Saturday, December 24, 2016

Romance Roundup: Spanish romance in English, Crime fiction wins in Scotland, Romance defended


A new, English translation of a novel by Corín Tellado has been published:
In 1962, Unesco declared her the most-read Spanish author alongside Cervantes. [...] Mario Vargas Llosa [...] has supplied the prologue to the translation.

“[Tellado] was, in all likelihood, the most significant sociocultural phenomenon in the Spanish language since the Golden Age,” writes the Peruvian-born Nobel laureate. “What might ostensibly appear to be heresy – and from a qualitative perspective it is – ceases to be so if we begin to view things in quantitative terms. Borges, García Márquez, Ortega y Gasset, any of the most original thinkers and writers in my language that you might care to mention, none of them have reached as many readers or had so great an influence on the way in which people feel, speak, love, hate, understand life and human relations, than María del Socorro Tellado López, Socorrín to her friends.”
Duncan Wheeler, associate professor of Spanish studies at the University of Leeds, was researching the cultural politics of Spain’s post-Franco transition to democracy when he noticed that her readers had been ignominiously lumped in with fans of Julio Iglesias and his ilk.

After devouring 50 of her books bought for a euro each at Madrid’s El Rastro flea market four years ago, he began to look beyond the comparisons with Cartland and consider Tellado as a chronicler of Spanish society [...] the books offer a valuable overview of an evolving Spain. Not only do they reflect the changing status of women as the tourism boom allowed them to leave home to work in hotels and other service industries, they also depict the country’s nascent celebrity culture and its fascination with all things American. (The Guardian)
The details of the translation are:

Corín Tellado, Thursdays with Leila, trans. Duncan Wheeler, intro. Diana Holmes and Duncan Wheeler, prologue Mario Vargas Llosa (Cambridge: MHRA New Translations, 2016)

More details of the cost and how to obtain the volume are available from The Modern Humanities Research Association.

I've often seen romance referred as the best-selling genre of popular fiction but presumably that's in the US/North American market. At least, at the end of November the Scottish Book Trust revealed that
crime/thriller books are the single most popular type of fiction in Scotland.

In a recent Ipsos MORI Scotland survey of 1,000 adults, just over 1 in 4 Scots (27%) who read for enjoyment said that books which fictionalise crimes, their detection, criminals and their motives topped their choice of reading or listening genres. The next most popular genre were science fiction/fantasy and biography/autobiography, both at 10%, followed by historical fiction at 9%.

While the crime genre was the most popular among readers of all ages, the second most popular genre among young readers (aged 16-34) was science fiction/fantasy (15%), while readers aged 55 and over chose historical fiction as their second preference (14%). (Scottish Book Trust)
To end on a more positive note for romance, Val Derbyshire's been busy trying to change perceptions of popular romance. She's reviewed Jenna Kernan's The Shifter's Choice (Harlequin Mills & Boon) in Revenant's special issue on werewolves. It's good to see a romance novel reviewed (and the genre defended) in an academic journal:
this is a romance where the author is asking her readers to suspend disbelief quite a lot. However, like most Mills & Boon romances, it's not as empty-headed as literary critics would have you believe. The story raises several issues of interest to contemporary society, including such matters as the selfishness of our Western consumption-driven culture in which the gulf between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots' is ever widening.
Earlier this year she was on the BBC arguing that romance is feminist and a lot more of her thoughts on that and other issues in the genre can be found in this short booklet about Harlequin Mills & Boon romances. Among the most thought-provoking parts for me was the one on "defamiliarisation":
Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky coined the term 'defamiliarisation'. He used this to describe the capacity of art to invest the familiar with strangeness and thereby enhance perception.

'Defamiliarisation' is not simply a question of perception; it is the essence of literariness. Authors who 'bare the device' in literature and expose literature's artificiality, defamiliarise its tropes and render it into 'true art'.

Mills & Boons do this repeatedly.
this is a romance where the author is asking her readers to suspend disbelief quite a lot. However, like most Mills & Boon romances, it’s not as empty-headed as literary critics would have you believe. The story raises several issues of interest to contemporary society, including such matters as the selfishness of our Western consumption-driven culture in which the gulf between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ is ever widening. - See more at: http://www.revenantjournal.com/contents/the-shifters-choice-jenna-kernan/#sthash.Uw7pzzPj.b9eMPXVX.dpuf
this is a romance where the author is asking her readers to suspend disbelief quite a lot. However, like most Mills & Boon romances, it’s not as empty-headed as literary critics would have you believe. The story raises several issues of interest to contemporary society, including such matters as the selfishness of our Western consumption-driven culture in which the gulf between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ is ever widening. - See more at: http://www.revenantjournal.com/contents/the-shifters-choice-jenna-kernan/#sthash.Uw7pzzPj.b9eMPXVX.dpuf
this is a romance where the author is asking her readers to suspend disbelief quite a lot. However, like most Mills & Boon romances, it’s not as empty-headed as literary critics would have you believe. The story raises several issues of interest to contemporary society, including such matters as the selfishness of our Western consumption-driven culture in which the gulf between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ is ever widening. - See more at: http://www.revenantjournal.com/contents/the-shifters-choice-jenna-kernan/#sthash.Uw7pzzPj.b9eMPXVX.dpuf

Tuesday, December 06, 2016

New to the Wiki: Islands in Romance, YA, NA, Crusie's Buildings, Military Romance, the British Empire.


Crane, Ralph and Lisa Fletcher, 2016. 
The Genre of Islands: Popular Fiction and Performative Geographies.” Island Studies Journal 11.2 (2016): 637-650.
Gillis, Bryan and Joanna Simpson, 2015. 
Sexual Content in Young Adult Literature: Reading between the Sheets (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield). [See Chapter 6 on "Sexual Content in Young Adult Romance".] Excerpt
 
Gleason, William, 2016. 
"The Inside Story: Jennifer Crusie and the Architecture of Love." Popular Fiction and Spatiality: Reading Genre Settings. Ed. Lisa Fletcher. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 79-93. Excerpt Abstract
Kitchen, Veronica, 2016. 
"Veterans and Military Masculinity in Popular Romance Fiction." Critical Military Studies. Abstract
Teo, Hsu-Ming, 2016. 
"Imperial Affairs: The British Empire and the Romantic Novel, 1890-1939", New Directions in Popular Fiction: Genre, Distribution, Reproduction, ed. Ken Gelder. (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 87-110. Excerpt
 
Tienkamp, Aaf, 2016. 
"New Adult Romance: An Emerging Genre." Master’s Dissertation Literary Studies. Programme: Writing, Editing and Mediating, University of Groningen.


Monday, December 05, 2016

Deadline Extended: Francis Award ($250 USD + Publication)

The International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR) is has extended the deadline for the Conseula Francis Award for the best unpublished essay on popular romance media and / or the logics, institutions, and social practices of romantic love in global popular culture. Submissions must now be received by Friday, January 6, 2017.  The winning essay will receive a $250 USD cash prize and be published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Popular Romance Studies, pending any needed revision according to the judges’ comments.

Essays submitted for the Francis Award may focus on work in any medium (e.g., fiction, film, TV, music, comics, or advice literature) or on topics related to real-world courtship, dating, relationships, and love. Conseula Francis’s work on popular romance fiction focused on African American authors and representations of Black love, and priority for the Francis Award will be given to manuscripts that address the diversity of, and diversities within, popular romance and romantic love culture: e.g., diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, class, sexuality, disability, or age.

All submissions should be sent to Erin Young, Managing Editor of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies, at managing.editor@jprstudies.org. Please put “Francis Award” in your subject line. All submissions must be Microsoft Word documents, with citations in MLA format; in keeping with JPRS publication guidelines we will consider essays of 5000 to ~10,000 words in length. Please remove your name or the name of any co-authors from the submitted manuscript; in your cover-letter email, please provide your contact information (address, phone number, e-mail address) and a 150-200 word abstract of the submission.

The judges for the Francis Award will be a mix of established and emerging scholars in the field of Popular Romance Studies, chosen by IASPR. The award winner will be announced in April, 2017; each year’s winner will be invited to join the panel of judges for the following year.