that can happen with any romance novel; some were troubled by the contrast between the heroine's topflight professional capacity and her enjoyment of being sexually dominated (in a pretty mild way) by the hero, but this actually fit very nicely with Rodale's chapters on Fifty Shades of Grey and with our class discussion of the romance marketplace, in which tropes that prove popular in one book have a way of showing up in others, deliberately or not.
- What I'd Do Differently Next Time: As I taught this novel, I thought of all sorts of connections between what it does with consumer culture and romance and what Eva Illouz talks about in Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. I tossed a sheaf of quotes from Illouz at my students, but didn't require them or assign long passages from that book. Next time I'd want to do more with this. The novel also would "play well" (as they say) with Vivanco's chapters on Modes (there's a lot of modal counterpoint to talk about) and possibly Metafiction (via the chocolate as romance connection).
3) Sonali Dev, A Bollywood Affair. This was the second time I've taught A Bollywood Affair, Dev's debut novel. I've been thinking a lot about my need to teach a more diverse array of romance novels, thanks in part to the #weneeddiverseromance hashtag campaign, and Dev's book brought some very interesting new material to my syllabus--a setting split between the US and India; a pervasive intertext of Indian popular film; Hindu characters rather than Christian ones, etc. I found it a charming book, and one which would give me the chance to talk about two sets of genre tropes: some from popular romance, and some from Bollywood film. Since I started watching those movies because of an Indian American student in one of my romance classes--"If you like these novels, you'l love these movies," she said--this seemed like a great way to close that circle.
- What Went Well: Great discussion of the trade-paperback marketing of the novel, which contrasted nicely to what Rodale says about romance covers; great discussion of how the heroine, Mili, turns oppressive givens of her life to her advantage, working within those constraints (which we thought about in terms of genre constraints as well); great discussion of how an early reference to the Hindu Trimurti (Creator, Keeper--or "Preserver," as I learned it in the '70s--and Destroyer) informs our sense of the novel's hero; great close reading of the novel's epilogue as a recapitulation of the opening, which let us talk about repetition and variation as a structural principle in romance. The novel's thematic emphasis on "freedom" made for a fine discussion of ideas from Pam Regis (whose Natural History) makes claims about "pragmatic freedom" and the romance novel in general.
- What Went Less Well: I had students read Jayashree Kamble's early piece on romance readers in India--the one published in the Sally Goade anthology Empowerment Vs. Oppression and included as the final chapter of her dissertation, years ago. Primed by this piece, which talks about arranged marriages, students sometimes failed to see that Dev's novel does not talk about arranged marriages, but about child marriage, which is a very different thing. Some students did not like how the novel plays up the physical size of its hero and the diminutive body of the heroine, but this is a familiar trope in popular romance fiction (cf. Lord of Scoundrels) and made for a useful discussion.
- What I'd Do Diffferently Next Time: As it happens, I'm teaching this novel again in the fall term, where I'm going to put it alongside Suleikha Snyder's Bollywood and the Beast and Alexis Hall's Glitterland to think more about romance fiction and romantic film. At some point in the future I'd like to show students--or have students watch--one or two whole Bollywood films to give them that context, rather than just showing them trailers and excerpts. Someday!
I see that this post is getting awfully long, so I'm going to split my account of the class into a pair of posts. See you soon in post #2!
Saturday, September 05, 2015
New to the Wiki: "Vocabulary Decay", Medievalism and Julie Garwood, Feminism
This time I thought I'd also include the items I didn't add to the bibliography so you can see the kinds of things I don't include. In the cases below, I omitted some interesting items because they either didn't deal with romance fiction at length or because they weren't secondary academic works.
First, though, are the items I did include:
- Arvanitaki, Eirini, 2015.
- "Gender in Recent Romance Novels: A Third Wave Feminist Mills and Boon Love Affair?", in Re/Presenting Gender and Love, ed. Dikmen Yakalı Çamoğlu (Interdisciplinary Net). Index of the book
- Diamond, Geneva, 2015.
- "Medievalism and the Courtship Plot in Julie Garwood's Popular Romance Novels", in The Middle Ages in Popular Culture: Medievalism and Genre, ed. Helen Young (Amhurst, NY: Cambria). Excerpt
- Elliott, Jack, 2014.
- 'Vocabulary Decay in Category Romance'. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Online, December 2014. [Abstract]
Writers of a best-selling category romance imprint share a common tendency to decrease their deployment of unique words over the span of their novels—a phenomenon of ‘vocabulary decay’. This tendency cannot be found in the novels of Jane Austen, suggesting this drop is not intrinsic to the romance genre itself, and is unlikely to have any true narrative purpose. A study of Charles Dickens shows that vocabulary decay extends beyond the romance genre. Closer examination reveals vocabulary decay is a result of progressive amounts of linguistic chunking—due to author fatigue or a desire to produce a more readable narrative.
- Elliott, Jack, 2015.
- 'Whole Genre Sequencing', Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Online, August 2015. [Abstract]
[Taking as its corpus] all electronically available Harlequin Presents novels—some 1,400 from 1999 to 2013—this article demonstrates that the genre’s fundamental architecture is a choir of authorial voices, that its evolution is dominated by sudden shifts due to financial pressures on the publisher, and that the order in which elements appear—the plot—is largely fixed.
In the romance scholarship section we also have (not so comprehensive) chick lit and rom-com bibliographies. New to the chick-lit list is:
- Ferris, Suzanne.
- "Working Girls: The Precariat of Chick Lit", in Cupcakes, Pinterest and Ladyporn: Feminized Popular Culture in the Early Twenty-First Century, ed. Elana Levine (University of Illinois, 2015): 177-???.
Stamm, Kim (1987) "Confessions of a Romance Novelist," Manuscripts: Vol. 56: Iss. 2, Article 12.
I've also omitted Craig Williams's "Roman Homosexuality in Historical Fiction, from Robert Graves to Steven Saylor", in Ancient Rome and the Construction of Modern Homosexual Identities, ed. Jennifer Ingleheart (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015): 176-???. That's because it doesn't have a lot to say about romance fiction (at least, not as far as I could tell from the excerpt), but there is a little, starting on page 190 and (from page 192) focusing on Fae Sutherland and Marguerite Labbe's The Gladiator's Master (2011).
Tuesday, September 01, 2015
Academic / Community Screenings of Love Between the Covers
--Eric Selinger
For several years now I've served as a
scholarly advisor for the Popular Romance Project, including the documentary
film part of the PRP, Love Between the Covers. The film is now in
circulation at festivals in the US and internationally, and I must say, I'm very pleased with how it came out. It's a really interesting film, with solid material on the genre, its authors, the reading
community, and the publishing industry (including the digital revolution
currently underway. Featured characters include Radclyffe (Len Barot),
Beverly Jenkins, Eloisa James, new author Joanne Lockyer, and the collaborative
team of Susan Donovan and Celeste Bradley.
I’ve just heard from filmmaker Laurie Kahn that
scholars, academic departments, and student groups can now host public
screenings of Love Between the Covers at their colleges and
universities. If you are interested, go to lovebetweenthecovers.com/screenings where
there's a form you can fill in (Laurie's office will then get in touch). The screening team for Love
Between the Covers (Laurie, Julia Hines and Riley Davis) will work
with you, providing you with
- help and answers to your questions
- posters, flyers, and postcards to promote your
screening
- great images from the film and film production,
- easy-to-use templates for a press release, for email
messages, facebook messages, tweets, etc.
- a DVD or Blu-Ray of the film for your screening
- and help organizing a Q&A in person or on Skype
with Laurie, local romance authors, or -- possibly -- one of the main characters
in the film (if they live near by). Obviously the romance scholars
hosting the screening will also be part of the Q&A. And those
who've seen the film take shape can talk about it.
- Finally, and most importantly, the screening team will
help connect you up with other organizations in your area that are also
interested in hosting a screening.
The cost of renting the film for a public screening is $400
USD, but all academic institutions and RWA chapters get a 25% discount,
bringing the price to $300 USD. If you team up with another organization (a book club, a
local chapter of the Romance Writers of America, etc) you can split the cost,
and promote the screening together.
Collaborative screenings will draw a particularly interesting audience, with a mix of scholars, students, book lovers, romance
authors, and romance readers!
At the Library of Congress conference "What is Love?
Romance Fiction in the Digital Age," which began with a sneak preview of Love
Between the Covers, there was a mixed audience of scholars, people from the
romance community, and the general public. The discussion was extremely lively
and interesting -- and substantially different from the discussions one hears
at conferences for romance authors/fans or conferences for romance
scholars. It was also a lot of fun!
There are many Romance Writers of America local chapters and
book groups that are eager to team up with universities. If you let
Laurie and her team know that you are interested, they will help pair you up.
The sooner you get in touch the better, since Laurie is
planning a Love Between the Covers screenathon, with 50-100 screenings
across North America in the fall and early winter. Already, screenings
are being planned:
· at
a large military base in Hawaii
· at
a beautiful new public library in Halifax
· at
a romance readers’ conference in Denver
· at
a Landmark theater in Cambridge, MA
· at
literature festivals in Alabama and Mantua, Italy
· at
an independent booksellers trade show in N. Carolina.
If you have any questions, get in touch with me or with
the Love Between the Covers screening team.
Sunday, August 30, 2015
New Issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies
"The Journal of Popular Romance Studies started publishing almost exactly five years ago: August 4, 2010" (Selinger) and Issue 5.1 is now available, for free, online.
Special Issue: Romancing the Library (Editor’s Introduction)
by Crystal Goldman
A Matter of Meta: Category Romance Fiction and the Interplay of Paratext and Library Metadata - by Vassiliki Veros
Love in the Digital Library: A Search for Racial Heterogeneity in E-Books - by Renee Bennett-Kapusniak and Adriana McCleer
Creating a Popular Romance Collection in an Academic Library - by Sarah E. Sheehan and Jen Stevens
Editor’s Note: Issue 5.1
True Love’s Kiss and Happily Ever After: the religion of love in American film - by Jyoti Raghu
Chick Lit in Historical Settings by Frida Skybäck - by Helene Ehriander
Love in the Desert: Images of Arab-American Reconciliation in Contemporary Sheikh Romance Novels - by Stacy E. Holden
Stacy Holden’s “Love in the Desert”: An Author’s Response - by Megan Crane
14 Weeks of Love and Labour: Teaching Regency and Desert Romance to Undergraduate Students - by Karin Heiss
An Interview with Susan Elizabeth Phillips - by Eric Murphy Selinger
Review: Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema, by Sangita Gopal; Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema, by Monika Mehta
Review: The Contradictions of Love: Towards a feminist-realist sociosexuality, by Lena Gunnarsson
Review: The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and its Discontents, by Laura Frost
Review: Sex, or the Unbearable, by Lauren Berland and Lee Edelman; Overcoming Objectification: A Carnal Ethics, by Ann J. Cahill; Erotic Memoirs and Postfeminism: The Politics of Pleasure, by Joel Gwynne
Saturday, August 29, 2015
New to the Wiki: Interview with Mary Jo Putney, Lesbian Romance Comics, Male and Female Sentences
I've just made 3 new additions to the Romance Wiki Bibliography:
- Faktorovich, Anna, 2015.
- Gender Bias in Mystery and Romance Novel Publishing: Mimicking Masculinity and Femininity. (Stone Mountain, GA: Anaphora Literary P.). [You can "look inside" via Amazon.co.uk]
It is a linguistic, literary stylistic, and structurally formalist analysis of the male and female “sentences” in the genres that have the greatest gender divide: romances and mysteries. The analysis will search for the historical roots that solidified what many think of today as a “natural” division. Virginia Woolf called it the fabricated “feminine sentence,” and other linguists have also identified clear sex-preferential differences in Anglo-American, Swedish and French novels. Do female mystery writers adopt a masculine voice when they write mysteries? Are female-penned mysteries structurally or linguistically different from their male competitors’, and vice versa among male romance writers? The first part can be used as a textbook for gender stylistics, as it provides an in-depth review of prior research. The second part is an analysis of the results of a survey on readers’ perception of gender in passages from literature. The last part is a linguistic and structural analysis of actual statistical differences between the novels in the two genres, considering the impact of the author’s gender.
- Faktorovich, Anna, 2015.
- "Interview with Mary Jo Putney, Best-Selling Romance Author." Pennsylvania Literary Journal 7.2
- This is available in full for free online and in it Faktorovich comments that
In my research for a book on gender bias in romance and mystery publishing, I found that most female romance novelists were married, while most female mystery novelists were divorced or otherwise had many negative relationships in their past.
- Putney remarks that
A good thing about genre romance is that the happy ending is guaranteed, so it’s a safe space to explore topics that can be painful such as domestic abuse and alcoholism. Such stories interest me, so that’s what I write.
- Wood, Andrea, 2015.
- "Making the Invisible Visible: Lesbian Romance Comics for Women." Feminist Studies 41.2: 293-334. [Excerpt]
Frou-frou fables for people starved of real love, or empowering stories that bring hope and happiness? Romance novels are perhaps more loved and more derided than any other book genre. Anne Gracie, a bestselling romance writer herself, recounts how she went from sneering at romance to writing it.
Grimaldi, Christine, 2015. '“Happily Ever After” for African-American Romance Novelists', The Rumpus, August 18th, 2015.
It's a long article which gets more interesting (I think) once it gets past the first couple of paragraphs, about the Popular Romance Project's launch at the Library of Congress. For instance, Grimaldi notes that the
publishing industry [...] self-identifies as 89 percent white, 3 percent Asian, 3 percent Hispanic, and just 1 percent African-American, according to a 2014 Publisher’s Weekly survey. Case in point: At the conference, Jenkins shared a story about feedback she received on one of her manuscripts. “We all know what ‘[keeping it on the] down low’ means, right? Well, the copyeditor did not,” she said. Judging from the laughter in the room, the audience, and especially her fans, got it. “And she sent me back a little note that said, ‘This is not correct. You should say, ‘Keep it on the low shelf.’ And I said, ‘How about I don’t say that?’ So you know, you’ve got to have a sense of humor to do this.”It's available in full, for free, online here.
Sunday, August 23, 2015
Academics at the Romance Writers of Australia Conference 2016
With thanks to Dr Jodi McAlister who drew attention to this on Twitter.
According to the Romance Writers of Australia:
The 25th Annual Romance Writers of Australia Conference will be held in Adelaide 2016.On Twitter they mentioned that this "academic stream" "will include Professor Catherine Roach, Dr Danijela Kakavaskovic" (tweet) and Professor "James McGoldrick" (tweet).
Ain’t Love Grand will be held from 19 – 21 August 2016 at the Stamford Grand Hotel located at vibrant Glenelg, only a few minutes from the city centre.
As an additional bonus, we have partnered with Flinders University of South Australia to deliver an academic stream.
Catherine Roach, whose “Getting a Good Man to Love: Popular Romance Fiction and the Problem of Patriarchy” was published in the Journal of Popular Romance Studies
also writes historical romance fiction under the pen name Catherine LaRoche; her first e-novel Master of Love was published by Simon & Schuster in 2012 and Knight of Love followed in 2014. [...]I couldn't find any details about a Dr Danijela Kakavaskovic but I wonder it there was a typo in the tweet and the name should be Dr Danijela Kambaskovic, who
Currently, she is writing about her experience of becoming a romance novelist in a general audience academic book on how the story of romance — “find your one true love” — is the most powerful narrative at work in popular culture. Entitled Happily Ever After, the book is forthcoming from Indiana University Press later in 2015. (Roach)
is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The University of Western Australia. She is a former a lecturer in Shakespeare and Renaissance Studies at UWA. She has published widely in the fields of genre history and history of ideas and is an award-winning poet. (History of Emotions)I also had problems identifying Professor James McGoldrick. There is one who co-authors novels under the name "May McGoldrick":
Nikoo McGoldrick, a mechanical engineer, and James McGoldrick, a professor of English with a Ph.D. in sixteenth-century British literature, collaborate in life as well as in literature. Writing under the name May McGoldrick, they produce historical novels for Penguin- Putnam, and Young Adult Highland romances for HarperCollins/Avon.
Under the name of Jan Coffey, they write contemporary suspense thrillers for MIRA. ("Jan" is an acronym for "Jim and Nikoo; "Coffey" is Nikoo's maiden name.) (NAL)
Tuesday, August 18, 2015
New to the Wiki: Shades and The Sheik
I've decided I should put up a post whenever I add (or someone else adds) an entry to the Romance Wiki bibliography because items are added quite frequently and I don't tweet or blog about them all individually, so people may not be aware of how often new items are added or what they are. In today's post, I'd like to draw attention to an issue of Women: A Cultural Review which should be of interest to romance scholars. I haven't actually been able to get hold of copies of these articles myself but the argument in the article about Heyer, in particular, seems controversial:
- Deal, Clare H., 2015.
- "‘Throbb[ing] with a
consciousness of a knowledge that appalled her’: Embodiment and Female
Subjectivity in the Desert Romance", Women: A Cultural Review 26.1-2: 75-95.
Here's the abstract:
This article examines the relationship between the desert and embodiment in E. M. Hull’s international best-seller The Sheik (1919). This novel, a desert romance, has been the focus of feminist scholarship for decades because of its controversial rape narrative. Drawing on theories of embodiment, in particular the work of Elizabeth Grosz, the author interrogates how the desert is paradoxically presented as a space of liberation and oppression within which female sexuality could be explored despite the gendered violence of pre-existing patriarchal frameworks. Ultimately, the author provides a reading of Diana in terms of her transition from an androgynous ‘girl’ to a sexually desiring, seemingly feminized ‘woman’, and examines the connotations associated with this. The author establishes a connection between the transient nature of the desert and the liberation offered to women within this liminal space. Through an in-depth examination of the protagonist Diana’s corporeal subjectivity over the course of the novel, the author positions The Sheik as offering a voice to female sexuality and erotic fantasy, demonstrating Hull’s depiction of the desert as an appropriation of that space through which to explore female desires. This opens up new understandings of what constituted innovative literature in interwar Britain and marks Hull’s book, with its overtly erotic content and specific focus on female desire, as a political and social departure.
- Gillis, Stacy, 2015.
- "The Cross-Dresser, the Thief, His Daughter and Her Lover: Queer Desire and Romance in Georgette Heyer’s These Old Shades", Women: A Cultural Review 26.1-2: 57-74.
Here's the abstract:
When romance fiction consolidated as a genre in the 1920s and 1930s, a series of generic conventions concerning the heterosexual imperatives came about. This article considers how these heterosexual imperatives function as a mask for queer desire in Georgette Heyer’s These Old Shades (1926). Drawing on the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the article identifies in the novel a detailed account of male–male desire through arguing that while the romantic narrative is concerned with the Duc of Avon and Léonie, his former cross-dressing page, the substantial sexual tension in the novel occurs in the meetings and exchanges between Avon and Léonie’s biological father, Henri Saint-Vire. While These Old Shades ends with the presentation of Léonie by Avon as his duchess, it is male–male desire which has (queerly) driven this romance plot to its ‘natural’ conclusion of marriage. The article thinks through what happens when the rivalry, explicitly about desiring a woman, is an implicit homosocial bond and how this functions within the heterosexual imperatives of the romance novel. The article questions how desire functions in the romance novel and, more crucially, how romance fiction can be read as resisting, at least in part, that which has been traditionally understood as their raison d’être—the heterosexual imperative.
- And in the same issue there's another item which may be of interest, though I won't be adding it to the Bibliography because I've not been adding Fifty Shades scholarship to it unless there's a clear link made to romance novels:
- Booth, Naomi, 2015.
- "The Felicity of Falling: Fifty Shades of Grey and the Feminine Art of Sinking", Women: A Cultural Review 26.1-2: 22-39.
Here's the abstract:
This article explores the frequent faints depicted in the Fifty Shades novels in the context of a long history of feminine swooning in the popular novel, and in light of Alexander’s Pope’s famous description of bathos as ‘the felicity of falling gracefully’. Pope’s satirical treatise describes not just a sinking from the high to the low, but from the present to the past, through a process of bathetic literary travesty. The author argues that the Fifty Shades novels travesty their literary precedents, troping in particular on past moments of female powerlessness and producing bathos through depictions of the fainting female form. The novels depend in particular on (mis)readings of Tess of the D’Urbervilles: their celebration of Tess’s abjection strips Hardy’s novel of its most complex and disturbing elements, euphemizing a bloody and tragic struggle as a swoon of ecstatic submission. At stake in this discussion is the question of how popular fiction deals with its past—in this case, how the novels deal with a history of exploited femininity iconized in the swoon. The Fifty Shades novels simultaneously invoke and deny the past, celebrating female abjection in a manner that disavows the specificities of that abjection, and denying the materiality of the materials they draw upon. E. L. James’s approach to her historical referents is contrasted with Angela Carter’s, through which the texture of the past (and the motif of feminine fainting) is vividly engaged with in an attempt to transform the future.
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