Teach Me Tonight

Teaching with "For Love and Money," part 2

2012-01-27T21:53:00.005Z

I just sent my students in ENG 383 (Women and Literature: Popular Romance Fiction) a list of paper topics, and as you'll see in this post and the ones that follow, these topics draw on our initial experiences with Laura's For Love and Money. The papers will be 6-8 pages long--and once I have them in hand, I'll have more ideas about how the students have responded so far to the secondary text. My sense so far, based on class discussion, is that For Love and Money not only introduces students to some very useful ideas about the genre, but also models the application of those ideas in the form of good, thoughtful close readings. So far, in short, so good!

The first chapter in For Love and Money treats the five "modes" of literature identified back in the 1950s by Northrop Frye, discussing each of them (myth, 'romance,' high mimetic, low mimetic, and irony) with examples of how they show up in and shape one or more HMB romance novels. Since 2006 I've opened almost every one of my romance classes with a discussion of these modes, since they give me the opportunity to nudge students away from thinking of low-mimetic literary realism as the "norm" against which to measure other forms of fiction, usually in order to find them wanting in some way. For Love and Money makes teaching these modes and their relationships to one another very, very easy, and it primes students to look for them in the texts they go on to read.

The book then proceeds to discuss how and why romance novels also use "modal counterpoint," the interplay of contrasting modes in a single novel. This, too, is a topic that I've tried to approach in other classes, with mixed success, mostly when I teach Suzanne Brockmann's novel Unsung Hero. For Love and Money makes the concept very clear, and since modal counterpoint is quite vividly on display throughout The Duke is Mine, this was a godsend. Rather than balk at or get bewildered by the contrasting tones in the novel, students approached them as a deliberate aesthetic feature of the text--which meant that, in discussion, they could discuss the relationship between this feature (multiple modes in one text) and other multiplicities and doublings in the novel.

Here's the paper topic, then, which I hope will provoke some interesting close reading from the students:

1. The first chapter in Laura Vivanco’s For Love and Money sets out the five “modes” of literature identified by Northrop Frye and shows how attending to the “modal counterpoint” in a romance novel can make sense of its shifting tones, metaphors, and rhetoric. These modes (and modal counterpoint) can be understood from a purely aesthetic standpoint, in terms of the structure and individual character of any given novel, but they may also be looked at from other perspectives: for example, Vivanco argues that the use of hyperbolic metaphors and allusions to “romantic” and high mimetic mythoi might aim to capture something of the experience of “romantic illusion,” which demonstrably forms a part of falling in love, at least for some (see pp. 65-69).
Write an essay on the use of modal counterpoint in The Duke is Mine, using ideas from Vivanco, from class discussion, and from your own insight to understand how James deploys a variety of modes in the novel, playing them off against one another. Your essay can be comprehensive, drawing on scenes and passages from various parts of the novel to illustrate James’s use of various modes, or it can focus on the counterpoint between various modes in a single scene, attending closing to a single chapter or passage. In either case, please keep in mind the guiding principle of our class: you want to make the novel seem as interesting as possible, whether by showing that it is more complexly coherent and artfully constructed than it might seem at first glance or by showing that it is more interestingly self-divided, conflicted, and ambivalent.

We also spent some time on Chapter 2, which focuses on what Frye called mythoi. More on that chapter, and the paper topic that came out of it, in my next post!

Teaching with "For Love and Money"

2012-01-22T12:56:00.008Z

--by Eric Selinger

Six years ago I taught DePaul University’s first course exclusively devoted to popular romance fiction: a gen-ed (or “Liberal Studies”) course that ran from E.M. Hull’s The Sheik (1919) to Bet Me, by Jennifer Crusie (2004). I have since taught about twenty-five courses on the genre, from large undergraduate surveys to senior and graduate seminars. The novels I've taught range from Christian inspirational romance to BDSM and LGBT romances, often accompanied by some range of essays and chapters from popular romance scholarship.

This winter, I'm teaching two romance classes, both of which I'm going to start blogging about here at Teach Me Tonight. One of them is built around fresh scholarly resource: Laura's brand new book, For Love and Money: the Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills & Boon Romance. I suspect I'm the first person to teach with this book, and I want to give anyone out there who might be considering it, either for class or for pleasure reading, a sense of how it's working in this context.

Let's start with logistics. When I asked my university bookstore to order hard copies of the book from Lulu, they balked, unused to dealing with an e-published / POD volume. (Our bookstore is a Barnes & Noble, and the fact that For Love and Money was available as a Kindle book, but not a Nook book, may have factored in their decision.) I promptly emailed the students directly, giving them links to download the book or purchase the paperback, and they were utterly unfazed by the prospect. About 2/3, I'd say, bought the paperback; the rest seem to be reading it on netbooks, e-readers, or tablets in class.

Because I wasn't sure whether they'd all have the book by the first full day of class, however--a worry I won't have in the future--I assigned some other reading before it. This is an upper-division undergraduate course, and I wanted to get students up to speed on the history of popular romance scholarship, the various debates that have structured it since the 1970s, and so forth. We started with three things:

The chapter on "Reading Romantic Fiction" from Joanne Hollows' book Feminism, Femininity and Popular Culture (2000), which gives an introductory overview of critical debates from the 70s-90s, grounding them in critiques of mass culture that date back to the 19th century;
The introduction to New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction, which covers the same period from a slightly different angle, and which brings things forward to the present, more or less; and
My own essay in New Approaches, "How to Read a Romance Novel (and Fall in Love with Popular Romance)," which talks about why it's been so hard for critics to invest in giving "close readings" of romance fiction--and then offers an example of what such reading might look like, working with Laura Kinsale's Flowers from the Storm.

Not much discussion that day, I'm sorry to say--I think I over-prepped, as I sometimes do when nervous. Instead, I talked my class through the critical history outlined in these three readings, so that they'd have a sense of the charges against and defenses of popular romance fiction in the contexts of 1) critiques of mass culture more generally (many of which are highly gendered, as Hollows shows); 2) feminist debates about the genre, including over whether it should be thought about as "pornography for women"; 3) the response of romance authors to these debates, primarily as gathered in the Dangerous Men, Adventurous Women anthology; and 4) the "new wave" of romance criticism that begins somewhere in the late 1990s, and picks up in the early 2000s, and includes Laura's book.

For the second day of class, I'd assigned the Introduction and first chapter ("Mimetic Modes") of Laura's book. Our conversation began, though, with an extended discussion of her dedication: "To every Harlequin Mills & Boon author who has ever been asked, 'When are you going to write a real novel?'" I had students brainstorm lists of the characteristics of the "real novel" and the "Harlequin Mills & Boon novel," drawing on the previous day's reading and on their own gut sense, as English majors, of what these differences might be.

This turned out to be a fabulous way to organize our thoughts, both in terms of the texts themselves and in terms of the ways they're written, published, marketed, and consumed, per student assumptions and as these get discussed in classes at our university. I kicked myself that I hadn't asked these students to read anything from Mark McGurl's The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction After Henry James, which has a wonderful discussion of how the high-art novel emerges (quite anxiously) from the sea of popular fiction during the later 19th century, but their exposure to a bit of that history via the Hollows chapter proved helpful in clarifying just how deeply they've been indoctrinated in some old, quite sketchy ideas about the distinction between "real" art (which is deliberate, and evidently created in pursuit of craft, social commentary, or inward spiritual necessity) as opposed to popular culture (filthy lucre!).

The key terms in Laura's title and subtitle, Love and Money and Literary Art, provided us with a useful frame of reference here, as did her introductory discussion of popular romance being "literature's Other" (thus Curthoys and Docker, qtd. 12) or being seen as the "degenerate" form of an older, more artistic genre. (This as opposed to the evolutionary metaphors commonly used for detective and science fiction, which is said to start as pulp fiction and then rise to the status of literature, at least in the hands of this or that author.) We talked about the denigration of HMB and of popular romance more generally—what had they seen, heard, etc. here at DePaul--and ended with Laura's comparison between HMB fiction and 15th century cancionero love poetry, which really struck a chord with several students.

By the end of class, they were ready to talk about reading romance novels as "real novels," which laid the foundation for our next go-round. I'll blog about that later this week, and then, at the end of the week, about our first attempts to read a particular romance novel, The Duke is Mine by Eloisa James, with Laura's study in mind. I chose the novel because it so prominently features a "mythos," in Northrop Frye's terms--in this case, the story of the Princess and the Pea--and Laura's second chapter is all about the ways that HMB romances deploy and revise and comment on recurring stories, or "mythoi." As it turns out, however, the first chapter of For Love and Money, about various fictional "modes" and the aesthetics of "modal counterpoint," also turned out to be quite helpful. Stay tuned!

Penny Jordan

2012-01-16T09:00:00.000Z

On the day of Penny Jordan's funeral I'd like to thank jay Dixon, author of The Romance Fiction of Mills & Boon 1909-1990s, for writing the following guest post about Penny Jordan's writing career for Teach Me Tonight.

Penny Jordan

24 Nov1946 – 31 Dec 2011

Penny Jordan was bornin Preston, Lancashire, and lived in north-west England throughouther life. A keen reader from childhood, her favourite authors wereJane Austen, Dorothy Dunnett, Charles Dickens, Georgette Heyer,Catherine Cookson, Shakespeare and the Bible. She died from inoperablecancer at the early age of 65.

As a consequence of her love ofHeyer, she started her writing career as one of the Desmond Elliotstable of authors, writing Regencies as Caroline Courtney. The firstwas A Wager for Love, where the hero (who according to one reviewer is ‘a bit too stuffy’) abducts the heroine. Her second,Guardian of the Heart, has a more typical Jordan hero: coldand aloof and out for revenge.

An insatiablestoryteller, while writing Caroline Courtney Regencies she also wrotebetween 1981 and 1983, three air-hostess romps asMelinda Wright and two thrillers as Lydia Hitchcock, but her bigbreak came in 1981, when an editor at Mills & Boon picked upFalcon’s Preyfrom the slush pile. A sheik novel, it has a dictatorial hero, whobelieves the heroine is a gold-digger and treats her accordingly.This remained a typical hero for Jordan, but she was also able toreinvent her M&B novels so that, for instance, in her 50^thnovel for them, Loving, published in 1986, quite early on inthe novel the hero is ‘stripped of his masculine arrogance’ andthe heroine, who was raped as an eighteen-year-old, ‘blot[s] outhis masculinity’ in order to talk to him. This picture of a hero isa far cry from one whose ‘study was an openly sexual one, and notmerely sexual but contemptuous’ (Passionate Protection,1983, p.25), or who ‘wouldn’t allow her to have any views thatweren’t his’ (The Inward Storm, 1987, p.12), which areJordan’s more usual type of hero.

[On 24 January jay Dixon adds: I have now confirmed that Penny Jordan also wrote circa 7 novels as Frances Roding for M&B early in her career.]

In 2007 Jordan wasinterviewed by the Romantic Novelists' Association (who presented her with a Lifetime Achievementaward in 2011), where she said in answer to a question aboutrepeating plots: ‘In each book the characters are different, withdifferent approaches and reactions, so the plot is bound to developdifferently. Each new hero/heroine has a unique past, their ownfeelings and new conflict so any coincidental plot similarities don’tmatter.’ (Romance Matters, p.9). This isreflected in her 1994 novel French Leave, where the hero is indisguise, and it is the heroine who misunderstands him and hismotives.

Although some of herRegency heroines were naïve innocents, her Mills & Boon heroineswere ‘self-determining with decent careers and some experience oflife’ (Fabulous at Fifty, p.241), and always foughttheir corner.

In 1994 Harlequin setup the MIRA imprint, and Jordan was among their first authors. Her first two novelsfor them were New York Times bestsellers, and her third,Hidden Years, was her personal biggest mainstream seller. Itstill has her trademark dictatorial male figure, but the emphasis ison the mother/daughter relationship of the two main characters.

However, after 10 yearsher sales started to fall, and her contract with them was eventuallycancelled. She started looking for another publisher, and so theAnnie Groves sagas were born, under the HarperCollins imprint. Theseare Second World War stories based on her own family’s memories. Adifferent style from her Mills & Boon novels, they are set inLiverpool and emphasise the home and family – for instance in theCampion series many of the important decisions are taken in theyellow-painted kitchen, which becomes a symbol throughout the novelsof family love and understanding.

A versatile author –as well as her Regencies, thrillers, Mills & Boons and sagas, sheleaves a complete but unpublished history of Richard the Lionheart –Jordan was able to adapt her style and plotting to the demands of herchosen genre without losing any of the vitality of her writing. Withonly three ‘O’ levels to her name, in English language andliterature and geography, on the advice of Desmond Elliot, whotold her ‘you can write’, she never took a writing course. Nonetheless, she became not just a successful author, but attained and remained atthe top of her profession for decades. She wrote well in manygenres, yet remained unassuming, diffident about her own talent, butalways keen to help new writers.

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Works Cited

Fabulous at Fifty: Recollections of theRomantic Novelists’ Association 1960-2010, ed. Jenny Haddon &Diane Pearson. The RomanticNovelists' Association, 2010
Romance Matters,February 2007

As Caroline Courtney

A Wager for Love,1979 Warner Books
Guardian of theHeart, 1979 Warner Books

As Penny Jordan

Falcon’sPrey, 1981Mills & Boon
French Leave,1994 Mills & Boon
Loving, 1986Mills & Boon
PassionateProtection, 1983 Mills & Boon
The Hidden Years,1990 Mira Books
The Inward Storm,1987 Mills & Boon

Campion Family Seriesas Annie Groves:

Across the Mersey, 2008HarperCollins
Daughters of Liverpool,2008 HarperCollins
The Heart of the Family,2009 HarperCollins
Where the Heart Is, 2009HarperCollins
When the Lights Go OnAgain, 2010 HarperCollins

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Obituaries can be found at The Guardian, the Harlequin blog, the Mills & Boon website, the Pink Heart Society blog and the RNA blog, and there have also been many individual tributes written by her colleagues.

Romantic Times with Eric and Sarah

2012-01-14T16:19:00.000Z

Laura Vivanco

Eric and Sarah are in the February issue of RT Book Reviews:

In the February issue of RT BOOK REVIEWS, we profiled the nonfiction academic study of romance, New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction: Critical Essays, edited by two professors, Sarah S.G. Frantz and Eric Murphy Selinger. The volume, which will be published this year by McFarland, contains 18 essays about the romance genre and community, from luminaries in the academic world as well as romance authors and bloggers. The editors had so much to say about romances and genre fiction and their fascination with the books, that we wanted to continue the interview in online. So today we're bringing you the extended Q&A with the book's editors and RT Managing Editor Liz French.

The "extended Q&A" with Sarah and Eric can be found here and the list of "luminaries," their contributions and those of the other authors whose articles are included in the volume, can be found here.

Miscellaneous

2012-01-13T00:07:00.000Z

Laura Vivanco

I'd been wondering when the current economic climate might begin to affect the Greek and Italian tycoons who inhabit romances, and recently I came across this in Sara Craven's Wife in the Shadows (Mills & Boon, June 2011):

any kind of open scandal should be avoided, particularly at this moment. The quality of the Galantana brand of clothing had saved the company from the worst effects of the global recession - indeed, they were planning expansion - but for that they needed extra finance for more new machinery at the Milan factory, as well as buying another site for workshops near Verona.
Which was principally why he had accepted Silvia's dinner invitation, because he'd learned that Prince Cesare Damiano, head of the Credito Europa bank would be present [...].
He and Prince Damiano had spoken briefly but constructively, and negotiations were now proceeding. And while the banker was a charming, cultivated man with a passion for rose-growing, he was also known to be a stickler for old-fashioned morality.
Any overt lapse on Angelo's part could well blow the deal out of the water. (14-15)

The situation described in the first paragraph fits rather well with the reality described in an article on the BBC website, from 1 November 2011:

There are no price tags on the clothes in Brunello Cucinelli's showroom in Milan.
The people who shop in the designer's store do not need to worry about how much they are spending.
And Mr Cucinelli doesn't feel he needs to worry about talk of a double-dip recession in Europe.
"This is the century of China," he says.
"This will mean billions of human beings coming towards us and asking to live in a different way. These people are fascinated by our quality, by our culture, by our craftsmanship."
Too true, says Italy's luxury goods trade group Altagamma.
It sees sales in European markets growing by 3.75% next year.

Jeannie Watt has taken a look at the changing trends in Supperromance covers, from 1980 to the present.

I've been guest-blogging at She-Wolf's (about medievalism and how it's shaped my approach to reading Harlequin Mills & Boon romances), at Read React Review (about "high" art and the way it's been defined in opposition to works which are commercially successful) and I've also received some nice comments about For Love and Money from Kate Walker.

I've also been updating Teach Me Tonight's look, in response to C. M. Kempe's plea that I "consider adding share buttons to the end of every post to make the redistribution easier." There are now share buttons at the end of each post and there are also some on the sidebar. This did involve redesigning the blog a little: we're still pink, but the look of the new template's a bit simpler.

The Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand (PopCAANZ) 2012 conference will be held at the Langham Hotel in Melbourne on the 27th, 28th and 29th of June. More details can be found here.

[Edited to add: Remittance Girl, an author of erotica (not romance) challenges fellow authors to write sex scenes which will evoke readers' lived experiences:

I don't want to connect with my readers over a landscape of commercialized sex. When they read a piece of my erotic work, I attempt, as far as possible, to ensure that what they're imagining calls to their real memories and lived abstractions, not a porn flick. Because I feel that the story will resonate at a deeper level if my words are associated with their real, felt, lived erotic experiences.

This is definitely an issue of relevance to romance as well as to erotica. For instance, Smart Bitch Sarah recently posted about the hymen because "I thought we'd gone over this in the past few years enough times that folks knew this information already. But it seems like we need a review because authors still don't seem to know where the hell the hymen is." As Dani A. points out in the comments, "Bad anatomy in romance isn't just aggravating, it's probably causing real harm and anxiety to people who don't know better and think that the books are right and somehow it's their bodies that are wrong."]

Bearing Free Heyer Stories I've Travelled Afar

2012-01-06T02:08:00.000Z

Laura Vivanco

Following the recent JPRS call for papers on Georgette Heyer, I was reading Jennifer Kloester's new biography of Heyer (some reviews can be found here, here and here and there's a preview here).

Kloester's mention of a short story " 'On Such a Night', which [Heyer's] agent sold to an Australian magazine (so far the story remains undiscovered, with no indication of what it was about or the period in which it was set)" (148) sent me off to see what I could find. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my journey didn't lead me where I hoped it would, though I did discover that on Wednesday 24 November 1937 the story was broadcast on Australian radio (Station 2GB between 11.45 and 12 noon).

I did, however, find two short stories by Heyer, "Lady, Your Pardon" and "Incident on the Bath Road," which were entirely new to me. So, in the spirit of Epiphany, I thought I'd bring you some gold from an archival treasure Trove. Below are links to those two stories and a few others you may or may not have already read. I've also discovered serialised versions of a number of Heyer novels, so I've included links to those too, though only to the first page of each installment, or this post would have got unmanageably long.

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Short Stories

"A Proposal to Cicely" (1922)- via Jane Austen's World. [According to Fahnestock-Thomas, it was first published in The Happy Magazine, 4 September 1922 (5) and it is reprinted in her Georgette Heyer: A Critical Retrospective.]

"Runaway Match" (1936) - (1), (2), (3) and (4) - The Australian Woman's Weekly, 12 June 1937. [According to Fahnestock-Thomas, who reprinted it in her book, this was first published in Woman's Journal in April 1936 (20).]

"Lady, Your Pardon" - (1), (2), (3) and (4) - The Australian Women's Weekly, 3 April 1937. [This story was originally titled "Pharaoh's Daughter" (Kloester 163) and since Heyer thought "it has the makings of a novel" (Kloester 221) the opening scenes became the basis of her full-length Faro's Daughter (1941). The two stories do, however, develop quite differently.]

"Incident on the Bath Road" - (1), (2), (3) and (4) - The Australian Women's Weekly, 29 May 1937.

"Love is a Hazard" - (1), (2), (3) and (4)- The Australian Women's Weekly, 10 July 1937. [This is a version of "Hazard," one of the short stories later published in Pistols for Two (1960).]

"Pursuit" (1939) - via the Internet Archive. [According to Fahnstock-Thomas this was first published in The Queen's Book of the Red Cross. She reprints it in her book.]

"The Duel" - (1), (2), (3), (4) and (5) - The Australian Women's Weekly, 28 October 1953. [This short story was later published in Pistols for Two.]

Historical Romances (mostly Regency)

The Black Moth (1921) [This is the full novel, I think, because it's out of copyright.]

Simon the Coldheart (1925)- in 5 parts in the Australian Women's Weekly.
20 Dec 1978; 27 Dec. 1978; 3 Jan. 1979; 10 Jan. 1979; 17 Jan. 1979.

Gay Adventure [Regency Buck] (1935)- The Australian Women's Weekly.
6 July 1935; 13 July 1935; 20 July 1935; 27 July 1935; 3 Aug. 1935; 10 Aug. 1935; 17 Aug. 1935; 24 Aug. 1935; 31 Aug. 1935; 7 Sept. 1935; 14 Sept. 1935; 21 Sept. 1935; 28 Sept. 1935; 5 Oct. 1935; 12 Oct. 1935; 19 Oct. 1935; 26 Oct. 1935; 2 Nov. 1935.

Kloester writes that Heyer was

incensed by the discovery that Dorothy Sutherland [editor of Woman's Journal] had re-named Regency Buck, Gay Adventure, with a caption that read: 'Gay Adventure - in the Dare-Devil Days when Men were Men and Women Seductively Coy!' above an illustration that made her strong-minded heroine look exactly like the sort of insipid female she despised. Georgette found this sort of take on her work maddening, for she worked hard to lift her plots, characters and dialogue out of the rut of stereotypical and formulaic fiction. [...] She wrote to her agent to express her outrage: '[...] I am so furious I can't bring myself to reply. She chose that filthy title, Gay Adventure (it makes me sick to write it) without one word to me!' Nothing incensed Georgette more than interference in her work and Dorothy Sutherland's meddling was something she would not easily forgive. (147)

The Talisman Ring (1936) - The Australian Women's Weekly
5 Dec. 1936; 12 Dec. 1936; 19 Dec. 1926; 26 Dec. 1936; 2 Jan. 1937; 9 Jan. 1937; 16 Jan. 1937; 23 Jan 1937; 30 Jan. 1937; 6 Feb. 1937; 13 Feb. 1937.

An Infamous Army (1937) - Australian Women's Weekly
22 Jan. 1938; 29 Jan. 1938; 5 Feb. 1938; 12 Feb. 1938; 19 Feb. 1938; 26 Feb. 1938; 5 March 1938; 12 March 1938; 19 March 1938; 26 March 1938; 2 April 1938; 9 April 1938.

Friday's Child (1944) - Australian Women's Weekly
29 Jan. 1949; 5 Feb. 1949; 12 Feb. 1949; 19 Feb. 1949; 26 Feb. 1949; 5 March 1949; 12 March 1949; 19 March 1949; 26 March 1949; 2 April 1949; 9 April 1949; 16 April 1949.

The Reluctant Widow (1946)- Sydney Morning Herald , starting 31 Aug. 1946
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, Conclusion.

Arabella (1949) - in 10 parts in the Australian Women's Weekly
2 Jan 1952; 9 Jan. 1952; 16 Jan. 1952; 23 Jan 1952; 30 Jan. 1952; 6 Feb. 1952; 13 Feb. 1952; 20 Feb. 1952; 27 Feb. 1952; 5 March 1952.

The Grand Sophy (1950) - in 8 parts in the Australian Women's Weekly
28 Jan. 1953; 4 Feb. 1953; 11 Feb. 1953; 18 Feb. 1953; 25 Feb. 1953; 4 March 1953; 11 March 1953; 18 March 1953.

Bath Tangle (1955) - in 6 parts in Australian Women's Weekly
30 March 1955; 6 April 1955; 13 April 1955; 20 April 1955; 27 April 1955; 4 May 1955.

Sprig Muslin (1956) - in 7 parts in the Australian Women's Weekly
4 April 1956; 11 April 1956; 18 April 1956; 25 April 1956; 2 May 1956; 9 May 1956; 16 May 1956.

April Lady (1957) - in 5 parts in the Australian Women's Weekly
3 April 1957; 10 April 1957; 17 April 1957; 24 April 1957; 1 May 1957.

Sylvester (1957)- in 7 parts in the Australian Women's Weekly
11 June 1958; 18 June 1958; 25 June 1958; 2 July 1958; 9 July 1958; 16 July 1958; 23 July 1958.

Venetia (1958) - in 5 parts in the Australian Women's Weekly
22 April 1959; 29 April 1959; 6 May 1959; 13 May 1959; 20 May 1959.

The Unknown Ajax (1959) - Australian Women's Weekly
1 June 1960; 8 June 1960; 15 June 1960; 22 June 1960; 29 June 1960.

Historical Fiction

Royal Escape (1938) - Australian's Women's Weekly
18 Nov. 1939; 25 Nov. 1939; 2 Dec. 1939; 9 Dec. 1939; 16 Dec. 1939; 23 Dec. 1939; 30 Dec. 1939; 6 Jan. 1940; 13 Jan. 1940; 20 Jan. 1940.

Detective Novels

The Unfinished Clue (1934) - "Complete Booklength Novel" in the Australian Women's Weekly, 10 August 1935.

Death in the Stocks (1935) - "Long Complete Book-Length Novel" in the Australian Women's Weekly, 8 June 1935.

Behold, Here's Poison! (1936) - Australian Women's Weekly
23 Nov. 1940; 30 Nov. 1940; 7 Dec. 1940 ;14 Dec. 1940; 21 Dec. 1940; 28 Dec. 1940; 4 Jan. 1941; 11 Jan. 1941; 18 Jan. 1941; [it would appear there is no issue for 25 Jan. 1941] ; 1 Feb. 1941.

No Wind of Blame (1939) - Australian Women's Weekly
19 April 1947; 26 Apr. 1947; 3 May 1947; 10 May 1947; 17 May 1947; 24 May 1947; 31 May 1947; 7 June 1947; 14 June 1947; 21 June 1947; 28 June 1947; 5 July 1947.

Detection Unlimited (1953) - in six parts in Australian Women's Weekly
3 Feb. 1954; 10 Feb. 1954; 17 Feb. 1954; 24 Feb. 1954; 3 March 1954; 10 March 1954.

If any of those links are faulty, please let me know. I was very careful, but there were so many links to insert I may have slipped up somewhere.

This Australian Women's Weekly review of The Spanish Bride, from 29 June 1940, may also be of interest. It includes a photo of Georgette Heyer which I hadn't seen before and the reviewer draws parallels between the historical context of the novel and that of 1940:

AT such a time as this, with the newspapers carrying, every day, news of further advances on the part of troops driven forward by the will of a ruthless, determined, strongly armed aggressor, there is a message of comfort in this story of a desperate war, against another Continental dictator, over a hundred years ago.

Kloester also notes the relevance of world politics to Heyer's output:

The idea that war was impending pervaded British life throughout the late 1930s and each of Georgette's historical novels written between 1936 and 1939 was about war. After An Infamous Army was published she decided to write the story of Charles II's escape from Cromwell's England following the Battle of Worcester in 1651. (185)

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Fahnestock-Thomas, Mary. Georgette Heyer: A Critical Retrospective. Saraland, AL: Prinnyworld, 2001.
Kloester, Jennifer. Georgette Heyer: Biography of a Bestseller. London: Heinemann, 2011.

The image of the Three Wise Men carrying gold, frankincense and myrrh, came from Wikimedia Commons.

A different take

2011-12-31T02:17:00.003Z

Sarah S. G. Frantz

Sarah's take on Laura Struves' article published by JPC is slightly different from Laura's and a lot more ranty:

I can't figure out if I'm more upset at the author or at the Journal of Popular Culture about this article. I think it's a tie, with a side-order of despair about academic publishing in the Humanities.

The author has produced yet another article about romance fiction that considers the entire romance genre to be the same -- to have the same purpose, the same outcome, the same focus, and the same manner of expression. This is yet another article astonished that romance readers aren't pathetic women who must be humored in their addiction. It hashes over the same ground in completely unoriginal ways. It's, basically, Radway updated for the internet, so the only new thing it's saying is that readers are doing exactly the same thing that Radway discovered they were doing (creating communities around their romance reading, being proactive and kickass), but now they're doing it on the internet too.

But the article doesn't consider current romance internet interactions. It does not mention Smart Bitches (started in January 2005) or Dear Author (started in April 2006). Twitter is conspicuous in its absence. As Laura says, the article talks about AAR's At the Back Fence as a current blog. It doesn't even mention RRA-L (the first romance listserv).

For example, the article claims, "Approximately fifty specific Web sites are dedicated to romantic fiction and eleven chat groups allow readers to talk to each other directly. Over 273 romance authors have sites on the Web, and more Web sites pop up daily." This sounds like something from the late 1990s. It continues, "The genre of romantic fiction is marked by a strong connection between writing and reading. Writers remain in close touch with their readers through conferences, fan mail, and the ever-expanding Internet." One thing about the connection between authors and readers that CHANGED on the internet is that it became much more direct. RRA-L was, in fact, the first place to change that, as it was a listserv to which authors and readers both posted with the same amount of authority. I was personally involved in Suzanne Brockmann's message board in 2000-2005, on which Brockmann frequently interacted with her readers. This is, in fact, where I met her and began to establish my professional relationship with her. The important thing to know is that Brockmann's message board was not unusual.

Honestly, this article feels like it was written as a seminar paper in 1997 or 1998 that applied Henry Jenkins's theories to the romance community and was then never updated for submission, but was submitted anyway. All quotes from authors in the articles, for example, were from Krentz's Dangerous Men, Adventurous Women or from AAR's ATBF in 1996 or 1997. This is unconscionable on the author's part. Giving her every benefit of the doubt, HOW could she submit, in, say, 2005 at the very very earliest an article that was written at least five years previously, without updating it? Because that's what it looks like she did. If *nothing* else, Pamela Regis's A Natural History of the Romance Novel was published in 2003 and would have bolstered part of the article's argument significantly.

Which brings us to the journal. JPC has, apparently, overwhelmed itself with accepted submissions, meaning there's at least a three year backlog on publishing articles after acceptance. That's their issue. They either need to raise their standards, expand their issues, or start publishing on the web like JASNA did with Persuasions. And certainly if this article is an example of the scholarship that they're putting in the very very long line for publication, then they need to raise their standards. If this was accepted in, say, 2008, that's still a full (generously) six years out of date *in 2008* (let alone how out-of-date it would be when finally published!). Peer reviewers should have caught this. Assuming a two year peer review process, there was still recent scholarship in 2006 that should have been part of the article (Regis), and there were CERTAINLY online communities that should have been discussed in an article *about* online communities that seems to have stopped its consideration of said communities in 1997 (ten years out of date for 2008 acceptance -- HOW did no one catch this?!).

But really, this says more than anything about the state of Humanities scholarship than it does about JPC (although it sure says enough there, too). JPC feels (and is not alone) that a two year peer-review process is just fine. It also feels that a three year wait between acceptance and publication is just fine, too. And then it publishes without indicating that there was, at least, a FIVE year wait between submission and publication. This is just...short-sighted, if nothing else.

The entire field of popular romance studies has changed in the last five year. IASPR was started in 2009. JPRS's first issue was in 2010.

But forget the academic field, the romance genre itself has changed in the last five years (downfall of erotic romance, switches in paranormal, rise of e- and self-publishing, demise of group author blogs). And certainly reader/author interaction has changed with the advent of Twitter and the dominance of Facebook. And while neither the author nor JPC could have anticipated *quite* how outdated the article would appear when published in 2011, talking as it is about online culture circa 1997 (almost 15 years!), the fact that academic publishing in general doesn't seem to realize that things change, dammit -- they grow and adapt and CHANGE -- is just...depressing. Is five years to publication REALLY the way to stay relevant? Do we really wonder why the Humanities are being left behind in academia by fields that can stay more relevant to modern changes?

Additional, though smaller, issues with the article that are just symptoms, I think, of the larger problem:

The article misspells Kathleen Woodiwiss (as Woodiweiss) and Jennifer Crusie (Cruise). The latter may be a legitimate typographical error, because I know I do it all the time when I try to type Jenny's name, but the former is not.
The section about covers is utterly out of date, almost a decade behind the times.
As is the section about the "midlist" issue -- something that's still an issue, to be sure, but has been fundamentally changed by digital publishing (started in 2000 with Ellora's Cave).
The section about sexuality in romances ignores the rise of the erotic romance, something that started in the late 1990s and fundamentally changed romance in the 2000s (again, also ignoring digital publishing).

Struve, Laura. “Sisters of Sorts: Reading Romantic Fiction and the Bonds Among Female Readers.” Journal of Popular Culture 44.6 (2011): 1289-1306.

Sisters and Husbands

2011-12-31T02:16:00.003Z

Laura Vivanco

Laura Struve's "Sisters of Sorts: Reading Romantic Fiction and the Bonds among Female Readers" appeared in the most recent issue of the Journal of Popular Culture but its conclusion is not likely to come as any surprise to readers of this blog: "Romance readers not only fail to be oppressed by their reading, they also make it an occasion to participate in a female community" (1303). Struve points to the existence of active communities of romance readers, such as those who visit All About Romance, as evidence that "Contrary to the perception that readers are passive, isolated women hopelessly waiting for their prince to come, readers of romantic fiction are active and seek to form bonds among women" (1293) and argues that

When romance readers seek out other readers, they are seeking out other women, and when readers become writers, they identify themselves as writing within a female tradition. These connections are discussed using the rhetoric of familial relationships—kinship, sisterhood, and motherhood. Instead of being obsessed with unattainable heterosexual romantic relationships, romance readers seek out and desire sisterhood. [...] These readers are not trying to find “Mr. Right” or “Prince Charming” [...]. They are trying to find a fellow reader; they are trying to find a sister of sorts. (1297)

Since it's quite possible to have both a husband and a sister and, according to the Romance Writers of America, "Romance readers are more likely than the general population to be currently married or living with a partner," I wonder precisely what is meant by "unattainable heterosexual romantic relationships." Clearly many readers are in romantic relationships, so is Struve is suggesting that there is a particular type of "heterosexual romantic relationship" which is unattainable (i.e. one with a "prince")? Or does she think that many readers have no need to be "obsessed" about attaining a heterosexual romantic relationship because they already have one? Could it be that she has failed to consider the possibility that romance readers may have (or be obsessed with having) heterosexual romantic relationships and develop homosocial relationships based around romance-reading?

Early in the essay Struve states that

If romance novels are perceived to be poorly written, formulaic, and pornographic, then it is easy to characterize their readers as unintelligent, unsophisticated, and neurotic. The idea that “you are what you read” dominates many studies of romantic fiction, and the portrait of the reader that emerges is heavily influenced by the content of the novels.

If, however, one shifts the focus from content to the activities that surround the reading experience—the way romance readers talk about their reading, the way they talk to each other, their connections to writers and publishers, the way they use technology—a portrait of a different reader emerges, a reader who is an active participant in the genre’s production and reception as well as its consumption. Despite the genre’s conservative ideology, which focuses on heterosexual courtship and marriage, romance readers make connections with other women, and they use the Internet to help foster this community. (1289-90)

It is not entirely clear whether Struve herself perceives romance novels to be "poorly written, formulaic, and pornographic" [and I, as the author of a book subtitled "The Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills & Boon Romance" would, obviously, take issue with that view if she does hold it] but she certainly seems to accept that the genre has a "conservative ideology, which focuses on heterosexual courtship and marriage." While it is true that a great many romance novels do focus on heterosexual courtship and marriage, such a statement immediately makes me wonder if the author is aware of the existence of substantial numbers of lesbian and m/m romances or has considered the possibility that there might be significant variations in the depictions of "heterosexual courtship and marriage."¹ Furthermore, when female communities are contrasted with a "conservative ideology," I can't help but note that a group of women do not, by the mere fact of coming together to participate in leisure or other pursuits, automatically pose a challenge to conservative ideologies.

Whatever her view of the merits (or otherwise) of modern romance novels, Struve is very much aware that there are

similarities between the study of romantic fiction and the history of the novel and novel studies. The attacks on the romance reader today are similar to those leveled at novel readers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. [...] During the first half of the twentieth century [...] [s]cholars who wanted to expand the canon to include works by female authors faced accusations that literature written by women was frivolous because it focused primarily on domestic concerns such as courtship and marriage and that these works were poorly written. (1302)

She therefore concludes that

Scholars who are critical of this genre seem unaware of the history of their complaints and cultivate a certain blindness about the relationship between literature and popular culture and the act of reading. Literary scholars have already decided that a lifetime can be spent and a career made in talking about books and reading them, yet romance readers are criticized for being “addicted” to reading. (1303)

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Struve, Laura. “Sisters of Sorts: Reading Romantic Fiction and the Bonds Among Female Readers.” Journal of Popular Culture 44.6 (2011): 1289-1306.

Another woman-only social activity

1 Despite the inclusion of some bibliographical items dated 2011 there is a curiously retro feel about parts of this essay. For example, Struve writes that "All About Romance, features an interactive column, 'At the Back Fence' ” (1294) but I knew it had been discontinued some time ago. When I checked at AAR, I discovered that "The last ATBF column was published October 27, 2008" (AAR). Struve writes that:

In addition, romance novels have an extremely shortshelf span; Harlequin publishes c. thirty different titles every month. Readers must rely on word of mouth and recommendations in order to make their purchases before the books disappear from the shelvesand are replaced by new titles. (1294)

There is no acknowledgment here that many romance readers now buy ebooks, which do not have "an extremely short shelf span." Incidentally, this also seems a rather low estimate of Harlequin's monthly output: in December in the Harlequin Presents line alone I counted 10 new novels. I strongly suspect that the essay was first written prior to 27 October 2008 but was not published until this month due to the fact that at one point the Journal of Popular Culture had a massive backlog of articles accepted for publication.

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The image is of "Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. These two Church Amish women are engaged in quilting. Quilting bees are popular in this area." The photo was taken by Irving Rusinow and came from Wikimedia Commons which in turn acquired it from "the National Archives and Records Administration as part of a cooperation project. The National Archives and Records Administration provides images depicting American and global history which are public domain or licensed under a free license."

Biscuits, Heyer and a Cornucopia of CFPs

2011-12-27T13:17:00.000Z

Laura Vivanco

Anyone want some (virtual) biscuits? I've been discussing the category-romances-as-biscuits metaphor at the Pink Heart Society.

From Eric, in his capacity as Executive Editor of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies, comes this

CALL FOR PAPERS: Georgette Heyer

Georgette Heyer’s work spanned many genres, including the detective novel, Georgian romances, and historical fiction, and she has been credited by critics with establishing the Regency romance as a popular romantic novel form. Acclaimed by reviewers and other novelists, including A. S. Byatt, Heyer’s enduring popularity among romance readers is evident in the publication history of her work—most has never gone out of print, with new editions recently published by HQN and Sourcebooks, Inc.—and in her many imitators. With the publication of Jennifer Kloester’s new literary biography of Heyer in the fall of 2011, the time seems right for a reexamination and reevaluation of Heyer and her work.

The Journal of Popular Romance Studies is soliciting papers for a special forum on Heyer as a romance novelist, guest-edited by Phyllis M. Betz. All critical approaches are welcome; papers may focus on individual novels or groups of texts, on Heyer’s changing status as a middlebrow and popular novelist, on paratextual and contextual issues (covers and marketing, publication history, reception), or on Heyer’s legacy.

Essays / proposals on Heyer’s work in other genres, and on her genre-crossing texts, are also solicited for a separate anthology, also edited by Phyllis M. Betz.

For the special JPRS forum on Heyer as a romance novelist, please submit scholarly papers of no more than 10,000 words to An Goris, Managing Editor managing.editor@jprstudies.org and betz@lasalle.edu. Submissions should be Microsoft Word documents, with citations in MLA format. The deadline for submissions is May 4, 2012.

For more information about the anthology on Heyer’s work in other genres, please contact Phyllis M. Betz at betz@lasalle.edu.

And in other CFPs we have:

Allusions and echoes – cultural recycling and recirculation, an international colloquium at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK, June 16-17, 2012. Deadline for paper/panel submissions is March 30, 2012. More details here.

Guilty Pleasure Literatures: The penny dreadful to the graphic novel. Dr Curt Herr and Dr. Deb Christie seek essays on guilty pleasure literatures for a new anthology. We are looking for submissions that explore the idea of guilty pleasure reading balanced with the cultural significance of the works under question. Deadline for submissions is Jan. 18th, 2012. More details here. [Since those details are rather limited, I contacted Dr Herr to ask for more information, and to enquire whether he and Dr Christie would be interested in submissions related to popular romance novels. Unfortunately he has not yet replied.]

The 10th Global Conference on Monsters and the Monstrous (Tuesday 11th September – Friday 14th September 2012), Mansfield College, Oxford. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 16th March 2012. Details here.

The 7th Global Conference on The Erotic (Tuesday 11th September – Thursday 13th September 2012), Mansfield College, Oxford. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 16th March 2012. Details here.

The 2nd Global Conference on Beauty: Exploring Critical Issues (Friday 21st September – Sunday 23rd September 2012), Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 16th March 2012. Details here.

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The photo came from Wikimedia Commons and shows "Types of fancy dessert biscuits as suggested in the book 'The modern baker, confectioner and caterer; a practical and scientific work for the baking and allied trades.' Edited by John Kirkland. With contributions from leading specialists and trade experts."

Joy to the World: Popular Culture Associations Go Global

2011-12-24T14:24:00.000Z

Laura Vivanco

In the first issue of the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture Toni Johnson-Woods and Vicki Karaminas write that

Our interest in establishing a popular culture association and publishing an affiliated journal was generated by an encounter on a cool San Francisco day in Easter 2008. In a boardroom of the Marriott Hotel, a dozen people sat around an executive desk listening to John Bratzel, the Executive Director of the Popular/American Culture Associations (PCA/ACA). John talked about the PCA’s wish to spread the study and understanding of popular culture globally by setting up affiliated organizations around the world. He asked if we would like to start an Australasian popular culture association. His question was met with a flurry of enthusiasm, and we all agreed that a popular culture association is exactly what Australia and New Zealand needed. (3)

The Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand (PopCAANZ) held its first conference in 2010.

Canadian scholars of popular culture have followed suit: the Popular Culture Association of Canada (PCAC or “canpop”) held its first conference in May 2011 and a Canadian Journal of Popular Culture will be forthcoming in 2012,

devoted to the scholarly understanding of popular culture in its broadest sense, encompassing non-mass-mediated as well as mass-mediated forms, texts and practices, both historical and contemporary. While encouraging submissions in all areas of popular culture, the journal will be particularly receptive to articles that focus on Canadian examples, or on broader comparative and theoretical questions viewed through a Canadian lens.

The "The East Asian Popular Culture Association (EAPCA), the newest branch of the Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association (PCA / ACA)" held its first conference in September 2011.

European scholars of popular culture have decided that a popular culture association is exactly what Europe needs too, hence the following

CALL FOR PAPERS: EUPOP 2012

Inaugural Conference of the European Popular Culture Association
11-13 July 2012
London College of Fashion
University of the Arts
London

Individual paper and panel contributions are invited for the inaugural conference of the European Popular Culture Association (EPCA).

EUPOP 2012 will explore European popular culture in all its different forms This might include European Film (past and present), Television, Music, Celebrity, The Body, Fashion, New Media, Comics, Popular Literature, Sport, Heritage and Curation. And more - we’ll be guided by the submissions.
Closing Date for this call: 18th FEBRUARY 2012

This conference will launch the European Popular Culture Association. There will be opportunities for networking and for developing caucus groups within the EPCA. Presenters at EUPOP 2012 will be encouraged to develop their papers for publication in a number of Intellect journals, including the new Journal of European Popular Culture, the journal of the EPCA, other film journals including Film, Fashion and Consumption, and various music journals.

Papers and Complete Panels for all strands should be submitted to the email contact below. Paper/panel submissions will be as always subject to peer review:
Submit paper or panel proposals* to: europop@arts.ac.uk
• The same address should be used for general administrative queries

- The European Popular Culture Association –

The European Popular Culture Association (EPCA) promotes the study of popular culture from, in, and about Europe. Popular culture involves a wide range of activities, outcomes and audiences; EPCA aims to examine and discuss these different activities as they relate both to Europe, and to Europeans across the globe, whether contemporary or historical.

CLOSING DATE FOR THIS CALL: FEBRUARY 18th 2012

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Johnson-Woods, Toni and Vicki Karaminas, V. "Letter from the Editors." Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 1.1 (2012): 3–6.

Giveaway of For Love and Money

2011-12-20T11:02:00.000Z

Laura Vivanco

Joanna Chambers, who very kindly read draft versions of parts of For Love and Money, has extremely generously decided to promote the book too. She's holding a competition on her blog this week and the prize is an e-copy of the book: "To enter, just post the name of your favourite category romance of all time - it doesn't have to be a HQ/M&B (for all you Loveswept readers out there...)." [Edited to add: the contest has now closed.]

The good news for those of you who prefer paper books is that the price at Lulu has just decreased to £14.95.

As for me, I've been avoiding giving book recommendations at the Spurtle, talking about metafiction and the "rules" of romance at Liz Fielding's blog and had my writing praised by my editor.

And if you're bored of reading about my book, you might be interested in Joanna's post about female impersonators and cross-dressing heroines.

PCA 2012 Deadline: December 21

2011-12-16T17:45:00.004Z

This is a FINAL CALL for proposals for the Romance Area for the Popular Culture Association's 2012 Annual Conference, which is being held in Boston from April 11 - 14, 2012 (one week later than we have traditionally held it in the past).

Call For Papers: Romance Area

Deadline for submission: December 21, 2011.

We are interested in any and all topics about or related to popular romance: all genres, all media, all countries, all kinds, and all eras. All representations of romance in popular culture (fiction, stage, screen—large or small, commercial, advertising, music, song, dance, online, real life, etc.), from anywhere and any-when, are welcome topics of discussion.

This year we are especially interested in papers on Romance on/and/in Television, to be presented on panels jointly sponsored by the Romance and the TV areas.

The Romance Area is also co-sponsoring with the Gay/Lesbian/Queer area papers that discuss BDSM and Kink in any form. Representations of BDSM/Kink in popular media and/or discussions of real-life BDSM/Kink practices and practitioners are all welcome. Romance is not a necessary component of papers to be presented in BDSM/Kink.

We will consider proposals for individual papers, sessions organized around a theme, and special panels. Sessions are scheduled in one-hour slots, ideally with four papers or speakers per standard session.

If you are involved in the creative industry of popular romance (romance author/editor, film director/producer, singer/songwriter, etc.) and are interested in speaking on your own work or on developments in the representations of popular romance, please contact us!

As we do every year, the Romance area will meet in a special Open Forum to discuss upcoming conferences, work in progress, and the future of the field of Popular Romance Studies. All are welcome to attend.

Submit a one-page (200-300 words) proposal or abstract by December 21, 2011, to PCA's online database: http://ncp.pcaaca.org. Specify the Romance Area (for any/all of the topics) and Sarah Frantz, the Area Chair in Romance, will be notified.

If you have any questions, please contact Sarah S. G. Frantz: sarahfrantz@gmail.com.

My New Book - For Love and Money: The Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills & Boon Romance

2011-12-14T21:35:00.001Z

Laura Vivanco

I'm very, very pleased to be able to announce that my new book, For Love and Money: The Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills & Boon Romance is now available.

Since this isn't a time for modesty, I'll share my back-cover quotes:

"Laura Vivanco's For Love and Money is an impressive study of the popular fiction of Harlequin Mills and Boon that is a must read for any student of popular fiction and for those who write and love the genre" - Liz Fielding, author of over 50 Harlequin Mills & Boon romances.

"Deep learning, wide reading, and clear thinking are very much in evidence in Vivanco's exploration of HM&B. A welcome addition to popular romance criticism." - Professor Pamela Regis, author of A Natural History of the Romance Novel.

"Laura Vivanco’s For Love and Money is the book that scholars and fans have both been waiting for: a deft, attentive introduction to the Harlequin Mills & Boon romance novel as a work of art. [...] Vivanco traces the connections between these books and the classical myths and medieval romances they so often deliberately echo, and she shows how the novels use allusion and metatextual reflection to defend their genre. (“Scorn not the sonnet,” Wordsworth warned in a sonnet—Harlequin Mills & Boon novels have long taught readers to “scorn not the romance.”) Vivanco’s conversation with earlier critics, from the 1930s “Battle of the Brows” through 21^st century scholars like Pamela Regis, is lively, engaging, and good-humored, and she has a remarkable eye for the textual details that bring each novel to life. I am profoundly impressed." - Professor Eric M. Selinger, author of What Is It Then Between Us? Traditions of Love in American Poetry.

My publisher, Humanities Ebooks, is (as their name suggests), an academic e-press, and the book is available from their site as a pdf. This is a format that deals particularly well with footnotes. A Kindle edition is also available at Amazon .at .com .de .es .fr .it and .uk .

HEB has teamed up with Lulu so that paper copies can be printed on demand. Lulu's preview of the table of contents and the introduction is embedded below.

A brief summary of each of the chapters and a list of the HM&B romances cited, can be found at my website.

Art and Craft: Bachelor Dad on Her Doorstep (2)

2011-12-10T12:29:00.008Z

Laura Vivanco

Michelle Douglas is a pseudonym used by Therese Michelle Dryden, who recently completed a Creative Writing Masters at the University of Newcastle (Australia). Her thesis has two parts. The first was Bachelor Dad on Her Doorstep; the second

discusses the conventions and constraints of the popular romance genre. It explores the challenges presented to a writer in creating and maintaining emotional intensity in a popular genre romance and the need to provide a satisfying and credible ending to that romance. Five well-known romance novels – Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Rebecca, The Grand Sophy, and The Republic of Love – are analysed for the manner in which they portray romantic love and for the narrative strategies that may be of use to the writer of category romance. Finally, the exegesis discusses how the conventions of the popular romance genre and the narrative strategies employed have combined to shape the creative work.

It can be downloaded from here. I'm very pleased that Therese has agreed to be interviewed at Teach Me Tonight.

Laura: You already had an undergraduate degree in English. According to the biography included in Bachelor Dad you "enrolled in an English master's program for the sole purpose of indulging [your] reading and writing habits further." I'm sure there would have been simpler ways to get indulge your "reading and writing habits"; why study for a Masters in Creative Writing?

Therese: I didn’t mean for that comment to sound quite so flippant. It certainly glosses over the hard work and angst involved in a Masters, but, that said, my Masters did allow me to indulge my love of reading and writing further, just in a more directed fashion. My undergraduate degree was 14 years prior to my enrolment in the Masters course and, as such, seemed like a whole lifetime ago.

But my reasons were bigger than that too. I had been submitting manuscripts to Mills & Boon on a fairly regular basis and, while said manuscripts were being rejected, I knew that I was getting closer and closer to being accepted for publication. But the process is so long and I started to wonder if I had the right voice and whether I was wasting my time etc. Enrolling in a Masters in Creative Writing seemed a good way to continue doing what I was doing while forcing me to spread my wings a little. Romance wasn’t actually my topic when I first enrolled (I wrote a loose and baggy monster of a novel), but when Mills & Boon bought my first book early in the second semester of my enrolment (February 2007) it seemed wise to focus all my energies on romance instead.

Laura: Re writing romance novels, you say that "The level of emotional intensity that needs to be generated quickly and maintained over the course of the story, and the credibility of the happy ending are two elements I find most difficult and challenging in my own practice" (193). I found that interesting because I recently read the following in a post by Magdalen, whose romance novels have not yet been published:

I don't know yet all the ways to convey emotion in my writing. If I'm managing to evoke emotion in my readers, it's a happy accident. That's why I'm off in January to coastal Maine to start an MFA program.

Yup, I'm committing two years and a lot of money to get a degree I don't need and won't likely use just so that I can write a scene that plays that most beguiling trick: it makes the reader feel.

Did studying for your MA help you perfect "that most beguiling trick"?

Therese: My initial response is to say no, as I still think the best instance of “that most beguiling trick” in my own work is in my first novel, which was written a good twelve months before I enrolled in my Masters. But that is too easy an answer. During my enrolment I was exposed to writers – excellent writers – whom I wouldn’t have studied otherwise and they have no doubt influenced me in untold ways.

More importantly, perhaps, I discovered other writers’ guidelines and maxims about writing that explained some of the techniques I was applying instinctively. A specific example being the idea that if you allow a character to cry in a story then the reader doesn’t have to. I knew that a particular scene in my debut novel worked well, but I’m not sure I could’ve satisfactorily explained why. Knowing the why is valuable because it gives a writer a place to look when an effect they are trying to create isn’t working.

Interestingly, though, I think the biggest benefit I’ve gained from my Masters has been the greater understanding I’ve developed for the romance genre. That has been invaluable.

Laura: Ken Gelder, whom you quote in your thesis, states that "The entwining of entertainment and information is a key feature of much popular fiction. Readers can quite literally learn from it" (62):

Crime fiction is often informational, and technical - although it is by no means the only genre of popular fiction that relies on the provision of often intensely researched details: even romance can do this. (Gelder 62)

In your thesis you focus on love and

the conflict romantic love seems to trigger between intellect and emotion. As Blaise Pascal declares: “the heart has its reasons whereof Reason knows nothing” (qtd. in Lewis, Amini, and Lannon 4). The internal discord this can engender in a heroine and/or hero can generate tension quickly within a story and help amplify the narrative elements of internal and external conflict while heightening the emotional tone of the story. (193)

Do you think readers can glean useful information, whether about relationships or about other topics, from romance novels?

Therese: Yes, I do, but I would also caution that romance novels are not self-help books or encyclopedias. I know the Smithton women in Janice Radway’s Reading The Romance cited facts and instruction as one of the benefits and enjoyments they found in reading romance, and while it’s true that, like them, I’ve learned interesting facts through the pages of a romance novel, it’s not one of the main reasons I read romance. Also, I don’t consider that passing on of information a romance novel’s primary goal, though it can certainly be an entertaining by-product.

I recently read Sarah Wendell’s Everything I know About Love I Learned From Romance Novels, which I enjoyed immensely. While I’m not sure I would make all the claims that she does, I do think romance novels generally portray characters who work through their fears and relationship problems and encourage each other to communicate, which I think has a positive import.

Laura: John G. Cawelti has suggested that

In earlier more homogeneous cultures religious ritual performed the important function of articulating and reaffirming the primary cultural values. Today, with cultures composed of a multiplicity of differing religious groups, the synthesis of values and their reaffirmation has become an increasingly important function of the mass media and the popular arts. (388)

Catherine Roach would appear to be in full agreement, at least with regards to the romance genre:

To the ancient and perennial question of how to define and live the good life, how to achieve happiness and fulfillment, American pop culture’s resounding answer is through the narrative of romance, sex, and love. [...]

I argue romance novels are so popular partly because they do deep and complicated work for the (mostly) women who read them—work that derives from the mythic or religious nature of the romance narrative that serves to engage readers in a “reparation fantasy” of healing in regards to male-female relations. Romance novels help women readers, especially heterosexual women, deal with their essentially paradoxical relationship toward men within a culture still marked by patriarchy and its component threat of violence toward women.

In Bachelor Dad you put a bookshop in conflict with a bakery. Jaz's mother, and then Jaz own the bookshop while "Mr Sears owned the '[...] bakery directly across the road" (11):

Mr Sears had never actually refused to serve Jaz and her mother in his 'baked fresh-daily' country bakery, but he'd let them know by his icy politeness, his curled lip, the placing of change on the counter instead of directly into their hands, what he'd thought of them.
Despite Jaz's pleas, her mother had insisted on shopping there. 'Best bread in town,' she'd say cheerfully. (12)

Is it entirely fanciful to think that this choice of shops might serve as a reminder that "Man shall not live by bread alone" (Matthew 4:4)? There's nothing overtly religious about the books Jaz sells, of course, but perhaps there's something of a spiritual nature to be learned from the fact that the conflict is removed because love overcomes hatred?

Therese: Oh, you have no idea how much I want to say that I intentionally did all that! My reasons for choosing a bookshop and a bakery were far more prosaic, I’m afraid. When I visited Leura, which is the inspiration for my fictitious town of Clara Falls, I fell in love with the bookshop there (Megalong Books if anyone is interested). So when I decided that I wanted to write a novel set in the Blue Mountains it only seemed natural that the bookshop would feature prominently. For plot reasons, I needed Mr Sears’ shop to be one that a person would go into on a regular basis. Hence, the bakery. However, the book does feature art and artists – in part to reflect the Blue Mountains which abounds with art galleries – and I wanted Mr Sears to be an artist in his own way as well (though, baking as art may indeed be fanciful). I wanted his art to hint at the fact that he could be redeemed (baking/bread = nurturing). Because a romance is focused so closely on the heroine and hero it wasn’t possible to show Mr Sears’ journey and I didn’t want his redemption coming completely out of left field (though I fear it probably still does).

That all said, though, this is a story that is primarily about forgiveness and redemption, and, of course, ideas of forgiveness and redemption do have significant religious overtones. I wanted echoes of Jaz and Connor’s journeys in the characters of Mr Sears, Mrs Lavendar and Boyd Longbottom too. I think that as a general rule romance novels do portray love as a much more positive emotion (ie, an emotion that can give one happiness) and a smarter choice than holding onto hatred, fear and prejudice. As Pamela Regis points out in A Natural History of the Romance Novel, the society defined at the beginning of a romance novel is flawed in some way. In Bachelor Dad, when the rifts are finally healed, old grudges settled, and Jaz and Connor are free to declare their love for each other, those fractures in the society are mended and that, hopefully, indicates not only a better future for Jaz and Connor, but for Clara Falls as well.

Laura: You write in your thesis that "Genre fictions are created for the purposes of enjoyment and pleasure" (219) while Ken Gelder suggests that

Two key words for understanding popular fiction are industry and entertainment, and they work firmly to distinguish popular fiction from the logics and practices of what I regard as its 'opposite', namely, literary fiction or Literature. Literary fiction is ambivalent at best about its industrial connections and likes to see itself as something more than 'just entertainment', but popular fiction generally speaking has no such reservations. (1)

In presenting Harlequin Mills & Boon romances as novels which are highly constrained by the publisher and emphasising their authors' wish to provide entertainment, do you accept that there is a great divide between Literature and popular fiction? And is this a question you meant to address in Bachelor Dad through the depiction of Jaz and Connor's art?

Therese: I don’t accept that there is such a great divide between Literature (with a capital L) and popular fiction. That seems to me too artificial. I think that Literature and popular fiction do privilege different things, but it doesn’t mean other elements are completely ignored. Literature often privileges truth, or beauty of expression in language, or experimentation with language and/or structure, but on its own head be it if it ignores a reader’s desire for entertainment and pleasure. Popular fiction privileges elements of fantasy, and romance novels idealize romantic love, but if there is no truth or honesty, or if it is poorly written, likewise, it won’t hold a reader’s attention for long. There are numerous works that are compelling, emotionally engaging, truthful and beautifully written in Literature and in popular fiction. I believe there are instances in which category romances are all these things too. Category romances are constrained, but that doesn’t mean there is no room for innovation, and within the form there is a wealth of diversity.

Can you tell that prior to writing Bachelor Dad I had been reading John Carey – specifically What Good Are the Arts, and The Intellectuals and the Masses? I do believe that Jaz’s tattoos and Connor’s wood-turned furniture are valid art forms – as valid as their drawings and paintings. I dislike any kind of art that attempts to deliberately exclude a large segment of the population. I come from a working class background so cultural elitism is an anathema to me. I don’t know if they were issues I deliberately meant to address in Bachelor Dad, but it is inevitable that a writer’s own prejudices and beliefs will make a mark on their fiction.

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Cawelti, John G. "The Concept of Formula in the Study of Popular Literature." Journal of Popular Culture 3:3 (1969): 381-90.
Douglas, Michelle. Bachelor Dad on Her Doorstep. Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2009.
Dryden, Therese Michelle. Bachelor Dad on Her Doorstep. MA thesis. Faculty of Education and Arts, School of Humanities and Social Science
University of Newcastle, Australia, March 2011.
Gelder, Ken. Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2004.
Roach, Catherine. "Getting a Good Man to Love: Popular Romance Fiction and the Problem of Patriarchy." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 1.1 (2010).

CFP Deadline Extended: Animals and/in Romance

2011-12-07T13:08:00.004Z

Laura Vivanco

"I thought I was late for a very important date..."

Eric Selinger, as Executive Editor of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies, has sent out the following message:

Due to an error in the submissions email address, submissions to the special forum on Animals and / in Romance have been getting bounced back to their authors as undeliverable!

We are therefore extending the deadline, and have a new, correct submissions address below. Please circulate the corrected CFP, as well as our apologies for the confusion.

The new deadline is January 6, 2012 and

Essays of up to 10,000 words (MLA citation style; Word documents preferred) should be submitted to An Goris, Managing Editor of JPRS, at managing.editor@jprstudies.org.

The original call for papers can be found here.

The illustration is one of Sir John Tenniel's drawings of the creatures in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). It shows the White Rabbit looking at his watch and was downloaded from Wikimedia Commons.

Art and Craft: Bachelor Dad on Her Doorstep (1)

2011-12-05T12:29:00.003Z

Laura Vivanco

Michelle Douglas, the author of Bachelor Dad on Her Doorstep (2009), "made my heroine and hero, each in their own way, artists" and I was intrigued by the ways in which the novel touches on matters related to art and books and hints at possible similarities between them.

The novel is dedicated "To Varuna, The Writers' House" and, as Douglas has written, "The inspiration for Bachelor Dad On Her Doorstep came from a setting: the Australian Blue Mountains where I spent a week on a writers’ retreat," presumably at Varuna, which "is in the World Heritage Area, the Blue Mountains region of New South Wales, Australia." Since Douglas's "favourite place in the mountains is Leura – seriously cute, plus it has one of my all-time favourite bookshops [...] I based my fictitious town of Clara Falls on Leura."

Jaz Harper, Douglas's heroine, owns a bookshop on the "main street" (15) of Clara Falls, so the novel literally places books at the heart of the community. In the final chapter a book fair gives Clara Falls the chance to demonstrate that "In this town [...] we pull together" (267); there are "Oodles and oodles of people. All mingling and laughing out the front of her bookshop" (265) and "a cheer went up when the townsfolk saw her" (266). Like Jaz's biker friends, this chapter seems to suggest that "supporting independent bookshops is a good cause" (146).

Jaz, who also "mean[s] to open an art gallery" (164), brings together books and art when she decides to decorate the bookshop, formerly owned by her mother, with a mural of the dead Frieda:

She'd sketched in the top half of Frieda's face with a fine pencil and the detail stole his [Connor's] breath. [...] Beneath her fingers, her mother's eyes and brow came alive - so familiar and so ... vibrant.
Jaz had honed her skill, her talent, until it sang. The potential he'd recognised in her work eight years ago - the potential anyone who'd seen her work couldn't have failed to recognise - had come of age. (112)

Brief as this passage is, it seems to suggest that the production of the best art requires practice as well as raw talent and this lesson is emphasised later in the novel when Jaz encourages Connor Reed, the hero and Jaz's former boyfriend, to pick up some charcoals and try sketching for the first time in years:

He'd lost count of how many pictures he'd drawn. [...]
Jaz sighed and chuckled and teased him, just like she used to do. She pointed to one of the drawings and laughed. 'Is that supposed to be a bird?'
'I was trying to give the impression of time flying.'
'It needs work,' she said with a grin. [...] 'But look at how you've captured the way the light shines through the trees here. It's beautiful. [...] You can draw again, Connor.' (174-75)

Jaz forces him to draw because she wants him "to know its joys, its freedoms once more ... to bow to its demands and feel whole" (170). This perhaps describes the experience of creativity not just of visual artists, but also of those who are creative in other media, including writers.

In addition, it seemed to me that the novel explores what can be classified as "art." In their youth Jaz and Connor used to

take their charcoals and sketch pads to one of the lookouts.
She'd sit on a rock hunched over her pad, intent on capturing every single detail of the view spread out before her, concentrating fiercely on all she saw. Connor would lean back against a tree, his sketch pad propped against one knee, charcoal lightly clasped, eyes half-closed, and his fingers would play across the page with seemingly no effort at all.
Their high school art teacher had given them identical marks [...]. Connor's drawings had [...] captured an essence, the hidden potential of the thing. Connor had drawn the optimistic future. (50)

It is perhaps logical, given the nature of his talent, that Connor "hadn't picked up a stick of charcoal since" (42) Jaz left town and he no longer envisaged an "optimistic future" for himself; he

relinquished his dream of art school.
'I run a building contractor's business now here in Clara Falls.' (41)

However, although Jaz is led to believe that Connor has "given up his art" (52) and is now merely "Painting shop signs [...] All that potential wasted" (50-51), and despite the fact that he believes he has "turned his back on art to become a carpenter" (169), when Jaz sees the "handmade wood-turned furniture" (189) he has made, "She marvelled at their craftsmanship, at the attention paid to detail, at the absolute perfection of each piece" (189) and tells him that "you didn't give up your art. You just ... redirected it" (190).

For her part, Jaz is now "a world-class tattoo artist, if Frieda's boasts could be believed" (43) and despite the fact that she herself used to think that "Connor had more talent in his little finger than she possessed in her whole body. She merely drew what was there, copied what was in front of her eyes" (50), in fact when she creates a tattoo it

wasn't just any simple tattoo. It was an indelible photograph captured on this man's arm for ever.
It was a work of art. (152)

To the man who has been tattooed, however, it is "a memorial" (153) to his dead daughter. Thus, like Connor's carpentry, the tattoo is art which is very functional.

Art, this novel seems to suggest, is not limited to 'high' culture, but can be found in creations which might be described as 'craft,' or 'popular culture.' Indeed, one might even wish to add to that list the work of Mr Sears, the baker. His carrot cake "tasted divine" (101) and he certainly behaves as though he considers his creations to be special: "he placed each of the three cakes in a separate cardboard box with the same care and reverence mothers showed to newborn babies" (146).

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Douglas, Michelle. Bachelor Dad on Her Doorstep. Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2009.

JPRS 2.1 continued

2011-12-02T22:09:00.008Z

Laura Vivanco

Some new essays, and some reviews, have been added to issue 2.1 of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies. In “When chick lit meets romanzo rosa: Intertextual narratives in Stefania Bertola’s romantic fiction,” Federica Balducci writes of romanzo rosa ("Italy’s tradition of popular romance") that

The master of romanzo rosa was Liala (Amalia Liana Cambiasi Negretti Odescalchi, 1897-1995), who remains the most popular romance writer to date (Arslan and Pozzato 1039; Roccella 12); all her novels have been continually reprinted through the decades. Her career stretched from the early 1930s to the 1980s, and her life and writing are so deeply interwoven that they have become the rosa’s prototype and foundation stone (Lepschy; Roccella 53). A member of the Italian aristocracy, Liala married Marquis Cambiasi, almost twenty years her senior. Shortly after the marriage she met the aircraft pilot Centurione Scotto and the two fell in love. Cambiasi agreed to divorce but in 1926, before the paperwork could be completed, Scotto died while performing an acrobatic flight. Liala’s first novel Signorsì (Yes, Sir) published in 1931 by Mondadori, is inspired by these events and became an instant bestseller (Lepschy 183-84).

According to Pozzato, Signorsì presents the “estetismo di massa” (“mass aestheticism”) that would become a trademark of Liala’s writing. Characterised by a sophisticated vocabulary and syntactical constructions, this style was rooted in the late-nineteenth century literary movement of decadentismo (Decadence), whose tones and values Liala absorbed and reworked in a more popular form, aimed at a broader readership (90). The main features of Liala’s “mass aestheticism,” Pozzato explains, are stunning heroines and stylish heroes, moral integrity, exquisite settings infused with a sense of grandeur, and refined tastes expressed through close attention to visual details, particularly when describing clothes, houses, cars and other material belongings (90). From a formal perspective, Anna Laura Lepschy identifies a strategy of “double focalization” in Liala’s courtship plots; that is to say, the emotions of both male and female characters are granted equal visibility and importance in the story (186).

I was struck by the number of similarities between Liala and Barbara Cartland (1901-2000): they were of the same generation, had very long careers, become figureheads for the genre in which they wrote, had aristocratic connections and wrote novels which featured "stunning heroines and stylish heroes, moral integrity, exquisite settings infused with a sense of grandeur, and refined tastes expressed through close attention to visual details, particularly when describing clothes, houses, cars and other material belongings." As far as I know, however, no-one has yet suggested that Cartland's writing was "Characterised by a sophisticated vocabulary and syntactical constructions."

Balducci's description of the much more recent writing of Stefania Bertola makes me wish that I knew Italian (or that that Bertola's novels had been translated into English).

Another new item which discusses chick lit and romance is Suzanne Ferriss's review of Chick Lit and Postfeminism by Stephanie Harzewski. Ferriss comments that

Harzewski notes that while popular romance fiction adheres to a “one woman-one man” ratio, chick lit presents one woman involved with many men. If in romance fiction, the quest for romance is central, in chick lit, the heroine’s quest for self-definition and the need to balance work with personal relationships is given equal, if not greater, attention. The idealized protagonist of romance fiction, typically an active, intelligent beauty, is nowhere to be seen in chick lit, which features protagonists who are highly conscious and critical of their physical appearance and who are more often pictured as flawed than feisty.

More significant differences center on the characterization of men and depictions of love and sex. Harzewski argues that romance fiction presents men as objects of erotic desire who are valued for their sexual prowess. By contrast, in chick lit, she argues, men are “not really valued as individuals as much as a means to a lifestyle, wedding, or in some cases beauty boost” (33). The moments of genuine eroticism that punctuate and, for some readers, characterize romance fiction are missing in chick lit.

Above all, the two genres differ in their endings. There are no HEA (“Happily Ever After”) endings in chick lit, which offers “a more realistic portrait of single life and dating, exploring in varying degrees, the dissolution of romantic ideals, or showing those ideals as unmet, sometimes unrealistic, expectations” (40).

Other new items are:

“Romancing the Past: History, Love, and Genre in Vincent Ward’s River Queen” by Roger Nicholson.

Kay Mussell's review of Reading the Adolescent Romance: Sweet Valley High and the Popular Young Adult Romance Novel by Amy S. Pattee.

Johansen Quijano's review of Boys' Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre, ed. by Antonia Levi, Mark McHarry, and Dru Pagliassotti.

Jonathan A. Allan's review of Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think About Marrying by Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker.

More Romance in the New Millennium

2011-12-02T09:35:00.000Z

Laura Vivanco

Continuing on from the tweeted summary of the keynote speech given to the McDaniel College Popular Romance in the New Millennium conference, and Jonathan's discussion of the ideas contained in his paper, here are some links about the conference. I suspect many of you will have read some or all of them already, but I wanted to provide them for those who haven't, and to create an archive of links.

There's a description posted on the McDaniel College website of a pre-conference talk given by Lisa Dale (author of Slow Dancing on Price’s Pier) and of a workshop run by Amy Burge. Jessica, of Read React Review, summarises Amy's presentation (in which she discussed this and a previous workshop) and also gives a summary of the presentation by Glinda Hall. Amy's own reflections on her McDaniel workshop can be found at her personal blog.

Jessica has also written a summary of Eloisa James's keynote speech.

Smart Bitch Sarah's summary of the entire conference makes particular mention of Mary Bly/Eloisa James's keynote address, Glinda Hall's "discussion of what including romance in courses does to the classroom community," An Goris's plenary address on the works of Nora Roberts, Samantha Sabalis's "Lacanian analysis of Courtney Milan’s Proof by Seduction and Unveiled," and Maryan Wherry's "feminist literary critical examination of the sex in romance."

Jessica has a fairly full discussion of her own paper: she

presented on authorship with a colleague. We have project going that traces a Romantic conception of authorship in women’s writing about authorship from the Minerva Press era (late 18th-early 19th century) through today’s popular romances.

Angela Toscano's paper on "The Liturgy of Cliché: Ritual Speech and Genre Convention in Popular Romance" is up here. The throbbing core of her argument is that:

It is an oft repeated criticism of popular romance that the genre is formulaic. The cliché use of language is indicative of this formula; it seems to expose the romance as the very “mass–produced fantasies for women” that Tania Modleski accused them of being. But let us assume that authors know what they are doing. That they are using cliché not because they are unable or unwilling to come up with better metaphors, more original similes, but rather because the cliché is doing something within the text that another phrase may fail to do.

Toscano proposes that "repetition is only problematic if one takes the view that to repeat oneself or to repeat someone else is to fail to properly use language. It presumes that originality is the highest form of narrative. That to say what has never been said and to say it in way that has never been said before is the supreme expression of language." She suggests that repetition, in certain areas of life, can in fact be considered a sign of success because there are "actions that need, want, and are desired to be done again. They are the appetites: sex, sleep, food, love. Love is not final. It is never done. The fulfillment of love, like sex, like food, is in its repetition" and she argues that "Story, like sex, incites the desire for more stories." In addition, she considers that in romance cliché can be considered

liturgical. It is a type of magical speech, as in the language of the Christian mass which transforms the substance of the wafer into the body of Jesus Christ. In the mass this is not metaphor but an actual substantive and physical change. In the world of the narrative, the cliché comprises a series of speeches that, like the mass, become the means by which a substantive transformation occurs in the persons and the bodies of the hero and heroine.

To fill some of the gaps, I'm also including some of the tweets from the conference (these may have been very slightly edited, to remove typos or fill out more obscure abbreviations). They were written bySmart Bitch Sarah Wendell (in purple), Jessica from Read React Review (in blue), and Sarah Frantz (in black). Since both Jessica and Sarah Frantz were giving papers, this impeded their ability to report on some of the panels, so even with these tweets to fill the gaps, not all the papers are covered.

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Third panelist is Jung Choi at Program for General Ed at Harvard titled "On Teaching the Romance Novel." Choi, quoting Derrida: "The center is not the center." Change one word, change center, relationship between center and margin. What is marginalized will come to center - for example, romance studied at Harvard. Behind images of emotional coldness, intellectuality, there have been constant image of love at Harvard: Love Story, Legally Blonde Inside ivory towers/ivy walls, Choi believes has been steady fascination with sex and romance. Choi did same assignment she gave students: shop for romance at Harvard bookstore. "Where are the Harlequin novels displayed?" Horrified reaction. "We don't carry trade books." Clerk couldn't say "Harlequin." "Romance has power to threaten what is a center." Quote from Northanger Abbey from Choi: "seems a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist." "Let us be united and let us celebrate."

jung choi, from harvard, on teaching the romance novel, is next. choi wondered whether she should attend this con, because she teaches the romance, not popular romance. choi starts with derrida quote, the center is not the center. choi's point is that the center we consider stable may be shaken up. relation bt center and margin is fluid. choi's romance course is dominated by women students. all female writers and topics such as marriage may explain that. for choi, issue is not just topics or gender, but location at margins, that prevents more male students from taking romance course. choi notes increase of students' interest in and desire to read strong female characters in romance course. choi assigns students to go out and find mass market romances in the community. look at display, marketing, etc. students are assigned to do an in depth study of one romance novel. part of the assignment is to read the romance in a public place and note reactions of peers. in 2008 choi went to harvard book store to ask for a harlequin novel. salesperson was dumbstruck. unable to repeat word "harlequin", clerk said, "we dont carry trade books." which is false. choi, "the happiest delineations of the varieties of human nature are celebrated in romance."

Up now is Jayashree Kamble on teaching literary canon alongside romance. For ex: Governess Novel: Jayne Eyre, Midnight Angel @lisakleypas, Turn of the Screw, Maybe This Time, Jennifer Crusie. Kamble encouraged students to use subjects that apply to their lives, i.e. using 1st person shooter Halo to discuss 1st person POV. "Eat Pray Love: appallingly bad movie, amazing in its exoticization of Italians, Indians and Indonesians." I have syllabi here. Section on "Love & communication" has Austen P&P, Flowers/Storm - Kinsale, Your Wicked Ways, Naked in Death. Secondary texts include Love Actually, Lady Hawke, Episode of Bones. Naked in Death included bc Eve Dallas has real problems with communication & emotional idioms. Kamble has students cite other students' papers, partly to teach citation, plagiarism, and what academic peer review is like.

j kamble shares syllabi. ex. the governess novel. incl j eyre, turn of screw, mistress mellyn, midnite angel, maybe this time j kamble's course on the exotic: wuthering, heart darkness, heart of fire, heart of the seas, seduce me at sunrise. kamble also uses variety of 2ndary texts in media theory, criticism. ex. levine's highbrow/lowbrow, belsey's a future for criticism

Now: Bill Gleason, “Teaching Romance in the Popular American Literature Survey” from Princeton U. Gleason: early version of course did not include romance fiction, but thought it did. Current version: A LOT of romance fiction. Course begins with Wigglesworth's Day of Doom (1662) as examination of books that were popular and some that still are, thru 20thC. Romance: Bet Me (2004) Students pick last book of the reading list, they decide. Nominate text, then class votes. Two years ago: Harry Potter, Sorcerer's Stone. Then Gossip Girl. Course is set up in "genres" and what that means: Seduction, Adventure, Mystery, Romance. Course focuses on the idea that the historical context of what is popular and WHEN it is popular is crucial to study. In 1993, Gleason thought was inc romance b/c he had GONE WITH THE WIND on the syllabus, w/ Krentz's DANGEROUS MEN. Offers covers to camouflage Bet Me: Cover for Beowulf, The History of Otero and Crowley Counties Colorado for embarrassed students. Comprehensive final exam, progression of class texts "makes romance fiction seem part of continuum, not outlier." Course presently is 2/3rds female, 1/3 male. One thing Gleason can't do is real sense of breadth and range of romance fiction. Students have asked for course just on romance fic.

bill gleason of princeton says in 1993 he taught GWTW thinking it was romance. gleason says he teaches bet me by jenny crusie. this is a topics in am lit course at princeton. Many Princeton students deeply embarrassed to read romance novels. Offer them camouflage book covers: Tarzan, Beowulf. ...gleason says having romance arrive at end means he can start talking about romance on first day of class. gleason emphasizes romance themes in earlier texts like last of mohicans. gleason tries to help students see romance as part of a continuum, not an outlier.

"Sneaking it in at the End: Introducing Popular Romance into the Small College Classroom” by Antonia Losano, who was unable to come. Eric Selinger is reading paper for scholar in absentia. Small colleges can be troubling for instructors because required courses take up time of small faculty, not room for flexibility. Lack of flexibility can marginalize romance, for example, because requirements for established canon classes for major students. Losano: Every time I tried to sneak a romance in at the end, it was a pedagogical failure. Students disliked inclusion of P&P and Frederica. "Frederica" has no redeeming values, said one student in eval. Course included Pamela and Welcome to Temptation. Students liked Pamela, didn't like Temptation. Losano was baffled. Losano presented Roberts' The Search as contemporary fiction featuring dogs for dogs in literature course. Was accepted w/o problems. Didn't reveal it was a "romance" so it was discussed without rejection. Losano asks: in what framing methods can we introduce romances into our courses? Concl: most successful method Middlebury College is hide romance completely in courses by not saying it's romance.

Now Selinger talking about his own experience teaching romance fiction at DePaul. Has done so for years. @angoris pointed out that Selinger's syllabi of romance text lacked, among other things, Carpathians and tycoons. Selinger had student who refused to buy romances because they were so embarrassing Selinger assigned her to think about that refusal. "What are you a sucker for?" These novels will teach you that. Students have written to say romances have taught them to leave bad relationships, challenge professors who dismiss romance. Selinger says one prof at DePaul would query on 1st day which students had read @harlequinbooks, then say they should be ashamed. Selinger: "He doesn't do that anymore."

EricSelinger says two rewards of teaching romance fiction are 1. they illuminate complexities of both emotional and textual desire and, says @EricSelinger, this turns student into readers, into scholars. second, romance teaches students about beautiful circuits and subterfuges of their own desires.

"The wired world of romance scholarship," Kat Schroder, student in Masters of Commm in Digital Media at U of Washington. "Online communities offer what James Gee calls an 'affinity space.'" online spaces encourage active sharing of knowledge. Romance communities are comprised of blogs, bboards, podcasts, social communities. Romance author websites being used for examples: Jennifer Crusie, Eloisa James. Jenny Crusie uses her blog to solicit help for plot points, names, titles, and allow audience to have role in shaping text. Reading is an active process in which readers construct textual meaning. In Crusie example, readers construct text and meaning. James' Facebook community allows readers equal access to text and "day in life of bestselling author" with video Q&A. Online community "changes what book is, shows how elastic parameters of a book are now." Boundaries between reader author friend and fan are blurry now. [Also, I point out, definition of "Friend" is varied as well. People who come to my home, eat w me not = FB friends, online friends.] Trying to link how internet has allowed academic study of romance to flourish. I am learning that there are terms for things like how many links, directions of links. Eigenvector Centrality: influence! All of the people who are part of IASPR network on twitter: in graphic. @sarahfrantz is center.

Now I'm listening to *business* professor Chryssa Sharp talk about "using cross-cultural frameworks to examine American attitudes. Sharp is proposing that we use international management models to examine affect of emotion in romance novels. How do values contained w/in popular romance line up w/ US cultural norms? What would cross-cultural comparisons show?

Command Performance: Lessons Learned

2011-11-30T10:38:00.001Z

This is a Tribute to An Goris and, since I'm not on Twitter, my attempt to retweet this, from Sarah Frantz: Huge congratulations to now Dr. @angoris for her successful defense of her dissertation on Nora Roberts' books!!!!! Woohoo!!!

Having gained the Key of Knowledge, I hope you'll Savor the Moment, An!

Disclaimer: the misuse of the NR seal should not be taken as an indication that Nora Roberts has begun awarding doctorates.

Romance, Readers, Affect

2011-11-26T12:45:00.004Z

Jonathan A. Allan

During my lecture at McDaniel, I returned to Susan Quilliam’s polemic and asked about the place of romance in therapy, therapy in romance. As a literary theorist, there are aspects of Quilliam’s work that I want to agree with, namely that romance – like any literary text – has an affective power. We are moved to laughter, to tears, to joy, to sadness, to pleasure by the texts we read. Dina Georgis, though not writing about romance novels, writes: "By awakening us to loss, literature incites our weeping" ("Hearing the better Story" 171). But, to recognise this affective power and possibility is to also recognise that Quilliam asserts, romances teach readers to have sex without condoms. Where Quilliam and I depart is about the role romance can and does have in the lives of readers and writers.

We are reminded often enough about the dangers of romance fiction. Jean Lush and Pam Vredevelt’s Women and Stress: Practical Ways to Manage Tension provides a telling example:

When I was writing my first book, Emotional Phases of a Woman's Life, I decided to investigate the reading material women were buying. I called bookstores and secondhand shops that handled thousands of paperbacks. One morning, in a used-book store, I witnessed a woman bringing in a huge sack of romantic novels to exchange for dozens more. I asked her why she read so many of these books, and she said, "I love romance. It's my escape from a humdrum life, I guess." [...]

Why is there such a colossal market for romantic paperbacks? Some would say this is one positive way women can stimulate their love life. However, many romance novel readers admit to being addicted to these books. They express a desire to break the habit because it robs them of time for other healthy involvements.

I think these books serve as a substitute for reality for some women who do not feel romantically fulfilled, but I question the benefits of getting lost in fiction. If anything, this habit may stir up unrealistic expectations and make them feel less satisfied with life as it is. (81)

I am willing to recognize, as I did in my lecture, that there are probably "extreme readers" for whom the romance novel is genuinely an addiction, but these readers are "extreme." As for "escap[ing] from a humdrum life," I'd imagine that many of us read fiction to "escape" our daily lives. Orhan Pamuk opens The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist with these words:

Novels are second lives. Like the dreams that the French poet Gérard de Nerval speaks of, novels reveal the colors and complexities of our lives and are full of people, faces, and objects we feel we recognize. Just as in dreams, when we read novels we are sometimes so powerfully struck by the extraordinary nature of the things we encounter that we forget where we are and envision ourselves in the midst of the imaginary events and people we are witnessing. At such times, we feel that the fictional world we encounter and enjoy is more real that the real world itself. (3)

Of course this could become a problem, a problem that leads Don Quixote to fight windmills in search of Dulcinea, a problem that leads Madame Bovary to be lost in romantic fantasy. But is this genuinely the "norm" and if it is the "norm" is it so extreme that it requires an intervention? For Donna Patrow, this is a reason for concern:

her inclination toward soap opera addiction will undoubtedly compromise her mental purity. [...] With that type of lifestyle, she's inclined to attract the wrong sort of friends - friends who drag her down rather than challenge her to grow mentally and spiritually. Maybe her soap opera buddies will introduce her to racy romance novels, and she'll become addicted to those, as well (see 2 Cor. 12:20; 2 Thess. 3:11). This can lead to a type of emotional adultery that is extremely destructive to your love life. (105-106)

Romance fiction, like soap operas, may very well be dangerous but this presumes that all readers of romance fiction will become "addicted" to a point where the addiction is debilitating and interferes with daily life to such a degree that some radical change is needed. Such a perspective is, to my mind, the most dystopian reading of romantic fiction (at least on the critic’s part). Surely, there is a way in which the critic can imagine a more utopian outcome for romantic fiction.

In my paper, I argued that indeed romantic fiction could serve more utopian ends. The argument that I am interested in is about what romantic fiction can teach its readers. If romantic fiction is powerful enough to teach readers not to use condoms, it surely too must be endowed with a similar power to teach readers about what an ideal relation might look like. I am not arguing that all relations will be ideal and everything will work out perfectly, indeed, I don't think many romance novels advocate this either. Pamela Regis’s eight components of a romance novel don't begin with perfection and then outline another seven perfect steps. The romance novel includes: conflict, points of ritual death, barriers. What romance does differently than lived romances is that it guarantees a happily ever after, but that happily ever after is only possible because the relation is itself a journey in which the reader and the heroine encounter barriers to the relationship, conflicts intrinsic to the relationship (which often enough reflect very real conflicts that can translate to the reader’s own life), and points of ritual death. The point of romance fiction, I argued, is less the happily ever after (though we demand this) and more the journey towards the happily ever after.

Modernism and the Women's Popular Romance in Britain, 1885-1925

2011-11-21T11:01:00.001Z

Laura Vivanco

Dr. Martin Hipsky's Modernism and theWomen's Popular Romance in Britain, 1885-1925, recently published by Ohio University Press, has been described as "a must-read rethink of modernism itself." I asked Marty if he'd like to visit Teach Me Tonight to tell us a bit more about his new book, and he agreed. I should note that although he describes it as a "study of the history of the modern romance novel," his focus on such an early period in the history of "the modern romance novel" does mean that some of the popular romances he studies (including Marie Corelli's The Sorrows of Satan and Elinor Glyn's Three Weeks) would not be classified as romances according to the RWA definition, although many others would.

MartinHipsky

OhioWesleyan University

mahipsky@owu.edu

Asa scholar of British and Irish literary modernism, I first becameinterested in the romance novel of the fin de siècle and earlytwentieth century when I was writing about the London avant-garde andWyndham Lewis's journal Blast(1914-15). Lewis's fiery cultural manifestos (co-signed by EzraPound) featured the name of celebrity romance-writer Marie Corelli,whom they took to be a totem of Edwardian popular culture, and a sortof demotic figure for cultural tendencies that they, as aself-proclaimed vanguard, were rebelling against. I discovered that(as readers of this blog may know) Corelli had been publishingbest-selling mystical romances since the mid-1880s, and in 1895, withher blockbuster romance TheSorrows of Satan, hadsold the most copies of any novel in the history of Britain to thatpoint.

SoI read some of Corelli's romances, and she became the inspiration ofa research project: to investigate the most successful romance novelswritten by women in the same years that witnessed the emergence ofwhat we now call high modernist culture, and to consider therelationship -- as perceived then, but more importantly as legiblenow, with the benefit of historical hindsight -- between thisultra-popular mode and the experimental narratives of such canonicalfigures as Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Rebecca West, JamesJoyce, and D. H. Lawrence.

Mystudy offers interpretations of eleven top-selling books, allwomen-authored romances, in the years around the turn of the Britishtwentieth century. This set of romances includes works by Mary Ward("Mrs. Humphry Ward"), Marie Corelli, Emma Orczy, ElinorGlyn, Florence Barclay, Victoria Cross, Ethel Dell, and E. M. Hull. For a list of the eleven romances I have chosen as my primaryinterpretive focus (a limited selection, as most of these eightwriters published a number of romances), you can look at the WorksCited list below.

AlthoughI note the occasional condescension that the modernist writers,predictably enough, expressed toward these women romance-writers,that is not the cultural dynamic of interest here. Rather, I arguethat certain "high" modernist works, for all theirintellectual challenges, nonetheless evinced a powerful force ofaffect in parallel with the affective appeal popular romances bywomen. While the parallel was not conscious on either side of theromance/modernism divide, what was conscious on the part of the twosets of writers, in different ways, was the project of creativereaction against the literary realism that was so esteemed by the(mostly male) cultural arbiters of the late Victorian and Edwardianperiods. This parallel, I argue, has powerful implications about theunfulfilling experience of living amid an often alienating andisolating modernity.

Modernismand the Women’s Popular Romance in Britain,then, is not primarily a celebration of either select high modernistworks, or select romance novels of the late-Victorian-to-modernistperiod. It is instead an attempt to explain the unprecedented (andoften forgotten) appeal of that era’s secular, women-authoredromance. As I say in the preface to the study, between 1885 and 1925these romances loomed as a series of pinnacles along the highestplateau of popular British (in most cases, also North American, andindeed global anglophone) reading. For this socio-historical reasonand many others (including the pleasures of discovery that theseromances can still bring to their readers), I believe that this groupof romances constitutes a very important part of recent anglophoneliterary-cultural history. I hope that the book makes somecontribution to our understanding of the vast phenomenon of thewoman-authored romance reading of our not-too-distant past.

WorksCited

Barclay,Florence. The Rosary. New York: G. P.Putnam's Sons, 1909.

Corelli,Marie. Innocent: HerFancy and His Fact. NewYork: A. L. Burton Company, 1914.

_____.The Sorrows of Satan[1895]. Ed. by PeterKeating. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

_____. The Treasure ofHeaven.. New York:Dodd, Mead and Company, 1906.

Cross,Victoria [Vivian Cory]. AnnaLombard. New York:Kensington Press, 1901.

Dell,Ethel. The Way of anEagle [1912]. London:Virago, 1996.

Glyn,Elinor. Three Weeks.London: Duckworth, 1907.

Hull,E. M. The Sheik[1919]. Philadelphia: Pine Street Press, 2001.

Orczy,Baroness [Emmuska]. TheScarlet Pimpernel [1905]“Popular Edition.” London: Greeningand Co., 1909.

Ward,Mary Augusta. LadyRose’s Daughter. NewYork: Harper and Brothers, 1903.

_____. Robert Elsmere [1888].Edited by Clyde de L. Ryals. Lincoln: University of NebraskaPress, 1967.

Approaching Deadline: RWA Academic Research Grant

2011-11-18T21:23:00.001Z

As Eric Selinger recently reminded members of the RomanceScholar listserv,

The deadline is approaching (Dec. 1, 2011) for you to apply for the Romance Writers of America’s research grant program, which is designed to “support theoretical and substantive academic research about genre romance texts and literacy practices” and to “encourage a well-informed public discourse about genre romance texts and literacy practices.” You can apply for up to $5000 USD. [...] You’ve probably met or heard of a few of the recent grant recipients, including:

Dr. Heather Schell (2011)—currently in Turkey, studying romance readers
Dr. Joanna Gregson and Dr. Jennifer Lois (2011)—studying the culture of romance writers
Consuela Francis (2010)—studying “Textual Pleasure and Female Sexual Agency in Contemporary African American Romance and Erotica”
Pamela Regis (2010)—working on her history of American romance fiction, 1742-present.

Previous recipients include Catherine Roach (2009), Sarah S. G. Frantz (2008), Stephanie Harzewski (2007), whose book on chick lit came out last year, Jayashree Kamble (2005), and me (2006). [...] The program is open to faculty, independent scholars with established publication records, and dissertation candidates who have completed all course work and qualifying exams. If you’ve applied in the past, unsuccessfully, I hope you’ll consider taking another shot—and if you’ve already won funding, and brought that work to publication, you can apply again, as long as four years have passed.

The RWA state that

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.

-----
The image of Jean-Honoré Fragonard's "The Young Scholar" came from Wikimedia Commons.

Barbara Grier 1933-2011

2011-11-12T20:39:00.001Z

Laura Vivanco

Barbara Grier,

a founder of what once was the world's largest publishing house of literature about gays and lesbians, has died. She was 78. Her partner in life and business, Donna McBride, said [...] "It was her belief that through literature she could make lesbians feel good about themselves and find a happy life" [...]. Most of their titles were romances and mysteries, McBride said. (Kaczor)

As June Thomas writes in Slate's culture blog,

in 1973 she and her partner, Donna McBride, founded Naiad Press, which was one of the first and most successful lesbian publishing houses of the 20th century. Although mostly known for light fiction—there was a template for Naiad books: conflict, romance, and a happy ending—the press also published works by Gertrude Stein and Renee Vivien, as well as occasional nonfiction, notably its most high-profile and successful book, Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence.

Victoria Brownworth recalls that

There were many complaints about Naiad over the years–that it was just a lesbian version of Harlequin (to which I always responded, “So?”), that the books were always romances with happy endings or mysteries with cozy Agatha Christie endings. But Grier said repeatedly that what she wanted was to reach the lesbians in Middle America who were in the closet and who deserved to have books about their lives, too.

Karin Kallmaker, a romance author who was published by Naiad and who is now Editorial Director of Bella Books, the successor to Naiad, explains the press's importance:

To understand the contribution that Barbara and Donna made to lesbian books one has to be capable of imagining a world that had none. Rather, what lesbian books there were had been hidden, disguised and coded. A lesbian lucky enough to find pulp paperbacks at the bus station featuring a brooding brunette and the sunny blonde on the cover had found lesbians in books, but not lesbian books. With very few, notable exceptions such as Ann Bannon's Beebo Brinker titles, they founds stories about despair and ruin. Those books were read and left behind, because it wasn't safe for most women to be discovered reading them. The reader was left more certain than ever that her life was doomed.

There were no mysteries with lesbian detectives. No romances with happy women choosing lives together. No warriors, no princesses, no heroes (only villains). No literature that could be discussed in polite society. Then, out of a hotbed birthed by the early feminist and gay liberation movements, the Stonewall riots, and the meetings of notable minds who networked by letter because no one could afford phone calls, there was an explosion of lesbian books. In the middle of that explosion, and going on to survive the rigors of publishing the longest, was Naiad. Naiad published poetry, literary works and, thank goodness, popular fiction. Finally, lesbians could see themselves in the books. They saw themselves deserving happiness. Deserving respect. Deserving futures. Deserving to live.

-------

Brownworth, Victoria. "In Remembrance: Barbara Grier." Lambda Literary. 11 Nov. 2011.
Kaczor, Bill. "Lesbian publishing house founder Grier dies at 78." Associated Press, 11 Nov. 2011.
Kallmaker, Karin. "Barbara Grier, Reflections. 10 Nov. 2011.
Thomas, June. "Barbara Grier, Pioneer of Lesbian Literature, 1933-2011". Slate. 11 Nov. 2011.

Tweets from the New Millennium

2011-11-11T09:52:00.001Z

Laura Vivanco

Yesterday's "Keynote Address by Professor Mary Bly/NYT Bestselling Author Eloisa James" was live-tweeted from the Popular Romance in the New Millennium conference being held at McDaniel College. There will be more tweets today. If you'd like to follow them, the hashtag being used is #mcdrom , or if you aren't on twitter, you can read them online here.

I thought I'd copy out the relevant bits of yesterday's tweets (authored by Sarah Frantz), to keep them for posterity and in case anyone would like to discuss the keynote address:

Introducing @eloisajames: "Sex acts, social identity, and the state of the field in romance scholarship."

Romance scholarship is in a good state, according to @eloisajames.

"ebook sales make up for lost paper sales" That's @eloisajames' experience. Describing how the publishing industry (and, obviously, romance publishing industry) is in flux and extreme change.

Squabbling over boundaries of romance is a waste of time. Romance is about the hidden order of the world. Love at heart of maze. Genre is undefinable. Mutable is difficult to write about for romance scholarship.

Quoting romance scholarship article about vampires and how the article doesn't specify pub dates of books = bad scholarship. Paranormal rules about "fated mates" has changed. Scholarship has to be specific to pub dates and not make sweeping statements.

Pet peeve of @eloisajames is scholarship that throws around word "patriarchy." Patriarchy is mutable. Scholarship needs to address specific discourses about "patriarchy."

Romance novels' engagement w/ history particularly fraught in relation to historical romance. "My heroes generally have equipment the size of the Hubble telescope." "Bodice rippers" specific term for historical romance novels from 1980s, says @eloisajames. (I'd say 1970s, early 1980s, actually.) "Eroticism is culturally specific and we write sex from our own attitudes and mores. Can't be 'historically accurate.'" Keep two viewpoints: 1. author and voice, and 2. specific cultural moment in which book was written.

.@eloisajames is stunned when romance scholars make arguments about an author w/o looking at website/shooting them email. Bestsellers built from strong emotions. @eloisajames wrote 5th Desperate Duchess book from "bedrock of truth" of worry over husband. "Romances live or die on strong emotions." You're going to find author utterly exposed behind book. That's not "cultural."

Rules dictating genre are not necessarily stronger than the specific author's oeuvre. Critics: "Iron-clad grip of genre" trivializes individualism of texts. Standardization does not sacrifice individualism.

@eloisajames compared w/ Gabriel Garcia Marquez by reader, as an insult. also been compared w/ Nicholas Sparks as an insult. But they're both selling really well, so...

Readers create their own novel in the intersection of readers' experience and the novel itself. What author is + does is changing, so it's important for scholars to be in touch w/ authors. [FASCINATING: been slammed for this.] Social media is commodifying the charisma of the author. Before: author's job ended w/ final draft. Not now. On social platforms. Books change according to reader feedback. Characters change over a series b/c of feedback.

Greatest shadow that clings to romance: cultural capital. "Capital enables one to maintain status in heirarchy." Romance doesn't seem to have very much cultural capital, certainly doesn't have much cultural cache. But it has money. No romance reader will rise in her cultural heirarchy based on what is termed her "addiction."

@eloisajames' Beast based on House from TV show, but Beauty was based on J. Alfred Prufrock. Heroine dying in "chambers of sea." Cultural capital of DUKE OF MINE: based on Princess and Pea fairytale (mattresses and pea). Hero on Asperger's scale.

Teach a vampire book from each of 1988, 1995, 2003 and talk about how the mating rituals change.

Nobody can steal or plagiarize a voice and that's what doesn't change. Wld be interesting to teach students to look for voice.

Question: putting too much weight on romance to focus on cultural capital? @EloisaJames: Don't talk about "genre," focus on author.

Teaching Romance

2011-11-10T09:31:00.000Z

Laura Vivanco

The Popular Romance in the New Millennium conference is taking place at McDaniel College from November 10-11 as a direct result of the Nora Roberts Foundation's decision to give

McDaniel College a $100,000 grant to help advance research and study of romance literature, establish an academic minor in the genre fiction and launch an online creative writing course in romance fiction.

It had been stated that "Pedagogy, the teaching of romance, will be an important focus of the conference" but all the same, when reading the abstracts of the papers to be presented, I was struck by how many are about the teaching of romance fiction and left feeling very hopeful about the future of popular romance studies.

Jung Choi - “‘The Romance’ at Harvard”

Jung Choi "is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and a teaching fellow in the Department of Women’s Studies at Harvard University":

As a graduate teaching fellow at Harvard, I have taught sections of a course called “The Romance,” which examines women’s genre fiction such as the Harlequin and “chick lit,” along with works by Austen, the Brontë sisters, and DuMaurier. Based on my teaching experiences, I would like to explore why teaching romance fiction matters; what we can learn from students’ responses; and how we can address the issues of women, gender, and sexuality while studying the romance.

William Gleason - “Teaching Romance in the Popular American Literature Survey”

Bill Gleason "is Professor of English and Acting Director of American Studies at Princeton University [...], he was also co–convener, with Eric Murphy Selinger, of Love as the Practice of Freedom? Romance Fiction and American Culture, a two–day interdisciplinary conference on romance fiction held at Princeton in April 2009":

I have been teaching “American Best Sellers,” an upper–level undergraduate survey course on American popular writing, since the mid–1990s. Moving from the colonial period to the present, the course examines roughly one text and historical period per week while simultaneously introducing students to a broad range of genres, including the tale of seduction, the sentimental novel, children’s fiction, the western, the detective novel, the adventure series, and (with increasing emphasis in recent syllabi) contemporary romance fiction. In this talk I will discuss the challenges of (and opportunities for) teaching romance as one among many genres in the popular lit survey.

Glinda F. Hall - “Teaching Romance/Teaching Sex: Classroom Challenges and Pedagogical Pursuits”

Glinda Hall "has returned to Arkansas State University as an Instructor in First Year Studies after holding an assistant professor position at the University of Arkansas–Fort Smith":

In spring 2010, I taught a senior–level English course titled “Beyond Heaving Bosoms: Women’s Popular Romance Fiction.” My plan was to focus on the history and heritage of popular romance fiction, with particular attention paid to gender dynamics and power structures at work in both the content and the reception of this genre of popular fiction. However, I soon learned that another topic was inescapable, and apparently more relevant to my students: sex. It then became clear that a significant portion of the course needed to address issues of sexuality, especially our culture’s view of women’s sexuality and how these are related to other issues: gender representation, power dynamics, political contexts, and economic realities for our contemporary society. In this presentation, I will discuss the practical exigencies of “teaching sex” in the context of popular romance fiction, as well as the intellectual questions that such pedagogy raises about how we teach and study literature.

Jayashree Kamble - “Romancing the Canon: Teaching ‘Literary’ Texts with Romance”

Jayashree Kamble "earned her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota’s English department":

Classic literature and genre fiction intersect more often than literary critics and students might realize. Therefore, even though popular romance is unarguably a distinct genre with its own parameters, it can also be taught alongside canonical texts. While courses that focus exclusively on romance fiction can subject the genre to a scrutiny that it both merits and can withstand, courses that combine romance and high literature make a different case for including the genre in the field of literary studies. For instance, pairing Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with Linda Howard’s Heart of Fire creates room to discuss issues of exoticism in both, while also affording a chance to examine the aesthetics of the Victorian novella and popular romance. Similarly, a course that contains Henry James's The Turn of the Screw and Jennifer Crusie’s adaptation of it in Maybe This Time, allows for a discussion on authorial style as well as the signifiers of the horror and romance genres.

Antonia Losano - “Sneaking it in at the end: Introducing Popular Romance into the Small College Classroom”

Antonio Losano "teaches literature and gender studies at Middlebury College in Vermont":

Mounting innovative new courses on popular culture is always challenging, but the endeavor has particular tensions in a small English department at a small Liberal Arts college. If I were to offer a course solely on popular romance, either one of the gateway courses, or a seminal survey, or the Victorian literature course wouldn’t get taught that year (and if English majors can’t get the courses they need to graduate, parents who are spending over $50,000 a year on this education start complaining). My contention, however, is that this constraint can be intensely productive for the study and teaching of popular romance, which need not be lost–it must simply be incorporated.

Instead of being taught in a stand–alone course, romances can and should, I argue, be folded into the fabric of the academic canon. A course just on popular romance runs the risk of isolating and marginalizing the popular romance–as if we were trying to keep it from infecting the Beowulf to Virginia Woolf survey, for example. It has been my strategy to include at least one popular romance novel into the syllabus of each course I teach, encouraging students to realize that the boundaries between romance fiction and “canonical” fiction are more permeable than critics of the former would like. In this conference paper I hope to offer suggestions on ways to engage with the popular romance in academic courses within the context of literary history.

Eric Selinger - “You Teach a Whole Course on Popular Romance? Who? How? Why? Now What?”

Eric Murphy Selinger "is Associate Professor of English at DePaul University":

In the fall of 2005 I taught DePaul University’s first course exclusively devoted to popular romance fiction: a gen–ed survey that ran from E.M. Hull’s The Sheik to the then–new Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie. I have since taught over 25 popular romance courses, from undergraduate surveys to graduate seminars, including a 10–week class on Laura Kinsale’s Flowers from the Storm; the novels range from inspirational to LGBTQ and erotic romances, and include both category and single–title texts. My talk will discuss the practicalities of classes devoted exclusively to popular romance fiction (course design, assignments and helpful secondary readings, issues in classroom dynamics), as well as the aesthetic and literary–historical questions raised by introducing such courses into a fairly conservative English department, one in which popular romance remains the abjected Other of “literature.”

More details about the presenters, and abstracts of the other papers being presented at the conference, can be found here.

Insights Into the Taste and Manners of a Nation

2011-11-04T18:43:00.000Z

Laura Vivanco

John Ryley, writing about early nineteenth-century Leeds, commented that

Public amusements, especially those of the Drama are calculated to give us an insight into the taste and manners of a nation; in popular Tragedies, we trace the refinement of the passions; Comedies are often satires on existing follies and fashions of the times; and even Pantomimes generally exhibit caricatures of the frivolities of the day. (61)

Although Ryley focuses on drama, the idea that cultural works in some way respond to, or give insight into, the "taste and manners of a nation" is one that has been widely accepted. Here's what John G. Cawelti had to say about the issue in his Adventure, Mystery, and Romance (1976):

Certain story archetypes particularly fufill man’s needs for enjoyment and escape. [...] But in order for these patterns to work, they must be embodied in figures, settings, and situations that have appropriate meanings for the culture which produces them. One cannot write a successful adventure story about a social character type that the culture cannot conceive in heroic terms; this is why we have so few adventure stories about plumbers, janitors, or streetsweepers. It is, however, certainly not inconceivable that a culture might emerge which placed a different sort of valuation or interpretation on these tasks, in which case we might expect to see the evolution of adventure story formulas about them. (6)

Now maybe I'm going to be guilty of making some generalisations to go along with the assumptions, but it seems to me that although I have come across some romance heroes who are carpenters and builders, they're usually depicted as small business owners (even if these are one-person businesses). I don't recall having read a romance which featured a hero who worked in a foundry, down a mine, or on an assembly-line. The only janitor hero I've encountered is to be found in LaVyrle Spencer's Then Came Heaven (here's an AAR review which gives an overview of the characters and setting). I suspect this novel is one of the exceptions which proves the rule that romance heroes are generally not employed in the kinds of proletarian jobs which would be celebrated in socialist realist statues of the kind pictured above.¹ I'm fairly sure that socialist realist art also has professions that the artists "cannot conceive in heroic terms."

Just out of interest, and because I want an excuse to include the following portrait, has anyone written a novel about a hero who's a tailor? I don't count The Tailor of Gloucester, as the tailor requires the assistance of some very compassionate and hardworking mice, and I'd consider them, rather than the tailor, to be the heroes of that story.

Romance heroines, in contrast to romance heroes, are not infrequently lowly members of the working classes (they may work as waitresses, secretaries, low-paid providers of care to infants and the elderly etc), but rather than setting up a workers' co-operative or joining a union, a downtrodden heroine will generally be freed from exploitation in the labour market by marrying her boss or some other male who will be able to support her and their children in relative comfort. Of course, many heroines do have professional jobs, enjoy their work and continue working after marriage, but they couldn't be romance heroines if they didn't give a higher priority to their romantic relationships and, often, children. In part that's due to the demands of the plot. After all, a romance wouldn't be a romance if the protagonists decided that their idea of "happily ever after" consisted of walking off into the sunset in opposite directions in pursuit of their careers. That applies to both heroes and heroines. However, I suspect the characterisation of heroines also owes quite a bit to social expectations of women, and character traits and behaviours which may be permissible, or even deemed admirable and/or sexy in a hero, may not be seen the same way if demonstrated by a heroine. Abby Green, in a description of her The Spaniard’s Marriage Bargain, writes that she

can’t remember exactly where the idea sprang from originally, but I know that I was thinking something along the lines of: what would be one of the most unforgivable things a woman/mother could do? For me, it would definitely be to walk away from her baby, or child.
Men seem to get away with doing that a lot easier than women in many cases, but for a woman to turn her back on her baby? It’s extremely hard to forgive, after all, women are all hardwired to be the nurturers aren’t they?
Well, of course we all know it’s never as black and white as that.

We may know it's "never as black and white as that" but judging by the characterisations of romance heroes and heroines a double standard does seem to exist around the issue.

It's not just characters who are affected by underlying social assumptions. As Cawelti observed, "for these patterns to work, they must be embodied in figures, settings, and situations that have appropriate meanings for the culture which produces them." This passage from The Seduction Business (1999) by Charlotte Lamb seems to me to reveal some of the settings "that have appropriate meanings" in romance:

The sound of his voice made her heart sing, but she was still afraid. When he'd begun making love to her in her bedroom the other night she had lost control within seconds; had been going crazy, burning up with desire as he touched her.
She wanted him now, in the cold light of day, in her office, sitting at her desk. It wasn't necessary to have moonlight, or music, or for her to have been drinking wine ... The desire she felt was constant, instinctive, deep. (157, emphasis added)

I think it would be safe to assume that the heroine is listing here some typical components of what might be considered the kind of truly "romantic" setting that is deemed particularly conducive getting a woman in a receptive mood for sexual activity. Phillip Vannini has observed that

Romantic love is one of the defining sentiments of our culture. [...] As production and consumption have expanded, mass communication has been transmitting to the public a visual idea of love as a spectacle. The romanticization of commodities occurs when media portray certain products and services as romantic. A cheap fast-food meal is not romantic, but the consumption of a candle-lit three-course meal at a French restaurant is. [...] Beside self-expression, romance allowed those who had learned to consume it properly to feel liberated from the drudgery of work. This is the image of the "date" as an outing to a restaurant, a movie theater, or a romantic getaway at the seaside or at a luxurious (and romantic) hotel. (171)

Again, I think there tend to be gender-related assumptions about the efficacy of romantic gestures and settings. The romance genre, and ideas about women's sexuality, have moved on since Germaine Greer wrote that "Flowers, little gifts, love-letters, maybe poems to her eyes and hair, candlelit meals on moonlit terraces and muted strings. Nothing hasty, physical [...] Mystery, magic, champagne, ceremony, tenderness, excitement, adoration, reverence – women never have enough of it" (173) but there is perhaps still a lingering impression that women need to be coaxed and wooed into having sexual feelings, or may be very occasionally overwhelmed by immense passion if they meet The One, whereas the common misperception, debunked by Snopes, is that "men think about sex every seven seconds" and, presumably, have no need of romantic music, wine, moonlight etc in order to get in the mood.

The range of personality traits embodied in heroes and heroines, and the aspirational aspect of romance reading, shape the types of settings, characters, and outcomes we tend to find in the genre. Some jobs, some social groups, some settings, are not ones that are seen as socially desirable. They're not aspirational. Ancestral mansions and white picket fences are aspirational, ballgowns and candle-lit dinners are romantic, strong rich men are desirable, virginal-yet-sexy-and-beautiful-yet-not-vain women are aspirational, but men who stack shelves in supermarkets and non-white women are generally not considered aspirational. At least, having read quite a lot of romances, that's the impression I'm left with.

Black heroines can, of course, be found in the African-American romance sub-genre, but they're not at all common in romances aimed at non-African-American readers. I wonder if this is because while black women are expected to be able to identify with a black heroine, and it's thought understandable that a black heroine can represent an ideal for a black woman, it's somehow not expected that a white women would find it easy to think of a black woman as the embodiment of an ideal she should aspire to. I could be wrong about that, but I'm offering it up as a hypothesis. It was certainly the case that in the nineteenth century

people sometimes spoke of civilization as if it were itself a racial trait, inherited by all Anglo-Saxons and other "advanced" white races.
Gender, too, was an essential component of civilization. Indeed, one could identify advanced civilizations by the degree of their sexual differentiation. [...] Civilized women were womanly - delicate, spiritual, dedicated to the home. And civilized white men were the most manly ever evolved - firm of character; self-controlled; protectors of women and children. In contrast, gender differences among savages seemed to be blurred. Savage women were aggressive, carried heavy burdens, and did all sorts of "masculine" hard labor. (Bederman 25)

This stereotype does not seem to have entirely disappeared:

According to essayists in “Critical Studies in Media Communication,” one of the things that reality television producers tend to do is to choose contestants, manipulate situations and use editing to reinforce racial stereotypes.
In an October 2008 issue devoted to the subject, theorist Robin Boylorn argued that black women are recruited and their content edited to conform to images through the history of movies and television. One predominant stereotype is the black woman as “aggressive, loud, rude and pushy. Other negative images include divas, hoochies, weepers, waifs, antagonizers, shrills, welfare queens and freaks.” (Cummings)

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Anreus, Alejandro, Diana L. Linden, and Jonathan Weinberg. The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere. Penn State Press, 2006.
Bederman, Gail. Manhood & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917. 1995. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 1996.
Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976.
Cummings, James. "Commentary: Reality TV reinforces racial stereotypes." Dayton Daily News. 22 August 2009.
Greer, Germaine. 1970. The Female Eunuch. London: Paladin, 1971.
Lamb, Charlotte. The Seduction Business. Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 1999.
Ryley, John. The Leeds Guide; Including a Sketch of the Environs, and Kirkstall Abbey. Leeds: Edward Baines, 1806.
Vannini, Phillip. "Will You Marry Me?: Spectacle and Consumption in the Ritual of Marriage Proposals." Journal of Popular Culture 38:1 (2004): 169-185.

1 I haven't done a comprehensive search for art and literature celebrating "plumbers, janitors, or streetsweepers" but I have come across a reference to a work in the American social realist style, which perhaps challenges a few preconceptions about which jobs are heroic:

Cesare Stea's 1939 relief Assembling for a sewage-disposal plant in Queens [...]. It shows four men working together on a length of sewage pipe. Their shirtsleeves are rolled up and their pants are tight, so that their muscular frames are accentuated. [...] Such an image is clearly meant to celebrate the New Deal's emphasis on putting Americans back to work, and its egalitarian rhetoric. (Anreus, Linden & Weinberg 121)

The first image is a cropped version of William Bell Scott's painting, Iron and Coal, which can be seen in its entirety at The Victorian Web. The photo of the "construction and industry statue on the Green Bridge, Vilnius [...] Lithuania" is from Wikimedia Commons, though again, I've done a bit of cropping. The third image is Giovanni Battista Moroni's The Tailor,

The portrait is a late work, probably around 1570, and the most famous of Moroni's portraits [...].
The colourful costume of the tailor is contrasted with the black material marked with chalk lines that he prepares to cut. Most of the sitters in Moroni's later portraits are dressed in black in the Spanish fashion that persisted into the following century. The tailor's head, lit from above to the left, dominates the painting, the eyes, as in the majority of Moroni's portraits, looking directly at the spectator with shrewd appraisal. (National Gallery)

I found this particular photo of the painting at Wikimedia Commons.

Bust Culture: Notes from the Great Recession

2011-11-03T14:25:00.000Z

Laura Vivanco

But not at Occupy London?

There's no mention at all of romance in this call for papers, but that very absence got me thinking:

In the throes of a double-dip recession and the wake of the Dot-Com crash, we seek proposals for an edited collection tentatively titled Bust Culture: Notes from the Great Recession, with completed essays due in Winter 2012. We are soliciting articles on cultural artifacts from all forms of media (televisual, cinematic, literary, musical, as well as videogames, websites, fine art) that reflect, refract, and/or respond to the recessionary times of the 21st century. Considering that the current economic downturn is ongoing, we hope this collection offers a timely foray into comprehending contemporary “bust culture.” Possible topics include but are not limited to:

* Television (Critical-Realist, Reactionary, Reality: Breaking Bad, Pawn Stars, etc.)
* Films (Up in the Air, Wall St. 2, Larry Crowne, Horrible Bosses, etc.)
* Documentary Responses (Capitalism: A Love Story, Inside Job, etc.)
* Satirical News Sources (The Onion, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, etc.)
* CEO Portraits, Corporate Personhood, and White-Collar Crime
* Informal Economies, Black Markets, Prison Culture, Narcocultura
* Migrant Workers, Immigration, and Outsourcing
* Unions, Union-Busting, and the Legacy of Ronald Reagan
* Neoliberalism (Harvey), “Disaster Capitalism” (Klein), and Tea Party Politics
* “House Hunters” and Other Forms of Wealth Voyeurism
* “Mancession” and Blue-Collar Nostalgia
* Women in the New Economy
* Race and Racism in the Great Recession
* End of the “American Century”
* Bubbles (housing, dot.com, gold, energy)
* Financialization, Derivatives, and Computerized Stock Trading
* Cognitive Mappings of Bust Geography and Architecture
* Consumption: Advertising, Shopping, Fashion, and Marketing Trends
* DIY (Do-It-Yourself) Culture
* Religion and Apocalyptic Discourse
* Sports as Big Business

We aim to assemble a diverse collection of academically rigorous pieces accessible to the general public (non-academics are encouraged to submit). For further information, visit www.bustculture.com and https://twitter.com/#!/BustCulture. Please direct all queries, questions, and submissions to bustculture@gmail.com.

I doubt we'll be seeing romances titled The Greek Tycoon's Bankrupt Economy, The Billionaire's Tax Avoidance Scheme or The Sheikh's Arab Spring but taking some inspiration from an older Mills & Boon title, I went off to see if there might be some stories or images related to "Bust Culture" which could inspire romance authors.

Have you read any romances recently which "reflect, refract, and/or respond to the recessionary times of the 21st century"? I thought I hadn't, but then I remembered Sarah Mallory's To Catch a Husband ... In this novel the escapist allure of wealth is frankly acknowledged since

Impoverished husband-hunter Kitty Wythenshawe knows what she must achieve by the end of her London season - marriage to a wealthy gentleman will save her mother from a life of drudgery. After all, love doesn't pay the bills. (Back Cover)

This being a historical romance published by Mills & Boon, Kitty ends up with both love and "marriage to a wealthy gentleman" but there is also some exploration of the fact that some accumulate wealth by exploiting others. As Sarah Mallory explains in an author's note:

Kitty and Daniel's story led me to some of the darker aspects of late-eighteenth-century society. The Abolition movement was gaining pace, with Anti-Slavery Societies being set up around the United Kingdom. [...] This was also an age when children were often exploited, but some mill owners were against this - for example Robert Owen, who built the New Lanark Mills in Scotland, introduced the revolutionary idea that children should not be allowed to work in the mills before the age of ten. For the sake of historical accuracy I could not remove children altogether from Daniel's mills, but as a forward-thinking employer he does have schools and nursery buildings for the children of his workers and apprentices.

Kitty and Daniel are a forward-thinking couple, and have very liberal views, but they are based on real characters - people who really did strive to improve the lot of the factory workers, and who fought for the abolition of the slave trade even though it was a risk to their own livelihood. The real heroes of the time.

I wonder if there's any chance we'll see more romances based on these "real heroes of the time" and if, in contemporaries, there might even be some changes among the ranks of those who, in fictional form, are deemed to represent the "real heroes" of our own time.

----

Mallory, Sarah. To Catch a Husband ... Richmond, Surrey: Mills & Boon, 2011.

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The photo of the man holding a banner reading

You can chain me
You can torture me
You can even destroy
This body
But you will never
Imprison my mind - Gandhi
I am the 99%

was taken by David Shankbone at "Zuccotti Park on Tuesday, October 25, Day 40 of Occupy Wall Street" and was downloaded from Flikr under a Creative Commons licence. The photo of the man holding a banner saying "Economic injustice is not beautiful #OccupyWallStreet" was also taken by David Shankbone and was also downloaded from Flikr under a Creative Commons licence.

CFP: Representing the Body in Culture and Society

2011-11-01T18:18:00.000Z

Laura Vivanco

In the photo above, a dancer balances en pointe, also supported by crutches (it may be relevant that "The use of pointe shoes and standing on tip-toes regularly cause problems like callosities, soft corns, hallux valgus, metatarsophalangeal degeneration and hammer toes" (Maffulli 163)). Apparently "The use of different devices – crutches, rope, horizontal bars, and harnesses – [...] characterizes Chinouard’s work" (Giuseppe Alizzi). They're certainly in evidence inCompagnie Marie Chouinard's bODY_rEMIX/gOLDBERG_ vARIATIONS. Maili comments on the dancers' use of the "devices" that:

Half of me admires the dance (apart from the skateboard guy), but the other half of me thinks: “Awkward.”

I don’t know how to articulate how I feel about this piece fetishising objects that are usually associated with hospitals or people with disabilities. I think my stance is mostly negative, because it indirectly objectifies people with disabilities. I know the public tends to view people with disabilities as asexual (which annoys me), but for something like this when choreographer Marie Chouinard says she wants to express and sexualise the beauty of objects used by people with disablities? It doesn’t work for me, I think.

Similar issues are raised in Jane's post at Dear Author today about the representations in romance novels of the bodies of characters who depart "from the established Caucasian able-bodied norm." She begins by recounting a discussion with Smart Bitch Sarah about a novel in which Jane felt that the heroine's

disfigurement is largely an accessory and not well integrated into the heroine’s character arc. I felt that the inclusion of disfigured heroines, even when poorly done, was a step forward. Sarah disagreed.

The ensuing discussion provides plenty of food for thought and demonstrates that there are romances which could be analysed in response to the following call for papers:

Proteus: A Journal of Ideas seeks submissions for our upcoming issue, “Representing the Body in Culture and Society.” We are soliciting articles and creative works from a wide range of disciplines that reflect upon the issue’s theme. We are particularly interested in work that focuses on the body from a Disability Studies perspective, though submissions from all disciplines are welcome. We are looking for broad theoretical inquiries, individual case studies, and traditional scholarly articles on the subject of the body, as well as theme-related photographs, poetry, and creative writing.Full Essays Due by January 15, 2012.

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The image came from the cover of a book.

Magazine and Story Paper Romances

2011-10-27T10:01:00.000+01:00

Laura Vivanco

There is, it seems to me, a hierarchy in romances: single-titles are often considered superior to category romances and the various magazine formats (including the romance comics to which Sequential Crush is dedicated) are often entirely forgotten. I was provided with a salutary corrective recently when I bought a copy of a 1960s guide to writing romantic fiction which states that

A good serial will always make a good novel and a good romantic novel will often make a serial. The most obvious difference is in length.
Magazines obtain their serials by two methods. Either they are specially written for the market, or, more commonly, they are adapted by the editorial staff from a full-length novel. Most publishers make a point of submitting manuscripts with a feminine appeal to magazines, in order to sell the serial rights well before book publication. Financially, selling to a magazine is by far the better proposition. Serial rights can bring in two or three times as much - sometimes even more than a publisher's advance. (Britton and Collin 108). ¹

They probably weren't overstating the importance of the magazine market in that period; Joseph McAleer, who has studied the publishing history of Mills & Boon, writes that

While Mills & Boon had had a close relationship with the magazines since the 1920s, it was in the 1950s that contact intensified, and the magazines themselves become a kind of extension of the editorial department. By 1948, pre-publication serializations of Mills & Boon novels were fixtures in the top three women's magazines, which together were selling over three million copies per week: Woman, Woman's Own, and Woman's Weekly [...]. This association with the weekly magazines served more than an editorial purpose. Mills & Boon reaped extra publicity when a serial 'sold' well, encouraging readers to seek out the complete novel in the libraries, or other titles by the author. Moreover, selling serial rights - for as much as £1,000 - helped Mills & Boon's cash flow. The firm usually retained between 15 and 25 per cent of the serial fee. (97)

Magazines came in various types and Bridget Fowler has studied in detail

a representative sample of weekly family or women's magazines, selecting those of the most economical design, with the lowest prices [...]. Where possible, the period analysed was July 1929 to July 1930 [...]. Not only was this a time of industrial restructuring and financial collapse, but it was also the last era before the birth of the modern, glossy, mass-circulation women's magazine in 1932. Stories had a much more central place in the older type of magazine and were often the sole diet of fiction for their readers. The affectionate niche they acquired in the lives of their reading-public was attested by many of my respondents with working-class roots, who recalled their mothers snatching brief interludes from heavy domestic labour to enjoy the little luxury of Silver Star or the People's Friend. (51)²

Billie Melman has focused in particular on "The Lancashire romance and the love story set in the Empire" (144) in British story papers of the 1920s. The "mill-girl story had emerged in the 1890s. Its heyday overlapped the decade between the end of the First World War and the Wall Street Crash; its decline and fall coincided with the Great Depression" (121). Indeed, "The Great Depression, which finally ruined the Lancashire cotton industry, also gave the Lancashire romance its coup-de-grâce" (133). This sub-genre does

include some stories of romantic rivalry between a mill-hand and a toff, fighting for the heart and hand of a mill girl. Usually it is the honest, industrious Lancastrian who wins. On the whole, the concept of marriage as a bond that benefits economically or socially one or both of the parties is alien to the spirit of the Lancashire romance. Matrimony is not an economic partnership, or a sanctioned sexual relationship, but a lifelong friendship between two adolescents, an extension of the 'matiness' of the mill. (128)

In sharp contrast to the mill-girl stories, yet existing alongside them, was a type of story whose "brand-mark was nationalism. Its symbol was the Empire. Its main characteristic was the blurring of social differences and the effacement of class consciousness" (134). Melman suggests that "The flowering of a genre that celebrated an imaginary society in which females were scarce and males plentiful may be seen as a response to the anxieties caused by the imbalance between the sexes" (136-37) in the aftermath of the First World War. There

are two patterns of romance. In the first, the emigrant story proper, an Englishwoman, newly arrived from the 'Old Country', finds a mate, a home and purposeful life in the unpopulated wilderness of a British dominion or colony. In the second pattern, the heroine, born of British parents in the 'New Country', is pursued and won by an Englishman. In both these patterns the main emphasis is upon the national and racial identity of the protagonists. The characters must be white and Anglo-Saxon. Their affiliation to race replaces other allegiances - to class, to the community, to occupation and even to gender. (137)

The story papers in which these stories appeared

were printed, on the newsprint pulp paper from which they derived their somewhat derogatory epithet, in a two- or four-column layout. The typical story paper was a weekly [...]. Its potential readers were unmarried manual workers, shop assistants, domestic servants and office workers. Married women in their early and mid twenties formed a distinct group for which a host of periodicals more domestic in outlook than the publications for adolescents catered.

The main component of the pulp weekly was fiction. The relation between the role of magazine fiction and the social status of the magazine-reading public has been noticed. The space given to fiction was in inverse proportion to the class of readers. The 'higher' this class, the smaller the story component. (113)

In addition, "The serial story was peculiar to working-class periodicals. [...] Middle-class publications, on the other hand, had a distinct preference for shorter fiction" (114).

William Gleason takes the study of magazine romances back even further in time, and across the Atlantic, in issue 2.1 of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies. He states that:

The mass marketing of modern romance fiction in North America began not with the emergence of Harlequin Books in the 1950s but during the dime novel and story paper boom of the 1860s and 1870s. Seeking to capitalize on the longstanding appeal of love stories, which had been appearing alongside other popular genres in the weekly family story papers since the mid-nineteenth century, many of the most influential “cheap” U.S. publishing houses—including Beadle and Adams, Street and Smith, George P. Munro, and Norman Munro—began to experiment with more distinctly marked romance series aimed primarily or exclusively at women readers. Several of these series were quite successful, others wildly so. Beadle and Adams’s Waverley Library, for example, which offered both classic fiction and popular romance novels, produced a total of 353 issues between 1879 and 1886 (Johannsen 304, 314). Street and Smith’s Bertha Clay Library, launched in 1900, ran (along with its successor, the New Bertha M. Clay Library) for more than thirty years (Carr 81). And from the mid-1880s through the 1930s popular publishers fought over exclusive rights to publish and republish the works of prolific American romance novelist Laura Jean Libbey, both as stand-alone volumes in various “library” series and as serialized novels in weekly story papers (Masteller 205). These late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century publishing successes laid the groundwork for the mass marketing of popular romance with which we are familiar today.

As for me, I've been dipping into the digitized, online editions of Australian Women's Weekly from 1933 to 1982. Joan Elman's A New Car and a Lady (18 Feb. 1939) features a heroine who drives cars for a living (she works for a car show-room); the first thing she says is "Oh, but this had been a day of days! Three demonstrations since ten o'clock. Careers for women? Ugh!" (5). The anti-heroine from this story is not totally dissimilar, at least initially, to the heroine of This Frail Flower (21 August 1943) who, before the war, was "lovely and loveable, spoiled, useless" (5). She, however, finds a new purpose in life, and her old love, in a factory doing war-work. In Paul Horgan's National Honeymoon (16 Sept. 1950) the heroine manipulates her new groom into appearing with her on a national radio programme which gives prizes to newly-weds in return for them sharing their love story with the nation. Roberta May reveals that she used to work "as a secretary [...] I wanted to keep on, but Gus wouldn't let me" because, as he says, "I can support both of us" (10). Roberta gave up her job rather than lose Gus, but much as the job would have enabled her to "help with payments on the house" (20), their appearance on the show will allow her to have a room in that house refurbished. After the show, however, Roberta is "sorry with all her heart for what they had given away that day [...] their very own love story" (22). Gus tells her that they can get back "the important part of it" by returning all the prizes; "I'll buy what we need, and if we can't afford it yet we'll wait till we can" (22). Yet again, the implication seems to be (a) a man should "support" the couple on his own, without his wife's assistance, and (b) when a wife puts herself into the public arena (as opposed to staying safely at home) she runs the risk of damaging her marriage. The contrast between these last two stories seems to reflect the changing attitudes towards women's work:

At the end of the war, the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor asked women workers about their future work plans [...] most women wanted to keep their present jobs. Immediately after the war, the percentage of women who worked fell as factories converted to peacetime production and refused to rehire women. In the next few years, the service sector expanded and the number of women in the workforce—especially older married women—increased significantly, despite the dominant ideology of woman as homemaker and mother. The types of jobs available to these women, however, were once again limited to those traditionally deemed “women’s work.”(History Matters)

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1The authors of this guide, Anne Britton and Marion Collin, had "both been fiction editors of women's magazines" (dustjacket) so they clearly write from experience when they warn authors of full-length novels that:

If your manuscript is bought as a serial do not be surprised by what happens to it. You may have written about sixty-five thousand words. The fiction staff will have no qualms about cutting it to thirty thousand words if it suits them better that way. You have sold the story and unless you want to kill your market you will be wise not to complain about its new length or its new title, or even to hint that they have cut out your most brilliant passages! The staff who cut are experienced, and it is their job to know what makes a successful serial. (117-18)

I can't help but feel that there are some parallels here with the process of translation and cutting documented by Eva Hemmungs Wirtén, which led her to ask "Is thisnot a new book? And where is the writer in all of this?" ("They Seek").

2 The romance stories themselves are described by Fowler as featuring "plots in which women are shown to be as capable of achieving production targets and intellectual attainments as men. However, in every case the working woman is reintegrated into the domestic world after marriage" (60).

------

Britton, Anne and Marion Collin. The New Writers' Guide: Romantic Fiction. London: T. V. Boardman, 1960.
Fowler, Bridget. The Alienated Reader: Women and Romantic Literature in the Twentieth Century. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.
Gleason, William. “Belles, Beaux, and Paratexts: American Story Papers and the Project of Romance.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 2.1 (2011).
McAleer, Joseph. Passion's Fortune: The Story of Mills & Boon. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999
Melman, Billie. Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties: Flappers and Nymphs. London: Macmillan, 1988.
Wirtén, Eva Hemmung. " 'They Seek It Here, They Seek It There, They Seek It Everywhere': Looking for the "Global" Book" Canadian Journal of Communication 23.2 (1998).

The covers above, from The Australian Women's Weekly, are for 25 Feb. 1939,19 June 1943 and 14 Oct. 1950. Thumbnails of all the covers can be viewed via a "visual timeline."

A Romance Manifesto: Apocalypse and Matricide

2011-10-20T10:16:00.000+01:00

Laura Vivanco

Pamela Regis, in one of the keynote speeches at the 2010 conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance, while "not proposing that we owe the romance novel our approval, or that our reaction to it requires a positive view of any kind," seemed to set out a manifesto for romance scholars:

We owe it to the romance novel to make overt and to defend our conclusion that the romance is simple, if this is, in fact, our assessment.

We owe the romance novel a good-faith effort to uncover the complexity that our discipline values so highly.

We owe the romance novel great care in choosing our study texts—more care, not less, than we take in choosing study texts from literary fiction.

We owe it to the romance novel to recognize that the values of its fans are not identical with the values of our discourse community.

We owe it to the romance novel to recognize that our study texts are probably not representative of “the romance” and to stop committing the logical fallacy known as hasty generalization.

We owe it to the romance to stay within our evidence when we state conclusions.

We owe the romance a just consideration of its happily-ever-after or happy-for-now ending.

We owe the popular romance a recognition of the archaeology carried in its name

Some of these points seem uncontroversial; few, I imagine, would argue in favour of hasty generalisations. Others are less so.

What really made Regis's romance manifesto inflammatory, though, was the fact that she referred to Ann Barr Snitow, Tania Modleski, Kay Mussell and Janice A. Radway as "the Four Horsewomen of the Romance Apocalypse." So what had they written which prompted this response from Regis?

The short answer is that they apparently rode into romance scholarship on horses named "porn," "addiction," "fantasy," and "patriarchy's dupes":

Ann Barr Snitow’s “Mass Market Romance: Pornography for Women is Different” has branded romance with the dismissive label of porn. Tania Modleski’s Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women asserted that reading romance is an addiction. Kay Mussell’s Fantasy and Reconciliation: Contemporary Fantasies of Women’s Romance Fiction attached the term “fantasy” to romance—“fantasy,” in her view, is a bad alternative to “reality.” Finally, Janice A. Radway in Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature has cemented in the public mind, apparently for all time, the notion that romance is patriarchy’s tool, and its readers patriarchy’s dupes.

In addition, they characterised romance novels as lacking in complexity (an attribute which is valued highly by literary critics:

Literary critics—we—all believe “that literature is complex and that to understand it requires patient unraveling, translating, decoding, interpretation, analyzing” ([Wilder] 105). [...] Snitow calls romances “easy to read pablum” (309), Modleski calls them “rigid” (32), Mussell labels them “adolescent” (184), and Radway, “superficial” (133). Our most influential early critics, the ones who have proven to have staying power, each viewed the romance novel as simple.

Regis therefore urges current scholars to make

a good-faith effort to uncover the complexity that our discipline values so highly. A skilled literary critic can see the complexity in any apparently simple text. [...] We owe the romance novel great care in choosing our study texts—more care, not less, than we take in choosing study texts from literary fiction. In writing our criticism, we are creating not only the critical context for the study of the romance novel, we are also creating the romance novel’s canon. Surely identifying and studying the strongest romance novels will benefit the entire critical enterprise and help us avoid making claims about simplicity and other qualities that critics assign to the romance novel based on an unrepresentative set of study texts.

If it's really the case that "A skilled literary critic can see the complexity in any apparently simple text," why (if we are skilled literary critics) do we need to choose our study texts carefully? Can't we just select them at random and then use our critical talents to see their complexity?

This passage also makes me wonder whether any objective criteria exist (or could exist) which one could use to select "the strongest romance novels." One recent incident which demonstrates the difficulties inherent in making such selections arose when some romance readers tried to change Rohan Maitzen's negative opinion of romances. They presented her with some of the titles which might well be considered part of "the romance novel's canon." Her assessment of them did not, however, match those of the romance-readers:

I took the bait and borrowed Loretta Chase’s Lord of Scoundrels, apparently known to some as one of the best romance novels of all time, from the library. Well, that was a setback. I thought the novel was ridiculous! In fact, it was so much like what I had always snidely imagined romance novels to be that I wondered if it was a parody! Egad. Then I tried Georgette Heyer’s Sylvester–not a genre “romance,” exactly, but in the romance tradition. That wasn’t much more successful.

Maitzen's response to these novels caused Liz McC, one of the romance readers, to ponder the nature of the writing in many romances:

Literary fiction today, I think, still tends to the minimalist, and sometimes loses something as a result [...]. Romance readers are sensitive about purple prose, because our genre is often attacked as a leading perpetrator of it [...]. Purple prose is usually defined as too something (too flowery, too descriptive, too melodramatic). But where’s the line between enough and too much? It varies from reader to reader, and from era to era.

Regis's response to the problem of selecting the "strongest" texts is that

We owe it to the romance novel to recognize that the values of its fans are not identical with the values of our discourse community. If we decide to read and study favorites suggested by romance fans then we may find ourselves confronting prose like this passage: “Somewhere in the world, time no doubt whistled by on taut and widespread wings, but here in the English countryside it plodded slowly, painfully, as if it trod the rutted road that stretched across the moors on blistered feet.” That is the first sentence of Kathleen Woodiwiss’s The Flame and the Flower, published in 1972. The possible representativeness of this miserable sentence to the rest of Woodiwiss’s work, I leave to students of Woodiwiss. We, however, should not assume that this miserable sentence is representative of popular romance novels. It is not. Confronted with bad writing in a study text, we have two good choices—we can choose another book to work on, or we can acknowledge the bad writing and figure out a way to say something interesting—which is to say, figure out a way to invoke the complexity topos—despite the lamentable prose. Fans love books for many reasons, but their values and ours will often be at odds.

This seems to suggest that literary critics are different from "fans" and it therefore reminds me, somewhat uncomfortably, of Janice Radway's statement about how the academics' "segregation by class, occupation, and race [...] works against us" (18) in providing support for, or learning from, romance readers. There are, though, a fair number of "acafans" in the romance-reading community.

Regis's response to Woodiwiss's metaphor brings us back to Liz McC's discussion of "purple prose." Would the following qualify as purple and "miserable":

Fame, amonster surpassed in speed by none; her nimbleness lends her life, and shegains strength as she goes. At first fear keeps her low; soon she rearsherself skyward, and treads on the ground, while her head is hidden among theclouds. Earth, her parent, provoked to anger against the gods, brought herforth, they say, the youngest of the family of Coeus and Enceladus-- swift offoot and untiring of wing, a portent terrible and vast--who, for every featheron her body has an ever-wakefuleye beneath, marvelous to tell, for every eye a loud tongue and mouth, and apricked-upear. At night she flies midway between heaven and earth, hissing through thedarkness, nor ever yields her eyes to the sweets of sleep. In the daylightshe sits sentinel on a high house-top,or on a lofty turret, and makes great cities afraid; as apt to cling tofalsehood and wrong as to proclaim the truth.

Trying to translate it from the original Latin may have made me miserable at school but the extended metaphor itself generally wouldn't be described that way; it's a quotation from John Conington's translation of Virgil's Aeneid. Woodiwiss isn't Virgil, but is her Time, with its wings and blistered feet, really much more miserable than his Fame, with its profusion of feathers, eyes, tongues, mouths and preference for nocturnal flight?

Finally, the suggestion that we need to identify "the strongest romance novels" in order to avoid working with an "unrepresentative set of study texts" seems to me to presuppose that "the strongest romance novels" are the most representative. What if they aren't? Theodore Sturgeon's

Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, [...] was that ninety percent of SF is crud. Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. are crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other artforms. (Wikipedia)

If the same is true of romances, should we ensure that our sample texts are representative by only including 10% which are "strong"?

Regis's response is that:

We owe it to the romance novel to recognize that our study texts are probably not representative of “the romance” and to stop committing the logical fallacy known as hasty generalization. This is not to say that all claims of representativeness are wrong—but they must be proven, they must be substantiated and argued for. It is a failure of critical imagination to assume we have seen it all. A corollary: We owe it to the romance to stay within our evidence when we state conclusions. So, if we have not demonstrated that our study texts are representative, we must qualify our conclusions, and avoid talk about what “the romance novel” writ large is or does.

Also in JPRS, An Goris praises Regis's "strong and much-welcome contribution to the development of a meta-perspective on the practice of popular romance criticism" but nonetheless argues that it could be considered one of a number of instances in romance scholarship of

ritual matricide in which scholars like Radway, Modleski, and Mussel function as the figurative mothers of the field who, in order to create the possibility for the field to grow up, develop, and mature, have to be figuratively “killed”—taken away, put aside, moved beyond. This process is a natural mechanism of evolution and growth and one which on the whole has positive effects.

She seems to suggest that before committing "matricide," Regis should have stopped to recognise that not all romance scholars are literary critics. While

Regis’ approach to the study of popular romance is one which she herself characterises in A Natural History as “a traditional literary historical approach” (112) in which the primary site of interest is the text and the secondary site of interest the broader historical and socio-cultural context in which the text figures [...] Radway, who carries out an ethnographic study of romance readers, is, unlike Regis, not primarily focussed on the romance novel’s textual properties, but in the reader’s use and interpretation of this text.

Goris also criticises Regis's account for "being too ahistorical and undertheorised" before adding that "In this context I must acknowledge that, much as Pamela Regis’ theoretical position influences her meta-critical discussion, my own critique of her paper is shaped by my position as a scholar inspired by post-structuralism."

I'll finish with a link to a post by Jessica at RRR, who is not a literary critic. Did Jessica take "great care in choosing [...] study texts"? Probably not, by Regis's standards: "it took about .0008 seconds to find several Harlequin Presents that fit the bill. I chose The Italian’s Mistress, a 2005 Harlequin Presents by Melanie Milburn[e]." And what were those purposes?: "to Use a Harlequin Presents to Teach Sexual Ethics."

--------

Goris, An. "Matricide in Romance Scholarship? Response to Pamela Regis’ Keynote Address at the Second Annual Conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 2.1 (2011).

Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. 1984. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 1991.

Regis, Pamela. "What Do Critics Owe the Romance? Keynote Address at the Second Annual Conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 2.1 (2011).

The first image is a cropped version of a photo taken by Frila of a "Relief im Ehrenmal" depicting the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and downloaded from Wikimedia Commons. As Regis mentions in her paper, "the original four horsemen [are] pestilence, war, famine and death." The second image is also cropped and shows part of Bernardino Mei's Orestes slaying Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. Clytemnestra was Orestes' mother. It was also downloaded from Wikimedia Commons.

Love in Translation

2011-10-18T13:47:00.000+01:00

Laura Vivanco

There hasn't been a lot of work done on the effect of translation on romances, and a fair proportion of what has been done isn't accessible to me, so I was pleased to see Artemis Lamprinou's article in issue 2.1 of the Journal of Romance Studies. Artemis Lamprinou looks at "British bestseller romances translated into Greek during the period 2000-2009, such as Gregson’s East of the Sun, Hislop’s The Island, and De Bernières Captain Corelli’s Mandolin," and shows that translation is not just about the mechanical substitution of words in one language for words with the same meaning in another. Translators have to take into account cultural norms and these differ from one culture to another:

Emotions may appear to be a common experience to all people across the globe but this is a generalization that requires some refining. All people feel and convey emotions but different cultures have their own emotional repertoires and their own norms regulating not only the expression of emotions, but as some scholars argue, even the variety of the emotions experienced. [...] The more modern version of the cultural approach to emotions, and the one that this paper adopts, is that some basic emotions, such as happiness, sadness, anger, and fear, are indeed universal. However, culture plays a considerable role in the suppression or heightening of emotions and generates norms governing the when, where, and how these emotions can be expressed (Shaver, Wu, & Schwartz 183). These cultural norms affecting the communication of emotions cannot be ignored in the translation of romances, especially when experiencing the emotions is vital for the identification of the reader with the characters, on which reader satisfaction depends. ("Translated")

Lamprinou's initial findings are that

when translating the word "anger," "translators have a tendency to increase its force in the Greek translation"; there was a "tendency to translate 'anger' as rage." Lamprinou suggests that this "could have been the result of the influence of Greek cultural textual norms which slightly differ in this case from the English ones as Greek authors value the production of more ‘dramatic’ passages."
similarly, translators may "raise the force of the described emotions [...] by altering the metaphor employed and [...] by introducing [...] personification." This would support the "hypothesis that Greek romance authors prefer more intense emotional passages than their English counterparts."
"Greek translators seem to eliminate, or at least ignore, certain strategies that were absent from the Greek romances, such as allusions and alliterations." Lamprinou rather tentatively suggests that "the translators may have eliminated the above-mentioned linguistic strategies in an effort to abide to the Greek textual norms, or, more possibly, they did not manage to recognize the importance of the strategies as they have not been often ‘exposed’ to such linguistic strategies through the Greek original romances."

Lamprinou's article draws attention to the importance of the translator and this is also emphasised in a 1998 article by Eva Hemmungs Wirtén, who interviewed members of Harlequin's Stockholm office, including "Ewa Högberg, the editor with the overall responsibility for translationsin-house." Högberg explained that

sometimes I would get a translation of a book that I had felt was a real tenpointer -- and then a translator had taken it and it comes out like nothing. Then you're so disappointed, because I had maybe laughed out loud when I read it or cried. It had made an impact -- not all books do that, but these are the ones you remember and then you expect so much of them. Then there's the opposite situation. Sometimes you have to take books that you don't believe in to 100%, maybe because it's a particular translator, maybe because the book contains certain parts that are supposed to work in contrast to others that month, so you get a good variation in contents. Sure, it's okay, but not that great according to my way of looking at things -- and then it comes back, and it's just -- YES! -- the best story, dynamite language, and you just feel that...sometimes I've gone back to my notes to check -- is this the same book? Can this really be? (Eva Högberg, Förlaget Harlequin AB, Stockholm, personal communication, May 20, 1996)
So the dullness and lifelessness of the first may become the vivaciousness of the next. As shetalks about her own reading, the enthusiasm is almost tangible. The book is not just "simply"translated into another cultural context, where it comes out clothed in another language, butessentially "the same." Instead, the process of translation is hazardous territory and what she issuggesting is that translations do matter -- so much so, in fact, that they can "make or break" thebook. ("They Seek")

Swedish Harlequins were also reduced in length:

The most important direction given to thetranslator is that he or she needs to shorten the chapter by 10 to 15% since all Harlequin booksare shortened in translation from English to Swedish. Books in the Superromance and Historicalseries are cut from 304 pages to 272 pages, books in the Romance, Presents, and Desire series arecut from 192 pages to 160 pages. ("They Seek")

Further changes may occur because the advice given to translators

ishardly rigid: "it is allowed to distance yourself from the English text to a substantial degree"and even though the recommendation is to keep personal names as they are, they are not holy. At oneof the editorial meetings, the pros and cons of the names in the miniseries Calloway Corners (wherethe individual books are named after each of four sisters) were discussed extensively.Mariah was kept, Jo became Chris (due to a possible mix-up with a Swedish orangejuice sold under the name of JO), Eden was considered too foreign for Swedish ears andtransformed into Ellen, and the hero in Mariah, Ford (a car, not a name, according to theeditors), was rechristened Robert. ("They Seek")

In her work Lamprinou mentions that some allusions may not translate well and she gives an example from the Greek translation of Rosamunde Pilcher’s

Winter Solstice, Elfrida, the heroine, is afraid to get out of her car because of a barking dog. The author of the text employs the phrase “a Baskerville hound” to express her fear by alluding to Arthur Conan Doyle’s story The Hound of the Baskervilles. The translator’s choice to render this passage into Greek word for word (literally “Baskerville hound,” as the article can sometimes be omitted in Greek) results in a Greek translation whose word order and phrasing remind readers less of the famous Sherlock Holmes book and sound more like the name of some strange breed of dog: a “Baskervillian hound” or simply “A Baskerville.” ("Translated")

The issue of allusions which are lost in translation is also discussed by Wirtén:

Cultural allusions to people or particular phenomena are treated either by exclusion altogetheror by substitution. George Burns, George Strait, and Sadie Thompson are examples of characters thatare simply deleted, presumably because they will not be recognized as references by Swedishreaders; "Kleenex," a brand name synonymous with a product in North America is far better known as"paper napkin" in Sweden; similarly, the expression "Lead on, Macduff" becomes "Lead on, Sherlock"in all likelihood because the translator deems the detective to be better known than the characterfrom Macbeth. References that require some previous knowledge of American culture to beunderstood at all, like a joke made on the concept of the Fifth Amendment or a pun on the word key(both as keys on a computer and the Florida Keys) are more problematic, either impossible to keepas they are or demanding an extra effort on part of the translator to come up with Swedishequivalents. ("They Seek")

In addition, at least with regards to sex scenes, it would appear that in the Swedish-language editions "the overtphysicality of the text is substituted with a more reflective, metaphorical language" ("They Seek"); Lamprinou found that in the Greek-language editions of the novels she studied metaphors were also added (though the examples she gives were not taken from sex scenes).

Cumulatively, the cuts and alterations which are made to these texts leave Wirtén asking: "Is thisnot a new book? And where is the writer in all of this?" ("They Seek").

-----------

Lamprinou, Artemis. "Translated Romances: the Effect of Cultural Textual Norms on the Communication of Emotions." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 2.1 (2011).
Wirtén, Eva Hemmung. " 'They Seek It Here, They Seek It There, They Seek It Everywhere': Looking for the "Global" Book" Canadian Journal of Communication 23.2 (1998). [This article is available online and is "based on a chapter in my dissertation which focuses in particular on Swedish translations," namely Eva Hemmungs Wirtén's Global Infatuation: Explorations in Transnational Publishing and Texts. The Case of Harlequin Enterprises and Sweden (Uppsala: Publications from the Section for Sociology of Literature at the Department of Literature, Uppsala University, 38, 1998) in which she looks at "the way in which the Harlequin book, through what I have termed transediting – or the combined process of editing and translation – is given a Swedish identity" (20). This is available online.]

The image came from Wikimedia Commons. It was created as an "Icon for translation projects" by Flappiefh.

Once More Unto the Breach, Dear Friends, Once More

2011-10-16T17:09:00.002+01:00

Laura Vivanco

"an ever-fixed mark"?

Issue 2.1 of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies was released last week and among the essays is Lynne Pearce's “Romance and Repetition: Testing the Limits of Love” in which she argues that "the question of whether love is, or is not, repeatable is at the very centre of attempts to both define and understand it." Pearce suggests that "Western culture still clings to the notion that 'true love' is both durable and non-repeatable: it is, by definition, an emotion that stands the test of time." She then outlines some of the implications this has had for romantic fiction, a term which, it should be noted, refers to a group of texts including, but not limited to, romance novels:

How romantic fiction has, in practice, dealt with the spectre of repetition is surely a question worthy of investigation, and—although I have not had the opportunity to conduct such a survey as yet—I offer below some hypothetical models predicated upon the canon of classic romance:
Happy Marriage: The most popular solution to the problem is to avoid repetition completely by focusing on only one relationship for the duration of the story and then bring the romance in question to a clean and definitive ending in marriage (“the white wedding”). If previous relationships did feature for one or both of the parties, they are very manifestly not “the real thing” and explained away (see 2 and 3 following). Even though common-sense tells us that it is impossible for any relationship to come to a fixed point, the illusion of closure remains one of the most singular pleasures that romance fiction trades in.
Discredited Former Relationship 1: As in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet wherein Romeo is enamoured of a girl called Rosalind before he meets with Juliet. Although this “repetition” of behaviour has the potential to debase “genuine love,” Romeo’s devotion to Rosalind is treated comically, with the Nurse roundly sending up his heart-sick lament. Discrediting previous relationships through the implication that they were (for example) predicated upon lust, or convenience, rather than love is clearly a neat way of solving the repetition problem. In other words, the characters (and especially the male characters) can be permitted more than one relationship, providing that only the current one is “the real thing.”
Discredited Former Relationship 2: As in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, there is also the possibility of a character having been “in love” more than once through a plot device which ensures that that the previous love-object is retrospectively discredited. This scenario was perfected in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca , a text in which it is possible to accept that Maxim loved both Rebecca and the narrator but only because his first wife is subsequently exposed as “not quite all that she seemed.”
Definitive Death: Here the notional finitude of marriage is replaced by the absolute finitude of death. The fact that there is no possibility of death-bound lovers repeating, and hence discrediting, their UR-passion explains why tragedy remains the most cast-iron means of supporting the view that love is exclusive, non-repeatable, and forever. The fact that so many tragic lovers actively seek death as a means of protecting their love from compromise underlines the principle that “true love” eschews repetition.
Duplicitous Afterlife: Although clearly a variant of “Death,” the solution offered by Gothic Romance is remarkable inasmuch as it simultaneously eschews and embraces repetition. While it is true that the star-crossed lovers at the centre of a Gothic Romance must never be seen to recover from their (one and only) love or its loss, this need not prevent them attempting a re-union with the lost loved-object (or, on occasion, his/her “double”) beyond the grave. Further, the crimes and mishaps that have caused the lovers to be doomed are subsequently seen to repeat those of their forbears and/or to generate a repetition in future generations (Pearce 86). In this respect, then, Gothic Romance must be seen as an instance of a genre both having its cake and eating it: “Genuine Love” is, of course, unique and forever—but so is the (doomed) will-to-repetition.
Taken together, then, what these models suggest is that, throughout history, romance has been consummately successful in side-stepping the problem that repetition poses for the integrity of love, through plot devices that either draw the curtain on previous/subsequent relationships or, alternatively, find some means of discrediting former love-affairs after the event.

------

Pearce, Lynne. "Romance and Repetition: Testing the Limits of Love.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 2.1 (2011).

The image is a Cupid weathervane from Pentlow, Essex, photographed by Keith Evans (via Wikimedia Commons).

2011-10-12T02:13:00.002+01:00

Sarah S. G. Frantz

Laura very kindly posted the summary of our edited anthology. And here's the Table of Contents!

New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction: Critical Essays, edited by Sarah S.G. Frantz and Eric Murphy Selinger:

Despite the prejudices of critics, popular romance fiction remains a complex, dynamic genre. It consistently maintains the largest market share in the American publishing industry, even as it welcomes new subgenres like queer and BDSM romance. Digital publishing originated in erotic romance, and savvy on-line communities have exploded myths about the genre’s readership. Romance scholarship now reflects this diversity, transformed by interdisciplinary scrutiny, new critical approaches, and an unprecedented international dialogue between authors, scholars, and fans. These eighteen essays investigate individual romance novels, authors, and websites, rethink the genre’s history, and explore its interplay of convention and originality. By offering new twists in enduring debates, this collection inspires further inquiry into the emerging field of popular romance studies.

Eric Murphy Selinger and Sarah S. G. Frantz: Introduction: New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction

Part One: Close Reading the Romance
1. Hsu-Ming Teo: "Bertrice Teaches You About History, and You Don’t Even Mind!": History and Revisionist Historiography in Bertrice Small’s The Kadin
2. Eric Murphy Selinger: How to Read a Romance Novel (and Fall in Love with Popular Romance)
3. Sarah S. G. Frantz: "How We Love is Our Soul": Joey Hill’s BDSM Romance Holding the Cards
4. Mary Bly: On Popular Romance, J. R. Ward, and the Limits of Genre Study

Part Two: Convention and Originality
5. An Goris: Loving by the Book: Voice and Romance Authorship
6. K. Elizabeth Spillman: The “Managing Female” in the Novels of Georgette Heyer
7. Laura Vivanco: One Ring to Bind Them: Ring Symbolism in Popular Romance Fiction
8. Carole Veldman-Genz: The More the Merrier? Transformations of the Love Triangle across the Romance
9. Deborah Kaplan: “Why Would Any Woman Want to Read Such Stories?”: The Distinctions Between Genre Romances and Slash Fiction

Part Three: Love and Strife
10. Robin Harders: Borderlands of Desire: Captivity, Romance, and the Revolutionary Power of Love
11. Jayashree Kamble: Patriotism, Passion, and PTSD: The Critique of War in Popular Romance Fiction
12. Kathleen Therrian: Straight to the Edges: Gay & Lesbian Characters and Cultural Conflict in Popular Romance Fiction
13. Sarah Wendell: You Call Me a Bitch Like That’s a Bad Thing: Romance Criticism and Redefining the Word "Bitch"

Part Four: Readers, Authors, Communities
14. Miriam Greenfeld Benovitz: The Interactive Romance Community: The Case of "Covers Gone Wild"
15. Glen Thomas: Happy Readers or Sad Ones? Romance Fiction and the Problems of the Media Effects Model
16. Tamara Whyte: "A Consummation Devoutly to be Wished": Shakespeare in Popular Historical Romance Fiction
17. Christina A. Valeo: Nora Roberts and Serial Magic

Bibliography
Index
About the Contributors

The book will be released in paperback and in electronic edition (although the electronic edition will not have the wonderful Picasso on the cover).

Male Virgins: A Small Note

2011-10-11T12:35:00.006+01:00

Jonathan Allan

I have written previously here and at The Educated Imagination about male virgins in romance. When I set out to write about male virgins, I was interested mostly in the nineteenth century, and truthfully, it was more of a theoretical exercise than anything else. Northrop Frye writes, "the prudery [about virginity in romance] is structural, not moral", and yet nearly every observation that appears about virginity in his writing on romance is about female virgins. So my question became: could the structure of romance hold if it were the male that was a virgin and not the female?

When I presented initial findings at the IASPR meeting in Belgium, my work focused on the Twilight Saga and perhaps the most famous of all 107-year-old virgins, Edward Cullen.

Now, however, I have new ideas and new concerns with male virgins in popular romance. For instance, though male virgins are not everywhere in romance, they are present enough. Many major writers of popular romance have included heroes who also happen to be virgins. The earliest male virgin in popular romance seems to be found in the 1970s and a few others appear in the 1980s. In the 1990s we see a rising interest in male virgins, and in 2000s the male virgin can be called a niche commodity.

In the 1990s, for instance, the male virgin is presented as more of a surprise for the reader. The author, in these instances, was playing with a trope, the hero, and seeing what would happen if the heroine were confronted by the fact the hero is a virgin. Of course, the virginal hero was also a surprise for the reader.

In Secret Admirer (1992) by Susan Napier, we read (toward the completion of the novel):

“Why, that it was my first time, of course.” And, as she continued to stare at him uncomprehendingly over the top of the cup, his smile gentled into a tender warmth.

“You were my initiation, Grace. I gave you my virginity; you gave me my manhood.”

It is only after the first time that Grace and by extension the reader learns that this was Scott's first time.

Later in Eloisa James’ When the Duke Returns (2009), the opening words of the novel are:

“He’s a virgin.”
“What!”
“He’s a virgin—”
“Your husband is a virgin?”
“And he won’t bed me.”

In James’ novel, the hero’s virginity is almost unbelievable. The opening of the narrative is a shocking one for both the reader and the heroine.

Today, nearly twenty years after Scott’s surprise virginity in Secret Admirer, virginity is not nearly the narrative surprise it used to be. In Cheryl Brook’s Virgin (2011), the hero’s virginity is announced in the first chapter (as are his thoughts on what the first time will be like). In Courtney Milan’s Unclaimed (2011), we read: “Sir Mark Turner did not look like any virgin that Jessica had ever seen before.” Indeed, even the marketing (which I noticed at Dear Author) for the novel reads: “In which a male virgin meets a courtesan.” And on her webpage, Courtney Milan explains: “All of my books get code names as I write them. The code-name I used for Unclaimed was Blasphemy. Because, you know, there’s a certain sense of blasphemy in seducing an upright moralist who also happens to be a virgin.”

I am now beginning to think historically – mostly thanks to Sarah Frantz and her very exciting work on the Alpha Male – about the male virgin in popular romance. I have ideas as to why the male virgin has appeared, but his place in the history of popular romance seems important given the fact there hasn’t been a year since the 90s in popular romance in which a male virgin has not appeared (and often enough we see as many as ten male virgins in a given year).

The question that continues to fascinate me is about the interest in male virgins. My interest was purely theoretical, at least initially, but what is the reader’s interest?

New Approaches approaches

2011-10-11T10:20:00.000+01:00

Laura Vivanco

New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction: Critical Essays, edited by Sarah S.G. Frantz and Eric Murphy Selinger will be published by Mcfarland in 2012:

Despite the prejudices of critics, popular romance fiction remains a complex, dynamic genre. It consistently maintains the largest market share in the American publishing industry, even as it welcomes new subgenres like queer and BDSM romance. Digital publishing originated in erotic romance, and savvy on-line communities have exploded myths about the genre’s readership. Romance scholarship now reflects this diversity, transformed by interdisciplinary scrutiny, new critical approaches, and an unprecedented international dialogue between authors, scholars, and fans. These eighteen essays investigate individual romance novels, authors, and websites, rethink the genre’s history, and explore its interplay of convention and originality. By offering new twists in enduring debates, this collection inspires further inquiry into the emerging field of popular romance studies.

One of those eighteen essays is by me. It's "One Ring to Bind Them: Ring Symbolism in the Modern Romance Genre." I'm looking forward to finding out what else is in there.

The "Special Relationship" Allegorised and Other Links

2011-10-08T16:25:00.002+01:00

Laura Vivanco

io9 claim that

Gregory Casparian's The Anglo-American Alliance. A Serio-Comic Romance and Forecast of the Future (1906), [is] the first lesbian science fiction novel [...]. An Anglo-American Alliance would have been better (and extraordinarily progressive) had Aurora and Margaret lived happily ever after as women, it must be admitted. Nonetheless, An Anglo-American Alliance is the first science fiction novel with a pair of lesbian lovers as heroines, one of whom becomes science fiction's first transgender hero.

It would also have been more "progressive" had it not been the case that after her transformation "all the accomplishments, knowledge and mental attributes possessed by Margaret, prior to her re-incarnation, had been intensified a hundred-fold in their entity into those of aggressive, daring and strenuous masculinity" (115). This emphasis on the differences between men and women is perhaps not surprising given that earlier in the novel the reader was informed that in 1918 "The Women's Clubs" had decided to abandon any idea of women entering politics and instead "confine all their energies to civic, educational and humanitarian channels and things pertaining to Home" (51). In addition, prior to the success of Margaret's operation, one of the "fears and misgivings" of the doctor carrying it out is "What, if she should prove to be a man with effeminate mind and manners?" (113).

The novel also contains statements such as "the Jews are not a pioneer race" (58), "the [...] inhabitants of the isolated islands of the Shetlands and Orkneys [...] led an indolent life" (72), and

the discovery, by an American, of a germicide for indolence was announced [...], by which lethargic persons were regenerated into acute activity. [...]
The negroes of the Southern States, the natives of tropical countries and also officials in the police departments of large cities, were the ones benefitted by this "golden medical discovery!" (77-78)

Casparian presents the novel as a "frivolously allegorical narrative" (ix) inspired by the idea of a union "between two of the foremost and best forms of Government - America and Britain" (viii-ix), which makes it an interesting take on the "special relationship." If it is "the first lesbian science fiction novel," then it's presumably also the first lesbian science fiction romance.

Given the scarcity of military heroes in contemporary Mills & Boon romances edited in the UK, I was surprised to see that Mills & Boon have re-released three of them in a volume raising money for Help for Heroes.

Rachel Cooke at the Guardian has read the new Heyer biography and asks

What, I wonder, is the point of this book? Who is it for? According to its jacket, Jennifer Kloester is "the foremost expert on Heyer" (as if the world's universities were crammed with her competitors, all of them writing PhDs on The Grand Sophy and Regency Buck). What this means in practice is that she tells you everything – I mean everything – about a woman whose life was simply not very interesting. This is a biography in which the pregnancy of a daughter-in-law is giant news. Yes, Kloester has had, courtesy of Heyer's late son, Sir Richard Rougier (the high court judge who once claimed never to have heard of bouncy castles), unbridled access to Heyer's papers, but since these include no exciting love letters, and nothing in the way of literary gossip, one wishes she had not felt obliged to quote from them so extensively. (One letter, in which Heyer complains to her agent about her publisher, Heinemann, is reprinted over three pages.)

My impression (I'm still waiting for my copy to arrive) is that the book was written for those who have already read Jane Aiken Hodge's biography of Heyer and think that Heyer's "angry letters to her literary agent, Leonard Parker Moore, refusing to see why she should permit Cartland to steal her ideas and research" (Alberge) constitute "literary gossip." We may not all be "writing PhDs on The Grand Sophy and Regency Buck" but we're probably the kind of people who'd be interested in reading those PhDs.

If you're that kind of person, you might also be interested in attending

Popular Romance in the New Millennium, a gathering of romance scholars to be held November 10 and 11 at McDaniel College in Westminster, MD. Register at the conference website:

http://www.mcdaniel.edu/romance/

[...] Highlights include a keynote by Professor Mary Bly/NY Times Bestselling Eloisa James on the state of romance criticism, a plenary address by An Goris of KULeuven on the work of Nora Roberts, and a Q&A with Smart Bitches Sarah Wendell on the future of romance.

---
The illustration came from Wikimedia Commons and depicts a

poster [...] used for the promotion of the United States and Great Britain Industrial Exposition in the late 19th century (1899-1900).
Shows Columbia and Britannia in the background holding flags, and Uncle Sam and John Bull in the foreground shaking hands.

Is Popular Romance Homophobic?

2011-10-03T17:48:00.001+01:00

Amy Burge

I recently came across the following passage in a Mills & Boon 'Modern Romance' sheikh title I'm researching. The passage struck me as odd, gratuitous and distinctly homophobic.

The heroine, Tally, is arguing with the hero, Sheikh Tair, trying to convince him that he is not as monolithically violent as he appears to be. The conversation goes as follows:

Tally: "You might say you're a brutal, vengeful man, but I don't see it. Your men adore you-"
Tair: "Please don't say my men and adore in the same sentence. It makes me extremely uncomfortable."
Tally: "The point is, you know your men care about you."
Tair: "You're confusing affection and respect. My men don't care about me. They fear me. Two significantly different things."
(Jane Porter, The Sheikh's Disobedient Wife, p. 105)

The line which gave me pause was Tair's comment 'It makes me extremely uncomfortable'. No explanation is offered for this statement, and the conversation swiftly moves on. But this jarring, homophobic comment stayed with me, as I began to think about how gay male sexuality is figured in heterosexual popular romance. How does this hero get away with being so homophobic?

Clearly, the context of the desert culture of the sheikh romance cannot be ignored here. As parts of the contemporary Middle East and Africa continue to criminalise homosexuality, it could be representational accuracy that leads this hero to espouse homophobic views. Yet given that these romances deliberately distance themselves, both geographically and in political terms from the reality of their Middle Eastern and North African settings (for example in the creation of fictional nation states over which the hero rules), it seems unlikely that this statement is simply a reflection of contemporary social politics.

Perhaps this homophobia is part of the hero's overtly constructed masculinity. Sheikh heroes are amongst the most deliberately masculinised Harlequin Mills & Boon hero; the traditional dress he wears, usually a keffiyeh or dishdasha and a long robe, seems to carry the danger of making the hero appear effeminate. This is frequently addressed and vociferously denied in sheikh romances:

Like her, he wore a long, loose robe. But, far from making him look effeminate, the outfit somehow accentuated the width of his shoulders, the whipcord strength of his body, his innate masculinity.
(Annie West, For the Sheikh's Pleasure, p. 109).

Is it possible that this homophobic comment serves to further masculinise (in the sense of heterosexualise) the sheikh hero (whose masculinity already treads the borderline between effeminacy and masculinity)?

There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of critical work on male homosexuality within heterosexual romances (perhaps because of its usual lack of mention), although a Teach Me Tonight post from 2006 discusses homophobia in romance. There has, however, been considerable work on lesbian romances and Stephanie Burley has considered the homoerotic potential of the romance, although this article focuses on women as the primary readers and authors of romance ('What's a Nice Girl like You Doing in a Book like This?: Homoerotic Reading and Popular Romance').

My reading expertise does not stretch far beyond modern sheikh romances, and homophobic references such as this do seem to be rare. But I would be very interested to hear about any other references to homosexuality (both positive and negative) within heterosexual popular romance. I wonder:

Is gay sexuality always undesired/rejected in heterosexual popular romance?

Is there room for the homoerotic in these romances?

And how do these compare with representations of female homosexuality (of which, in heterosexual romance, I have encountered none)?

These are certainly questions I will be considering in my future romance reading.

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References:

Stephanie Burley, 'What's a Nice Girl like You Doing in a Book like This?: Homoerotic Reading and Popular Romance', Doubled Plots: Romance and History, ed. Susan Strehle and Mary Paniccia Carden (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003)

Jane Porter, The Sheikh's Disobedient Bride (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2006)

Annie West, For the Sheikh's Pleasure (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2007)

CFP: PCA/ACA Conference 2012

2011-09-29T17:46:00.000+01:00

Laura Vivanco

This is a call for papers for one of the subject areas covered at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association's 2012 Conference, which is being held in Boston from April 11 - 14, 2012. Apparently this "is a week later than we have traditionally held it in the past."

Call For Papers: Romance Area

Deadline for submission: December 15, 2011.

We are interested in any and all topics about or related to popular romance: all genres, all media, all countries, all kinds, and all eras. All representations of romance in popular culture (fiction, stage, screen—large or small, commercial, advertising, music, song, dance, online, real life, etc.), from anywhere and any-when, are welcome topics of discussion.

This year we are especially interested in papers on Romance on/and/in Television, to be presented on panels jointly sponsored by the Romance and the TV areas.

The Romance Area is also co-sponsoring with the Gay/Lesbian/Queer area papers that discuss BDSM and Kink in any form. Representations of BDSM/Kink in popular media and/or discussions of real-life BDSM/Kink practices and practitioners are all welcome. Romance is not a necessary component of papers to be presented in BDSM/Kink.

We will consider proposals for individual papers, sessions organized around a theme, and special panels. Sessions are scheduled in one-hour slots, ideally with four papers or speakers per standard session.

If you are involved in the creative industry of popular romance (romance author/editor, film director/producer, singer/songwriter, etc.) and are interested in speaking on your own work or on developments in the representations of popular romance, please contact us!

Some possible topics for Romance (although we are by no means limited to these):
Popular Romance on the World Stage (texts in translation, Western and non-Western media, local and comparative approaches)
Romance Across the Media: crossover texts and the relationships between romance fiction and romantic films, music, art, drama, etc.; also the paratexts and contexts of popular romance
Romance High and Low: texts that fall between “high” and “low” culture, or that complicate the distinctions between these critical categories
Romance Then and Now: representations of Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, Romantic, Modern, Postmodern love
Romancing the Marketplace: romantic love in advertising, marketing, and consumer culture
Queering the Romance: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender romance, and representations of same-sex love within predominantly heterosexual texts
BDSM Romance and representations of romantic/erotic power exchange
Romance communities
New Critical Approaches, such as readings informed by critical race theory, queer theory, postcolonial studies, or empirical science (e.g., the neurobiology of love)
The Politics of Romance, and romantic love in political discourse (revolutionary, reactionary, colonial / anti-colonial, etc.)
Individual Creative Producers or Texts of Popular Romance (novels, authors, film, directors, writers, songwriters, actors, composers, dancers, etc.)
Gender-Bending and Gender-Crossing / Genre-Bending and Genre-Crossing / Media-Bending and Media-Crossing Popular Romance
African-American, Latina, Asian, and other Multicultural romance
Young Adult Romance
History of/in Popular Romance
Romance and Region: places, histories, mythologies, traditions
Definitions and Theoretical Models of Popular Romance: it’s not all just happily ever after

As we do every year, the Romance area will meet in a special Open Forum to discuss upcoming conferences, work in progress, and the future of the field of Popular Romance Studies. All are welcome to attend.

Presenters are encouraged to make use of the new array of romance scholarship resources online, including the romance bibliography, the RomanceScholar listserv, and the open Forums at the webpage of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance.

Submit a one-page (200-300 words) proposal or abstract by December 15, 2011, to the Area Chair in Romance:

Sarah S. G. Frantz
sarahfrantz@gmail.com

If you have any questions as all, please contact the area chair. Please feel free to forward, cross-post, or link to this call for papers.

On the topic of CFPs and conferences, don't forget that the IASPR 2012 conference, focusing this year on the topic of "The Pleasures of Romance," will be held in York from 27-29 September. Proposals for "individual papers, full panels, roundtables, interviews, or innovative presentations" need to be sent to conferences@iaspr.org by May 1, 2012.

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The image of the television was created by Robert Couse-Baker and was downloaded from Flikr under a Creative Commons licence. The BDSM symbol was created by Aida, released into the public domain by Aida and AnonMoos, and downloaded from Wikimedia Commons.

CFP: Love in Crisis, Love as Crisis, Love Against Catastrophe

2011-09-28T18:41:00.000+01:00

Laura Vivanco

Eric has proposed a seminar for the American Comparative Literature Association's 2012 Annual Meeting which

will take place at Brown University, Providence, RI from March 29th to April 1st, 2012. [...] The ACLA’s annual conferences have a distinctive structure in which most papers are grouped into twelve-person seminars that meet two hours per day for the three days of the conference to foster extended discussion. Some eight-person (or smaller) seminars meet just the first two days of the conference.

Here's the call for papers for Eric's seminar:

Since at least the 1920s, literary and cultural commentators have warned that modern lovers, hell-bent on investigating love, desire, and the self, would undermine all three. “We never say the word Love, do we; –we know it’s a suspect ideological construct” Maud Bailey shrugs in A. S. Byatt’s Possession, her symptoms shared by the patients Julia Kristeva discusses in Histoires d’Amour: men and women who suffer “crises of love. Let’s admit it: lacks of love.” In 1993, the New York Times announced the “Death of Eros” to readers of its Sunday magazine, and as ethnomusicologist Martin Stokes notes in The Republic of Love, Turkish novelists like Orhan Pamuk and Elif Şafak have recently suggested that love there, too, is “in a state of crisis.”

Yet is not love itself a sort of crisis? From Sappho to the Surrealists, Dante to Dil Se, Nizami to Jean-Luc Nancy, love seizes the body, shatters the heart, and annihilates the self, turning old life to new. And what of other enduring discourses– psychological, theological, literary, and political–that frame love as a force that resists and rebuilds in the face of catastrophe? (Against the Nakba, Mahmoud Darwish thus declares himself a “Lover from Palestine.”)

This seminar invites papers on love in crisis, love as crisis, and love in the face of catastrophe, in literary texts, popular media, and works of critical theory. Ideally our seminar will span multiple periods, genres, traditions, and cultures of love, bringing them into productive conversation; all approaches are welcome.

Apparently "The Deadline for Paper Proposals has been extended to November 15, 2011."

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The photo was taken by CarbonNYC and was made available under a Creative Commons licence at Flikr.

CFP: Teaching, Women's Writing, Travelling Women

2011-09-23T18:27:00.002+01:00

Laura Vivanco

The following three calls for papers were announced in the latest email digest from The Middlebrow Network.

TeachingTainted Lit: Popular American Fiction and the Perils and Pleasures of theClassroom

Essay contributions are sought for a volume entitled Teaching Tainted Lit: Popular American Fiction and the Perils and Pleasures of the Classroom, to be edited by Janet G. Casey. Taking as its premise the idea that popular fiction has secured a solid position in higher education classrooms, this collection seeks to explore its pedagogical implications. Possible topics may include:

unusual or insightful uses of the popular in the context of college English
historical or contemporary struggles over the teaching of popular texts
the politics and intersections of popularity and canonicity as they pertain to the classroom
anxieties andpleasures (on the parts of students and/or teachers) located in reading the popular
differences in attitudes about studying historical and contemporary popular texts
relations between teaching the popular and the perceived crisis in the humanities
teaching the American popular outside the U.S.
issues of publication and dissemination that affect teaching (e.g., working with magazines; problems associated with out-of-print materials).

Essays that focus on a particular text and its pedagogical ramifications are also welcome, especially if they put broader questions into play. Personal/anecdotal postures invited. Please send a 300-word abstract and cv to jcasey@skidmore.edu by 15 Jan. 2012. Invited essays will be due in late 2012.

Postgraduate Conference: The Popular and The Middlebrow: Women’sWriting 1880–1940

12 April 2012, Newcastle University.

Keynote Speaker:Professor Nicola Humble (Roehampton)

This event aims to bring together postgraduate researchers from across the UK and beyond to discuss the growing interest in and importance of the categories of the middlebrow and the popular as ways of engaging with women’s writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both of these terms have become crucial ways of exploring the work of more marginalised female writers who were not directly involved in larger intellectual discourses such as Modernism or social realism, but who enjoyed a great deal of success during their own time. From the regency romances of Georgette Heyer to the crime fiction of Agatha Christie, from the muted socialist politics of Winifred Holtby to the witty asides of Molly Keane, the conference reasserts the importance of these women’s writing as part of a wider literary tradition. It encourages papers which both work with and interrogate the terms ‘popular’ and ‘middlebrow’ as well as those which choose to apply them to the work of a specific woman or group of women in order to challenge or consolidate their usage. It asks: do the terms still contain inherent value judgements? Are they problematic when applied to women’s literature? Or do they engender a challenge to preconceptions about women and literary history, allowing for a reconceptualization of notions of canonicity?

Possible topics include:
Women writers and the popular
Women writers and the middlebrow
Domesticity and the home
Place and landscape
War and politics
Queer fictions
Marginalised women writers
Violence
Women writing romance
Women and historical fictions
Women writers and science fiction

Proposals of no more than 300 words should be emailed to middlebrow-conf@ncl.ac.uk by 30 November 2011.

The conference has a website.

Moving Dangerously: Women and Travel, 1850-1950

13-14 April 2012, Newcastle University.

Keynote Speakers:Alexandra Peat (University of Toronto)and Avril Maddrell (University of the West of England)

The period between 1850 and 1950 is widely acknowledged to have been one of dramatic societal and cultural change, not least in terms of women’s experience of and relationship to travel. The rapid expansion of the travel networks both nationally and internationally towards the end of the nineteenth century coincided with the impact of first wave feminism, as the suffragette movement gathered momentum and the figure of the New Woman appeared. By 1950, new forms of technology and transport, and their widespread availability, had substantially altered women’s perception of and ability to travel.

This two-day international and interdisciplinary conference invites papers that explore the changing relationship of women and travel across key moments in modernity, such the First World War and its effects on women’s independence, the developments in British Imperial activity, and the boom in rail, air and sea travel. The conference aims to stimulate academic discussion on a range of topics relating to women and travel in the period ranging from 1850-1950. These topics include representations of women and travel in fiction and film, non-fictional portrayals and documentations, as well as archival work on first-hand accounts of women travellers. As such, we welcome papers from those working in the fields of Literature, History, Geography, Film and Media, Modern Languages, Gender/Women’s Studies, and Politics.

Potential paper topics might include considerations of: both published and unpublished travel-writings by women of the period; fictional accounts of travel written by women throughout the period; representations of women travellers in contemporary biography; representations of women and travel during the period in fiction and film, and the benefits of archival research into women and travel on contemporary understandings of women’s role in modernity.

Please send abstracts of 250 words for 20 minute papers to: moving@ncl.ac.uk by 30 November 2011.

The conference has a website.

The Return of Heathcliff

2011-09-18T12:58:00.000+01:00

Laura Vivanco

Kate Walker's latest romance, The Return of the Stranger, is based on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and on Saturday 17 September she gave a talk about them at the 2011 Brontë Festival of Women's Writing (organised by the Brontë Society and the Brontë Parsonage Museum). As stated in the programme, Kate is "A huge admirer of the Brontës, she wrote her MA thesis on the work of Charlotte and Emily Brontë." I was very pleased to be able to interview Kate on behalf of those of us who couldn't get to Haworth.
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Laura: When I first learned that you'd be writing a romance based on Wuthering Heights as part of a four-book Harlequin Mills & Boon series (The Powerful and the Pure) based on classic novels I thought you perhaps had the hardest job of the four authors. They based theirs on Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma. You have Wuthering Heights and although I suppose it's possible to argue that Wuthering Heights fits the Romance Writers of America's definition of a romance because it has "a central love story" (RWA) and "the lovers who risk and struggle for each other and their relationship are rewarded with emotional justice and unconditional love" (RWA), by the time Catherine and Heathcliff are finally united they're both dead and have brought misery to almost everyone in their vicinity.

Who came up with the idea for the series and how did you end up writing a romance based on Wuthering Heights?

Kate Walker: Thanks for inviting me to do this interview Laura – it’s been fascinating wearing both of my ‘hats’ as an academic and a writer of popular romance to look at Wuthering Heights and answer your questions.

OK – so the idea for writing the mini series based on these classic books of romantic fiction was originally put to me by my editor. It was one of the editorial ideas that were being considered at the time and I’d recently written a book in a series on the Greek Myths which had been very popular, so with that and my MA in English Lit, I suppose I was a pretty natural choice as one of the authors involved. Originally, I was asked to write a book inspired by Mrs Gaskell’s North and South – I suppose because of the hugely successful TV production here in the UK, but I wondered if perhaps American readers might think this was the North and South by John Jakes that was televised starring Patrick Swayze. I was working on The Proud Wife at the time and there was a bit of a rethink, then next I heard was that they now wanted me to do Wuthering Heights. I’d recently appeared on a panel discussing the Brontës and Romantic Fiction at an event organised by The Brontë Society and of course Mills and Boon know about my MA thesis on Emily and Charlotte’s childhood writings and how they reflected in the adult novels they wrote.

So Wuthering Heights was mine – I think I’d have been very jealous of anyone who’d been asked to do this one! But yes, it was a problematic novel to work on as a romance writer. I’ve said several times that I don’t really believe it is a love story – it’s hugely romantic if you’re defining romance in terms of powerful, passionate emotions between a man and a woman, but it’s more a novel about passion and possession and power than a long-lasting love that would translate easily into the happy-ever-after ending romances promise the readers – the reason readers come back to them again and again. But the love these two share is ultimately a destructive one – it is a wild, ferocious storm of emotion and one that, as you say, is so self-absorbed that it has brought misery to so many others in their vicinity. It’s interesting that the real love story – that between younger Catherine and Hareton – seems so mild in comparison that in so many film adaptations it gets left out completely and yet this is a love of real strength that flowers in spite of the very rough ground it grows on and both Catherine 2 and Hareton defy the dangers of Heathcliff’s rage quietly and steadily as they grow to care for each other. In the end, the wild passion brings nothing but destruction, while the love story promises the hope of rebuilding a future. Together.

So that’s some of what I had to contend with - giving my Heath and Kat the understanding and strength of love, forgiveness, sharing while trying not to diminish them in the passionate, tempestuous love that readers remember from Wuthering Heights. I also had to make two characters who some readers find totally hateful, cruel and even downright evil, believably sympathetic and ultimately loveable.

Laura: You mention in your letter to the reader that when you were a child your

teacher started to read us Wuthering Heights. We only ever heard the start of the story - up to the moment when Heathcliff turned his back on Cathy and walked away to make his fortune - so I didn't know what happened until I found a copy on my mother's bookshelves [...] I had always hoped that Wuthering Heights would have a happy-ever-after for Cathy and Heathcliff. But even from the start I had somehow known that that wasn't going to be. (2)

Heathcliff has often been described, along with Mr Darcy and Mr Rochester, as a romantic hero, but I wonder if, in order to turn him into a romance hero, a reader has to adopt the position of Isabella Linton who, as Heathcliff says, eloped with him "under a delusion [...] picturing in me a hero of romance" (Chapter 14), having dismissed Catherine's warnings:

'I wouldn't be you for a kingdom [...] !' Catherine declared, emphatically: and she seemed to speak sincerely. 'Nelly, help me to convince her of her madness. Tell her what Heathcliff is: an unreclaimed creature, without refinement, without cultivation: an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone. [...] It is deplorable ignorance of his character, child, and nothing else, which makes that dream enter your head. Pray, don't imagine that he conceals depths of benevolence and affection beneath a stern exterior! He's not a rough diamond - a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic: he's a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man. [...] avarice is growing with him a besetting sin. [...] There's my picture: and I'm his friend. [...]' (Chapter 10)

Is he a good template on which to base a Mills & Boon hero? Mills & Boon state that in the line of novels you write for,

When the hero strides into the story he's a powerful, ruthless man who knows exactly what - and who - he wants and he isn't used to taking no for an answer! Yet he has depth and integrity.

Kate Walker: Your question makes me think of the many different ways I’ve ‘read’ Heathcliff over my lifetime, and more rereadings of Wuthering Heights than I can count. When I first heard the story of Heathcliff – just the beginning as you’ve described above – I fell head over heels with the hero of that story. I saw him so much as the wronged victim, lost, orphaned, treated appallingly by Hindley. It wasn’t until I found the whole book and read the complete story that my opinions started to change. I could see exactly why my schoolteacher had stopped where he did – and never finished the story for his class of 10-11 year olds. And yes, I think that early feeling, seeing him as a romantic hero, does have to be “under a delusion [...] picturing in me a hero of romance.”

Ever since then, each time I read the book I feel slightly different about Heathcliff. He’s brutal, cruel, he treats his own son appallingly, he hangs Isabella’s dog – when I said I was reworking Wuthering Heights, it was amazing how many people cited that as a reason to detest him rather than the way he treats the people who have the misfortune to be part of his plan of revenge and then his savagery after the loss of Cathy.

That’s when he ceases to be a hero for me now – when he loses depth and integrity. If I create a hero who is looking for revenge then he needs to take out his revenge on the person who deserves it, not her sister-in-law or her daughter or someone else who is linked to the person who hurt him, but isn’t directly involved in the hurt he has suffered. So my Heath can take revenge on Kat’s brother Joe, who, like Hindley, treated him appallingly and in Wuthering Heights Hindley is the author of his own downfall.

Writing a Modern Romance for Mills and Boon today, the trick is to make the hero ambiguous and open to different interpretations so that the reader initially believes that he is “an unreclaimed creature, without refinement, without cultivation: an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone.” But in reality he “conceals depths of benevolence and affection beneath a stern exterior!” Heathcliff is as Cathy describes him – “He's not a rough diamond - a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic: he's a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man” but he has intense romantic appeal in that so many people say ‘who wouldn’t want to be loved like that?’ - but that’s a dangerous, destructive ‘love’ even if it is intensely passionate.

So – both as a writer and as a person, I couldn’t justify Heathcliff’s behaviour, no matter how badly he has been treated in his youth; the revenge he exacts – and the people he destroys as a result – are out of all proportion. I need to have a hero who is a man of honour, who is a powerful, ruthless man who knows exactly what he wants but who doesn’t lie, cheat, hurt people just for hurting’s sake. Ambiguous maybe – but not downright cruel and evil.

Laura: I don't want to spoil the fun for readers who'd like to compare the two novels, so I shan't discuss this in detail, but it struck me that in addition to the changes you've made to the personality of Heathcliff, you've also made very significant changes to Edgar Linton and (I don't think this is a spoiler since it's revealed very early on) in a sense you've also literally sacrificed him so that your Kat can have her happy ending. Did you to some extent merge Edgar Linton with Linton Heathcliff to produce your Arthur Charlton? It certainly seemed to me that your Kat is a mixture of both Catherines, and that your Heath is a mixture of Heathcliff and Hareton. If so, it seemed to me that you had some textual justification for writing them like this because Linton bears a "strong [...] resemblance" (Chapter 19) to his uncle Edgar, the Catherines are mother and daughter and share the same name and, towards the end of Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff says that "Five minutes ago, Hareton seemed a personification of my youth" (Chapter 33).

Kate Walker: One of the problems of writing a very much shorter book and one that obviously cannot possibly have the depth of Emily Brontë’s amazing original is that there isn’t space in 55,000 words to develop anything more than the central plot, or to bring in a large cast of secondary characters. (Though interestingly several people have commented on the fact that The Return of The Stranger actually has a bigger ‘cast’ than I usually deal in!) Some characters had to go, some had to be changed. Wuthering Heights has so many deaths in it but more than one would overload a short romance, but if Kat and Heath were to have their happy ending, I had to deal with the question of her marriage to Edgar/Arthur – and do so within the short space of the timeframe of a romance. No chance for 31 years and several generations as Emily Brontë had. Just as I’ve always had ambiguous feelings about Heathcliff, I’ve never seen Edgar as a sweet, lovable, caring man who was going to be a good husband to Cathy. When we first see Edgar, he and his sister have been fighting over a puppy – “That was their pleasure – to fight over a heap of warm hair, and each begin to cry because both, after struggling to get it, refused to take it” (Chapter 6). They hurt the puppy in this exchange – shades of Heathcliff’s callous treatment of Isabella’s dog. And later Edgar can be petulant, petty, mean . . So I already had a feeling of Edgar having a lot in common with his nephew Linton – and really Emily Brontë doesn’t show either of the Lintons as being anything but spoilt and pretty selfish. So I could combine all of these characteristics – with the strong possibility that one in particular might apply to Linton Heathcliff to create the character of Kat’s husband.

I think you’re right in that yes the two Catherines could be said to merge in Kat, and Heathcliff and Hareton could be said to merge into Heath. Catherine Earnshaw certainly needs softening - she is a very difficult, wild and selfish character. Though it was never that deliberate or thought out. I had created my central characters, and then they took on a life of their own – but because I needed to add in those ‘lovable’ elements to make their happy ending work, they inevitably ended up with aspects of the two people who in the original novel are capable of a loving relationship. It’s interesting that you’ve read it in this way when you are studying the book objectively and I would say that I didn’t rationalise these elements, but was working creatively - and now I can see that yes they are there. It’s one of the questions that fascinates me with my two ‘hats’ on – how much of the symbolism and the elements that critics analyse so much were deliberate planning on Emily’s part, and how much was just the burning flow of her imagination working on a deeper instinctive level.

Laura: The Harlequin/Mills & Boon line you write for is characterised by "smouldering intensity and red-hot desire." There's certainly intensity in the relationship between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. Catherine, for example, states that

My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. (Chapter 9)

However, this isn't exactly the same as 'red-hot desire' and Patsy Stoneman has recently argued that

The relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff [...] follows the many intense brother-sister relationships found in the Romantic poetry of Byron and Shelley, and is inevitably tragic since it cannot be consummated except in nostalgia for childhood or anticipation of death.

I noticed that in your novel it's revealed that, at the point when Heath left Kat, her feelings for him were childlike: "He had become a man when she was still lingering in girlhood - still in so many ways a child - so that she hadn't recognised what was growing between them" (135-36). What's your view of the nature of the relationship between the original Catherine and Heathcliff?

Kate Walker: There’s a lot of evidence for Patsy Stoneman’s argument – if you study a timeline for Wuthering Heights, Catherine is only just 15 when Heathcliff leaves Wuthering Heights to make his fortune. Her birthdate is around 28^th May 1765 and Heathcliff leaves about August 1780. Catherine is in fact only 18 when she dies. And Heathcliff is just about 20. So they are very young in the early part of the story. Some film versions and TV adaptations have made their early relationship a very sexual one, but the passion and devotion inspired by longing and non-consummation of their relationship is perfectly believable too. Today we tend to think in terms of passion being sexual but sexual anticipation, sexual tension builds the intensity harder and stronger in a story as in life.

There’s a possibility of interpreting Catherine’s ‘madness’ and decline to her death as being strongly connected with her pregnancy as well as the emotional upheaval of Heathcliff’s return etc. If Cathy and Edgar marry about 12^th March 1783, and she dies giving birth to young Cathy, I have felt that there it is possible to read into the book the fact that in marriage, coming up against the reality of sexual love between a man and a woman, she longs for the ‘innocence’ and intensity of the relationship of their youth and the loss of the freedom of their childhood.

Again this is something that I’ve read differently at different stages of my own life – when I first saw a TV production of Wuthering Heights it was the 1967 version with a young Ian McShane as Heathcliff. I was young and impressionable too - and I couldn’t imagine how anyone could not want to go to bed with him! But even at 25, McShane was older than Heathcliff ever was when Cathy was alive. But then I didn’t register quite how young Cathy and Heathcliff were. It wasn’t until I studied the book as a critic rather than swallowed it whole as a passionate reader that I started to wonder and question. I suspect that if Heathcliff and Cathy had slept together then their relationship would not have been lived at the intensity it is. And if Heathcliff knows that Edgar has been Cathy’s lover his jealousy will be all the more savage. Certainly I found that this worked very well for me with the characters I had created and the relationship that developed between them.

This all of course begs the question of what Emily Brontë, spinster, clergyman’s daughter, knew of sex. I still remember when I did my MA thesis reading a totally serious discussion of Emily having a French lover – possibly one she met in Belgium – called Louis Parensell. This was in fact the result of Virginia Moore misreading the handwritten title of Emily’s poem Love’s Farewell. So we don’t know - but there is a lot of the same ardent yearning and passion in Emily’s sister Charlotte’s relationship with M Heger so she might have drawn on some of that for inspiration.

I used the fact that Cathy was so young when Heathcliff left as part of the story of The Return of The Stranger because it’s in the original and because it fitted well with adding another dimension to the reason Heathcliff left. The famous words “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff” (Chapter 9) that Catherine Earnshaw declares were perfectly justifiable when they were written – even more when you consider that Wuthering Heights is in fact a historical novel, set over 70 years before the date when Emily wrote it. It would have degraded her to marry the servant Hindley had made him. But that wouldn’t fit with the 21^st century mentality. We would expect love to conquer all, no matter what position in life the hero and heroine hold. And I couldn’t make Heath stay under Joe’s oppressive rule for too long or he wouldn’t appear heroic if he didn’t fight back. But if he went away to make something of himself and because he knew that the feelings he was having for this young girl were sexual then that fitted.

Laura: You've made your hero Brazilian and called him Heath Montanha (which means "mountain," I think). I thought that was quite clever, and it also occurred to me that you have some textual authorisation for giving Heathcliff a new nationality. After all, Nelly Dean once suggested to him that

Who knows, but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen, each of them able to buy up, with one week's income, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange together? And you were kidnapped by wicked sailors, and brought to England. Were I in your place, I would frame high notions of my birth. (Chapter 7)

Indeed, your own novel recalls that passage when Heath states that "you were the one who once told me that my father could have been an emperor of China" (29). In addition, the original novel is told by one narrator (Mr Lockwood) who is recounting the details told to him by another narrator (Nelly Dean) and questions have been raised about their reliability. Did these things make you feel more comfortable about creating your own version of the story?

Kate Walker: There’s lot of justification for considering that Heathcliff is not English, that he might have a partly or totally foreign heritage. In fact, because he is so dark in appearance there is the possibility that he was black. And the latest actor to be cast as Heathcliff, James Howson, is black. Lockwood describes Heathcliff as: “a dark-skinned gipsy in aspect...” (Chapter 1) and Mr Linton says in Chapter 6:

Oho! I declare he is that strange acquisition my late neighbour made, in his journey to Liverpool—a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway.

And when he is first brought to Wuthering Heights, no one understands him:

yet when it was set on its feet, it only stared round, and repeated over and over again some gibberish that nobody could understand. (Chapter 4)

So there was plenty there to give him a different nationality.

Then there was the fact that Mr Earnshaw had found Heathcliff in Liverpool, a busy international port – and Heathcliff could have arrived there on any of the boats. I assumed that boats would arrive there from the west, from the Americas – and that was also where Heath could go to start his new life after he left High Farm. I also needed to explain his absence and his return as a wealthy man. No one says how Heathcliff made his money and in fact Emily Brontë didn’t really need to say how he came by it, but I did. There are suspicions that he was a gambler, or in the army – or even connected to the slave trade. The reference to America meant that I could use that, and send him back there to make his fortune. But I wanted something wilder, more elemental for Heath so South America worked better for me. It also gave me a chance to give him a surname that was as close to Heath Cliff as I could go!

Laura: Harlequin/Mills & Boon romances are short novels and having read the Mills & Boon guidelines on 'How to Write the Perfect Romance', in which it's stated that

I don't like secondary characters - use with caution! You're writing a romance, readers are interested in your hero and heroine so keep the focus on them.

I think it would be fair to say that a Mills & Boon editor would not respond to Nelly Dean's detailed account in the same way that Mr Lockwood did:

'Sit still, Mrs. Dean,' I cried, 'do sit still, another half hour! You've done just right to tell the story leisurely. That is the method I like; and you must finish in the same style. I am interested in every character you have mentioned, more or less. (Chapter 7)

Were there elements or aspects of Wuthering Heights which you'd have liked to include (or include in more detail) but which you had to cut out (or down)?

Kate Walker: Emily Brontë’s book is a far more lengthy and complicated story than the one I’ve written. I am only dealing with one small section of the whole book and focussing on one element – the Cathy/Heathcliff story and working it into a love story. I needed to concentrate on that. I also have to make it clear who is the hero, the heroine and what is the truth about their relationship. Like all the narrators in Wuthering Heights, Nelly Dean isn’t a trustworthy reporter, she’s partial and inclined to slant her narrative in a way that leaves questions unanswered and makes answers unreliable. As a result, obviously, I’ve had to cut and simplify, make sure that the focus stays on the hero and heroine and nowhere else.

One of the obvious things I had to do was to remove Edgar/Arthur from the scene, and to have his relationship with Kat come out in talk between her and Heath. Originally I had planned that Heath would flirt more with Isabella to make Kat jealous, but this didn’t work from the point of view of a man of integrity. I would have liked to work more on Heath’s relationship with Kat’s brother Joe, and Joe’s son Harry. In Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff’s relationship with Hareton is complicated and ambiguous – Hareton is his enemy’s son, the child of the man he hates, but he is also Cathy’s nephew – and constantly reminds him of the woman he has lost. Hareton is one of the few people who has feelings for Heathcliff, he is loyal to him and he weeps “in bitter earnest” (Chapter 34) when Heathcliff dies. I would have liked to show Heath work through the demons of his past with the man who had treated him so badly. But I was writing a romance and as you have quoted, the focus of a romance has to be on the hero and heroine, so that’s where my spotlight had to stay through the book.

Laura: Thanks very much for visiting Teach Me Tonight and answering my questions!
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The picture of Emily Brontë came from Wikipedia.

Reworking Classics: Powerful? Pure?

2011-09-17T09:30:00.000+01:00

Laura Vivanco

Liz McC writes that

Several years ago I taught a first-year Major Themes in Literature course I called “Transformations.” All the readings had transformations of various kinds in them, and I paired “classic” texts with later “transformations” by other writers. [...] A modern re-imagining can shine new light on a classic and vice versa, and the pairings help students find a way in to reading analytically. [...]

Taking on a beloved classic is an enterprise fraught with peril, and though Kate Hewitt says in an interview with CataRomance that she “leapt at the chance” to rewrite Emma for a Harlequin Presents series paying homage to romantic classics, she is also frank about the difficulties. The Matchmaker Bride didn’t work for me as well as The Man Who Could Never Love for two reasons: a) Austen’s tart, ironic narrative style isn’t a good match for Hewitt’s sweet sincerity (that sounds belittling, but I like that about Hewitt); b) Emma–and Austen’s Augustan restraint generally–isn’t a good fit for Harlequin Presents, a line characterized by angsty, over the top emotion. Moreover, although it ends with a slew of marriages, Emma is far less shaped by the plot conventions of romance than Pride and Prejudice or Persuasion. It’s a comedy of manners about the heroine’s education. Matchmaker Bride felt caught between the conflicting demands of its source and its Harlequin category.

Tomorrow I'll be posting an interview with Kate Walker about her contribution to the mini-seriesHewitt was contributing to. As Kate Walker has explained elsewhere, it's a

four book mini-series, The Powerful and the Pure. These books are by four different Modern authors, myself, Sharon Kendrick, Kate Hewitt, Cathy Williams, and the series description was on the ‘concept page’ in the books:

The Powerful and The Pure

When Beauty Tames the Brooding Beast

From Mr Darcy to Heathcliff, the best romantic heroes have always been tall, dark, and dangerously irresistible.