The
concept of location is a powerful one in popular romance studies,
driving several recent conferences in the field. For Romancing Academia
2025, we want to extend this idea further to approach the genre from
several angles in relation to the idea of ‘place.’ Place or setting is
crucial to the romance narrative in many ways – whether it is a small
town, a cabin in the mountains, a deserted island, or, on a broader
scale, cities, states and nations. The dynamic concept of ‘place’ is
equally useful to interrogate the place of the genre in institutions
related to book culture, including academia and the publishing industry.
In addition, as Catherine Roach notes, the “literary landscape, human
community, and online discussion world” of the romance genre are
together often described by readers and writers using the spatial
metaphor of “Romancelandia” – the genre itself is therefore also a place
(2016, p. 197). Through exploring these different interpretations –
place as setting, status, or genre itself – this symposium is aimed
towards mapping romance onto contemporary scholarship in book culture
practices and literary studies, and bridging industry practices and
scholarly engagement.
Proposed
papers or roundtables should fit under the broad umbrellas of place as
‘setting,’ ‘status’ and ‘genre,’ and could be related to (but are not
limited to):
“Romancelandia” and its different characteristics
Places as tropes (e.g., small town romances)
Clothing and textiles as a marker of place and time in romance novels
Food as a metaphor for place
Digital romance – virtual places and online spaces
Media (ebooks, comics, paperback, etc) and reading spaces
Modifications of the genre in different locations across the world
Romance studies in academia/literary studies/in relation to other disciplines
Publishing romance (or specific subgenres)
The place of romance in public libraries
We invite you to submit your 250-word abstracts and a brief bio by 16th May 2025 to romancingacademia@gmail.com.
Videos are now freely available of some of the events from last year's Popular Romance Fiction: The Literature of Hope conference, held at Yale University.
Johnson, Jacqueline E. (2024)
"Lusting out loud: racialized aurality, podcast intimacy, and the uses of thirst".Communication, Culture and Critique. Online First.[Excerpt and details here. As I mentioned over on BlueSky, the focus on "the expansive middle" reminded me of Athena Bellas and Jodi McAlister 's (non-paywalled) recent article on audio erotica. So I wondered if such a focus might have something to do with an audio experience? And/or a difference between
what readers/listeners seek from erotica vs. romance fiction? Jodi suggested it could be to do with the length of time available and that the episodes could be thought of as 'a little slice of life from what An Goris calls the "post-HEA"'.]
Spencer, L. (2024). '“Walk like a chameleon”: Reflecting on my teaching journey at a South African university'. Educare, (1), 192–215. https://doi.org/10.24834/educare.2024.1.1093 [Dr Lynda Gichanda Spencer, Associate Professor and Chair of the
Department of Literary Studies in English at Rhodes University, discussed her teaching of African romance fiction as part of a panel
at the IASPR 2020 conference. There are a couple of paragraphs about
her 2019 third-year elective course titled Global Chick-Lit or
Trans-Global Literature? Re-reading Contemporary Women’s Fiction in this online paper, discussing how she asked students to compare Harlequin Mills & Boon romances with romances by African publishers.]
From 16-18 August 2024 the Romance Writers of Australia will be holding their conference at Stamford Grand, Glenelg and, in collaboration with Flinders University, they're looking for romance scholars to join them on 16 August:
The
Degrees of Love Romance Research Hub at Flinders University, with the
support of Assemblage Centre for Creative Arts, is thrilled to host an
academic symposium on popular romance studies as part of RWAus’ 2024
conference. Featuring the latest research from romance academics, and
open to anyone with an enquiring mind who wishes to attend, this
symposium will showcase the latest romance scholarship. The symposium
will consider the role of tropes in all sub-genres of romance, focusing
on the power of the romance genre and its intersections with feminism,
gender, sexuality, generic forms and formulas, ideologies and more. When
experts in the field of popular romance studies bring their research
into the same room, new ideas ignite. This will be a day of fun,
excitement, learning and sharing - throwing an intellectual spotlight on
the role of tropes in the most read genre in the world.
We invite proposals for 20-minute papers, or 90-minute
panels or roundtables, on romance tropes and the intersections of tropes
with subgenres, gender, sexuality, race, ideologies, love and desire,
the body, power and more.
Conference on Love Studies, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Canary Islands), January 2-7, 2024
They're looking for papers about love:
We consider love in its broad meaning, including different modes and
types of love, and various contexts from those that inhibit to those
that facilitate the experience and expression of love. Among the
variations implied above are:
Love at the nature of humans and humanity, philosophy of love, good and bad sides of love
Familial love, maternal love, paternal love, the love of children for their parents
Love as interpersonal attachment, and pair-bonding love
Love, physical attraction, sex, and diversity of sexual love
Companionate, compassionate love, love for friends, and friendship
Diversity of polygamy and monogamy in love, polyamory, and open relationships
Rational, practical, pragmatic forms of love
Love focused on divine and supernatural entities, religious conceptions of love
Love as positive social connection, communal and ideological love
Para-social forms of love and sex
Love directed to oneself, self-love, and narcissism
Love for pets and inanimate beings (flowers, money, activities, etc.)
The biology and physiology of love
The various other types of love and relationships, including those at an intersection between them
Any kind of love is of interest for this conference.
The International Advisory Board has extended the deadline for
submission of proposals for presentations at the International
Conference on Love Studies, which will be held in Las Palmas de Gran
Canaria (Canary Islands) on January
2-7, 2024 (both in-person and virtual formats).
The 2023 Northeast Popular Culture Association (NEPCA) will host its
annual conference this fall as a virtual conference from Thursday,
October 12-Saturday, October 14. See https://nepca.blog/2023-annual-conference/
The conference includes a romance/popular romance fiction area, which has put out a call for papers:
Romance/Popular Romance Fiction Current Chair: Wendy Wagner, Johnson & Wales, Wendy.Wagner@jwu.edu
This area invites proposals relating to romance fiction and its
influence and adaptations in popular culture. Romance Writers of
America, the professional organization of romance authors, identifies
two specific features of romance fiction: a central love story, and an
emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending. Romance novels generate
$1B of sales each year, and the reach of the romance narrative permeates
a variety of popular culture texts, from movies and television to music
and comics. This area welcomes submissions from variety of disciplinary
perspectives. Topics may include:
History of the romance novel
Analysis of romance readers
The romance novel across cultures
Romance tropes
Politics and activism in the romance community
Film and television adaptations
Romance fandom and “shipping”
The economics of the romance novel industry
Portrayals of romance authors in popular culture
Controversies in the publication of romance novels
Romance book clubs
New media and romance novels
Library and archival collections of romance fiction
That's here (scroll down the page). Submissions are open until 11:59pm on Monday, August 14 (EST) and there are more details about how to submit a proposal etc here.
Popular Romance Fiction: the “Literature of Hope” is a conference event
occurring on Friday, September 8 - Saturday, September 9, 2023 at Yale
University. This interactive gathering brings bestselling romance
writers together with scholars, students, readers, and the public for
two days of conversation and events at Yale and in the New Haven
community about the nation’s most popular literary genre. Through
discussion panels, a romance writing workshop, documentary screening,
historical exhibition, Elm City LIT Fest collaboration, a special
keynote event, and more, we examine romance fiction in expansive ways
that move at and beyond its surface appearances, exploring its
political, material, racial, feminist, and religious histories and
manifestations. Confirmed speakers include Roxane Gay, Adriana Herrera,
Eloisa James, Beverly Jenkins, Julie Moody-Freeman, Sarah MacLean,
Radclyffe, and others.
The conference includes:
How to Write a Romance Novel Workshop with Adriana Herrera and Sarah MacLean
Love Between the Covers (2015) documentary screening followed by "talk-back with documentarian Laurie Kahn and writers from film Eloisa
James, Beverly Jenkins, and Radclyffe on writer experience, making the
film, romance as a literary vehicle of hope, and how Romancelandia has
changed since the film, with attention to class, race, sexuality,
gender, and more."
Book signing
“Popular Romance Fiction: the ‘Literature of Hope’ ” - Keynote conversation between Roxane Gay and Beverly Jenkins on
romance and the power and politics of hope.
The full programme and more details can be found here. One of the organisers says that "The program and website will be updated with more details in the coming weeks, so please check back in August for more exciting info."
On 17 September the Center for Black Diaspora at DePaul University is hosting
Black Romance: Past, Present, and Future
Moderator: Dr. Margo Hendricks
Four panelists:
Dr. Piper Huguley,
Dr. Katrina (Nicole) Jackson,
Tatianna Richardson,
Dr. Yakini Etheridge,
This round-table brings together romance writers, scholars, editors,
readers, and podcasters to discuss their views on the past, present, and
future of Black Romance in the United States.
Sponsoring Institutions:
Center for Black Diaspora, DePaul University
Center for Contemporary Literature and Culture, University of Birmingham
International Association for the Study of Popular Romance.
Call for Papers: Concepts in Popular Genre Fiction
Deakin University, 6-8 December 2021
Convenors: Dr Jodi McAlister and Dr Helen Young
This virtual symposium, to be held 6-8 December through Deakin
University as part of the Literature and its Readers research network,
seeks to open up different sorts of questions, in order to consider
other ways of examining, analysing, and utilising popular genre fiction.
Specifically, we seek papers exploring concepts, ideas, and motifs, and
the role that they play in popular genre/s.
The first of our keynote speakers will be Farah Mendlesohn (@effjayem). Farah is the author of several acclaimed books on popular genre fiction, including Rhetorics of Fantasy and Children’s Fantasy Literature: An Introduction. Our second keynote speaker will be Jayashree Kamble (@prof_romance). Jayashree is currently the vice-president of@IASPR and the author of Making Meaning in Popular Romance Fiction: An Epistemology. And finally, we will host a keynote panel by the research team from the Genre Worlds project, Lisa Fletcher (@lmfletcher72), Beth Driscoll (@Beth_driscoll) and Kim Wilkins. This fascinating project explores genre in 21st century Australian popular fiction.
Mary Lynne Nielsen interviewed veteran romance cover artist James Griffin about his work and changes in the industry. The interview can be found here and also at AAR.
KJ Charles wrote a post about obstacles in romance, illustrated with references to Alexis Hall's For Real:
But there’s a lot more obstacles than the obvious headliners.
Power imbalance is a big one. Where there’s any sort of
difference between the characters there’s probably some sort of power
imbalance, which can lead to uncertainty, insecurity, misunderstanding,
resentment. Obvious areas for power imbalance are gender-related
(including in queer relationships), and disparities in wealth, health,
professional status, class, sexual experience, age, perceived
attractiveness, perceived value as a person. It’s always worth thinking
about these.
(For an entire book about power imbalance–across age, wealth, education, status, sexual experience, and class–Alexis Hall’s For Real
traces a relationship between an older, authoritative, wealthy sub and a
young, less secure, broke dom. It’s a masterclass in power imbalances
going both ways, and the complexities of how they shift and seesaw.)
Programme for the 2020 Bowling Green conference is now available.
Our Guest of Honor for the conference will be Alyssa Cole. She is an
award-winning author of historical, contemporary, and sci-fi romance.
Her Civil War-set espionage romance An Extraordinary Union was the RT
Reviewers’ Choice Award’s Best Book of 2017 and the American Library
Association’s RUSA Best Romance for 2018, and A Princess in Theory was
one of the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2018.
One of the many people who'll be presenting papers is Christine Larson who recently had an article published about her research and the RWA crisis.
Some of her already-published work also discusses publishing and racism.
The Color of Romance (from Voices: The Shifting Contours of Communication Research.) Eds. Patricia Moy and Donald Mathesen. Peter Lang, 2019. (You might be able to download it from her website)
More coming soon: "She is currently writing a book on the 40-year history of romance writers’ professional networks."
K. J. Charles posted about the representation of non-English languages in English-language novels. Here's an excerpt:
Italicising serves as a nudge to the reader that they’re not expected to
recognise or understand a word. That act very much assumes who the
reader is. If you italicise all your Spanish in a book written about Mexicans, that rather suggests you don’t expect your book to be read by
Mexicans. It is othering—and in many cases that can look like saying,
“Those people are different from me and you, the writer and the reader.”
And finally, still on the topic of racism some more items which can't be added to the Romance Wiki bibliography because it's not around:
Adair, Joshua G., 2020. ‘“A Battlefield All Their Own”: Selling Women’s Fictions as Fact at Plantation Museums’. Museums, Sexuality, and Gender Activism. ed. Joshua G. Adair and Amy K. Levin. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. 239-251. [Excerpt]
Ali, Kecia, 2019. “Sacrifices, Sidekicks, and Scapegoats: Black Characters and White Stories in Nora Roberts’s Romances.” Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture 4.2: 149-168:
In several of the scores of romance novels she published between the 1980s and the early 2000s, bestselling American author Nora Roberts limns whiteness by deploying black characters as sacrifices or sidekicks. In her recent novels (2016–19), villainous white characters who express racist sentiments become scapegoats, obscuring racism’s broader structural and cultural dimensions. At a time when discrimination within romance publishing and award-giving has gained attention, it is vital to explore how the genre continues to center white readers and white identities, even while explicitly condemning racism.
Researching the Romance: Romance Across Boundaries
Bowling Green State University, Ohio
April 24-25, 2020
More about the Conference
Romance fiction is shaped by boundaries and rules- the expectations of
tropes and subgenres, the centrality of the love story, the requirement
of the happy ending. Authors and readers rely on the boundaries of
romance to help them write and read, yet also sometimes revel in their
subversion. Academics use those same boundaries to form their avenues of
inquiry into this vast genre. Taken together, the boundary lines
provide endless points of discussion and controversy for those who
produce and consume romance. This conference will provide a venue for
all of those interested in romance fiction- authors, academics, and
readers- to come together and discuss their interactions with the
genre’s boundaries.
Call for presentations:
We are seeking presentations of approximately 15-20 minutes in length.
The scope of the conference is deliberately broad in order to encourage
presenters to be creative and take interdisciplinary approaches.
Individual and panel presentations will be considered. Some examples of
potential topics include but are not limited to:
Romance tropes and how are they defined, enforced, and subverted
In-depth analysis of particular authors’ work
The history and growth of subgenres within popular romance fiction
The history of the Happily Ever After
Predictability and freedom within category romance
Authors’ approaches to research on time periods, subgenres, etc
How authors, readers and academics can occupy multiple identities within popular romance fiction
Romance novel covers across the decades and subgenres
Popular romance fiction around the world- how national borders influence the genre
How the traditional boundaries of romance impact self-publishing
Presentation proposals should consist of an abstract of no more than 250 words. The deadline for submissions is November 1, 2019.
The PCA/ACA conference is taking place this week and the programme for romance is here. I've tried to pick out the papers I think are focussed on romance novels and I've added links to what I think are pages about their authors (however, I can't guarantee the links are/will remain correct).
Mass Market Pornography: Romance Novels for Men are Different
Via Twitter: 'Jonathan Allan talks about vanilla sex and the "fantasy of the
ordinary", and links it to Ina Garten saying that you need "really good
vanilla" for baking' and 'I asked what it means to call this “ordinary” when its still so far from
real sex acts/bodies. Allan’s response touches on this sex as seeming
“achievable” which is intriguing me re. the porn/romance connection.
The paratextuality of category romance: the branding of short shelf life fiction
Via Twitter: @JodiMcA and @lmfletcher72
looked closely at the paratext of 43 category romances published by
M&B UK in August 2017 - these are "books that kiss the shelves
rather than linger on them".
New Adult Fiction: A feminist Reading of a New Genre
Josefine Smith
Via Twitter: Smith defines NA as 'romance about "emerging adults" ages 18-29, focusing on forming identity and transitioning into adulthood' and " notes that female protagonist of New Adult romance deals with coming if
age in a patriarchal culture dealing with the male gaze, madonna/whore
complex. Her ideal male partner is both strong /powerful and woke and
emotionally intelligent."
Black-Asian Swirl – Resisting Stereotypes and Promoting Fetish in American BWAM Romance Fiction
Via Twitter: "about Black Woman-Asian Men (BWAM or AMBW) romances and how the texts
reflect the BWAM movement objectives and resist white supremacy" and "Tension in BWAM fiction between resisting and succumbing to tropes, particularly beauty norms and colorism."
Via Twitter: the Project is "trying to ID which tropes are most popular w/romance readers over time" and "The most prevalent plot device found so far in RITA nominees = Previous relationship/second chance romances." There is more about this project on Peterson's website.
Where are all the Fun Books: Holdings of Popular Romance and Science Fiction Novels in Academic Libraries
Via Twitter: "she has found that uni
libraries in the Oberlin Group hold much more sff than romance" and "Sheehan's larger point is that libraries collect the academic criticism
on romance, but not the primary texts academics also need to study the
genre. What will be studied in 20 years, esp as public libraries turn
over their collections?"
Romance Novels & The Female Gaze: The Evolution of the Romance Genre’s Book Covers
Angela Hart
Via Twitter: "presenting her PhD work on romance novel covers. The research is based on LOTS of interview data!" "Some interesting findings in @writerahart's
interviews: 65% of romance readers preferred digital books and
electronic devices; average age of respondents was 38; purchases are
mostly online (Amazon dominant) but bookstores (chain, used, and local)
still there (33-38%)"
“A recipe for sugary-sweet erotica:” Consumption in Alexa Riley’s Novellas
Evvie Valiou
Via Twitter: "Evvie Valiou looks at the clash between body positivity and objectified
consumption in Curvy by Alexa Riley. The heroine is presented as a
positive fat woman, but is the object of the hero's consumption. Sex is
also heavily described in food terms."
“Doubt Creeps In”: Sarah MacLean and the Inverted Orpheus of One Good Earl Deserves a Lover.
Jessica Chadbourne
Via Twitter: "@JtheBookworm
on Sarah MacLean’s use of Orpheus myth with hero/subversion of Eurydice
role by heroine - interesting implications re: relations to myth,
narratives, role-modeling, & identity construction"
Her History, Her Romance: Evangeline Parsons Yazzie’s Naabeeho/Diné historical romance series
Via Twitter: "Hoorenman, discussing Evangeline Parsons Yazzie's Navajo romance novels,
notes that Native authors of genre fiction may depart from conventions
because those were often developed by white authors and may be
problematic or oppressive. Not genre ignorance."
Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime: Revenge in Sarah MacLean’s Rule of Scoundrels Series
Via Twitter: "@wilthepony concludes by identifying progress from liminal role of heroine to liminal role of hero & mythic power shift in @sarahmaclean ‘s novels: men cannot effectively revenge, but goddesses can."
An Articulation of Modern Indian Values in the Romance of Sandhya Sridhar
Via Twitter: "Sridhar’s publishing house had a stated goal of breaking away from the
Mills and Boon model to an Indian one with its own Indian romance
fantasy but perhaps her own books don’t depart as much from the rich
hero trope"
Rainbow nation in love. South African popular romance in Afrikaans and the Politics of Representation
Via Twitter: Martina Vitackova introduced these books [Sophia Kapp's Malansusters trilogy (2007, 2008)] as the reader favorites among popular romance in Afrikaans.
"This paper presents the results of a case study of the heroes of all ten
titles published to date by Ankara Press, “a new imprint bringing
African romance fiction into the bedrooms, offices and hearts of women
the world over” (“About Us”, AnkaraPress.com)." More details here and, via Twitter, "Burge notes that Ankara positions its heroes as explicitly opposed to a
western toxic masculinity but toxicity in African masculinity is
referenced too, so alpha is still present."
Love in the Time of the #MeToo movement
Teaching Paranormal Romance in 2018
Via Twitter: '@RomanceProf
on 19th C. American romance, [...] asks: "who is supposed to be happy at
the end of a romance?" (A: the couple, but also the reader) and what
happens if that is no longer true?' and " Looking at Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok (1824). Readers differ in experience of ending then (1824) and now (2019)" because it's "an early 19c American novel with a Native
American hero who nobly stands aside to allow the white heroine to
reintegrate into white society. This novel is a good example of how
the definition of a "happy ending" shifts over time." and "happy endings [...] are more complex & contingent (who gets to be
happy? what about shifting cultural definitions of happy?) than often
assumed."
The “Grandly and Inhospitably Strange World” of Heroines on the Autism Spectrum in Romance Fiction
Via Twitter: 'Wagner looking at Thomas’ Lady Sherlock series and Hoang's The Kissing
Quotient. Thinking about ways neurodivergent characters read as
“diversity” to some readers and reductive tokenism to others' and 'Wagner tracing ways that Kissing Quotient frames Stella’s discomfort
with touch not as a need to adapt to some neurotypical norm, but as a
conversation about consent' and 'Wagner unsure if Thomas means for us to read Charlotte Holmes as
neurodivergent, but finds key indicators in the series. Tracing ways the
series emphasizes world's need to adapt to Charlotte, not Charlotte’s
need to adapt/acclimatize.'
“Cockygate”: Trademark Bullying, Romance Novels and Intellectual Property
Via Twitter: "@dfralston on #Cockygate which, alongside #ritassowhite is one of the [burning] topics in the Anglophone romance world right now", " @dfralston's point is that Hopkins (#Cockygate author) is using trademark in a way that it is not meant to be used" and "In #cockygate
Hopkins uses legal rhetoric of cease and desist letters to silence
other authors, loops them into the automated reporting structures
implemented by platforms to protect corporate IP."
“Welfare Reform, Romance, and a Black Love Ethic for the 1990’s”
Via Twitter: 'The first panel asks: what's race got to do with it? (Spoiler: A LOT).
First speaker is Julie Moody Freeman who is talking about "lift as we
climb" (Angela Davis) in Felicia Mason's romantic fiction.'
(Re)imagined Romance: intersections of cultural memory, media representation and the perpetuation of repressive ideologies
Tania de Sostoa-McCue
Via Twitter: 'Sostoa-McCue interested in disconnect between romance community,
industry, and public which leads to the erasure of marginalized peoples' because 'Representations of romance claiming to “help” romance or reframe it
often do this in ways that reify what they claim to be working against.
Tracing problem through media coverage of romance (publics) and certain
reader responses (counter publics)'. Specifically: 'Sostoa-McCue turning to romance scholarship. Thinking of ways pop-rom
studies, in working to value romance lit, maybe falling into similar
trap where they ignore romance counterpublics and privilege mainstream
romance' and 're. pop-romance scholarship "I know we’re all trying to do our best but I felt really erased by my own research"'
“Love is (Color) Blind: Citizenship and Belonging in 21st Century Historical Romance Fiction”
Via Twitter: "@FeistyHeroine
interested in anxieties about citizenship in age of neoliberalism via
Duran’s Duke of Shadows and Romain’s Secrets of a Scandalous Heiress" and "Citizenship under neoliberalism = proving yourself effective/successful within capitalism" and "The state is prominent throughout 2 books, until conclusions where it
disappears. One book seems to question if state is possible, other
replaces with capitalism. Seem to suggest citizenship is
precarious/unobtainable."
Love to Teach You: Pedagogical Reflections on Alisha Rai (Hate to Love You) and Alyssa Cole (An Extraordinary Union)
Via Twitter: "Jessica Miller [...] is taking us into aesthetic experience, asking: what makes good romance novels good?" and "Miller outlines common objections to romance and points out how they're
over-simplifying and not helpful: it's just porn; it's formulaic; it's
badly written; it's conservative."
Idyllic Escapes and Ideal Theory: What Romance Novel Settings Can Tell Us About What’s Wrong With The Real World
Matthew Hoffman and Sara Kolmes
Via Twitter: "Matthew Hoffman and Sara Kolmes [...] are focusing on the idyllic settings
of romance, arguing that these highlight things that make the HEA
harder in real life" because "idealized escapist settings in romance (isolated castles, islands, etc)
create the conditions for HEA by shutting out systematic problems and
creating space, which then can prompt a critique of those systematic
problems" and "Unrealistic or escapist romance can prompt readers to ask what is being
excluded or escaped from: financial worries? Societal oppression?
Something else?"
Engaged, but Not Enfranchised: Political Women in the novels of Rose Lerner
Via Twitter: "@DameMystery
Learner’s novels reflect contemporary understandings re. the ways women
and girls interact with politics outside of the voting process" and "center community/networks in their political discourse, balancing this with individual identity/priorities."
Swooning Maidens, Heroic Saviors: How Fictional Romantic Archetypes Engage with Popular Notions of Love
Ashley Gwen Hay and Hannah Shows
Via Twitter: "Interested in invisible work, influence, agency present in women’s lives."
In transports – the negotiation of pleasure and the construction of authority in Jane Eyre fan fiction
Via Twitter: "@LucySheerman
is making an argument about the spaces of cars as contested in gender
terms in Jane Eyre fan fiction by Betty Neels, Penny Jordan, and others" but "to clarify, @LucySheerman
isn’t applying fic to texts that would necessarily consider themselves
fic. These are published romance novels that she links to Eyre and reads
as fanfic."
The Agon-y and the Ecstasy: Heroic Confrontation in Romance Novels
Via Twitter: "@jayu77[...] is reading agon (from classical Greek meaning a struggle or conflict) in romance novels" and "@jayu77
is interested in ways romance novels use agón to play out conflict and
desire, wants to track the lexicon and changes over time" and suggests "More recent novels reduce hero’s attacks on heroines, but also expand the agon backwards into characters’ history."
Conference of the Popular Culture Association (PCA/ACA)
17-20 April 2019 – Washington, DC
In response to the 2019 conference’s location in Washington, DC, the
US capital, this year’s romance area will foreground the topic of
popular romance and politics. Romance has arguably always been
political, but recent years have seen political engagement in romantic
spaces become more explicit.
We encourage you to define “politics” broadly, not simply as party
politics in a particular national or regional arena, but also as the
ways that power dynamics among social groups are reproduced or
challenged, naturalized or destabilized, along such faultlines as
gender, sexuality, race, nationality, religion, and class, among others.
In the world of romance, such politics often has to do with inclusion
and representation. Consider the pins Alisha Rai distributed at a
recent author event, which proclaimed, “HEA belongs to everyone.”
If we think about the romance “genre world” as a “social and
industrial complex in which people work together to create and circulate
specific types of texts” that functions at the industrial, social, and
textual level (Fletcher, Driscoll and Wilkins 2018), we can see everyday
politics in action at every level: Which authors and works get
published? Who gets taught in college classrooms? Who gets awards?
Paper topics on this special theme might include the following:
The politics of the popular romance novel, romantic comedy, or any medium involving romance
The multicultural romance as antiracist pedagogy
M/M romance and the straight female readership/viewership/etc
Racial segregation in the romance industry
Politicians, activists, and elections in popular romance
The academic politics of studying popular romance
Party politics and military romance
Romance as resistance and romance writers/creators as activists
Politics within the RWA or other writers’, creators’, or makers’ organisations
Pushing historical romance beyond the straight, white, and narrow
Making consent hot
The dialogues between romance and specific social movements, such as #metoo
Mapping politics among romance readers, viewers, consumers, etc
The politics of publication and the current industrial status quo
Romantic love in a time of political upheaval
If you are sick of politics, or simply want to pursue your own
intellectual passion, you are very welcome to do so. The Romance area
invites any theoretical or (inter)disciplinary approach to any topic
related to romance. We would like to emphasise that you do not need to
write about romance novels to participate in this area (although that is
obviously welcome!): the Romance area is open to engagements with all
forms of media and culture that are concerned with romance, including,
but not limited to, the following: art; literature; philosophy; radio;
film; television; comics and graphic novels; videos, webzines and other
online storytelling.
We are deeply interested in popular romance both within and outside
of mainstream popular culture, now or in the past, anywhere in the
world. Scholars, romance writers, romance readers/viewers, and any
combination of the three are welcome: you do not need to be an academic
to be part of the Romance area.
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. In
addition, if you wish to organise a roundtable, special session, or a
film screening, please contact the Area Chairs, Jodi McAlister and
Heather Schell.
that Kathleen Kollman, a Ph.D. student in American Culture Studies, has
been named as the inaugural recipient of The Roberta Gellis Memorial
Paper Award. Kollman’s paper, titled “Contemporary Paranormal Romance:
Theories and Development of the Genre’s Feminism (Or Lack Thereof)” was
written for a seminar on romance novels taught in the Spring 2018
semester by Dr. Kristin Rudisill in the Department of Popular Culture,
and was also presented at the Researching the Romance conference
sponsored by the Library in April 2018.
An abstract of the paper and a link to download it as a pdf are available here.
Romantic E
-
Scapes: Popular Romance in the Digital Age
(University of the Balearic Islands, Palma de Mallorca)
9
-
11 July 2018
The conference programme can be found here. Since (a) the programme's available, (b) there are a lot of papers and (c) I don't have any additional details about them, I'll just list a selection of the ones which seem as though they could be about romance as defined by the RWA (though they might not be).
Details are available for the PopCAANZ conference which is currently taking place at Auckland University of Technology. This year there are lots of papers on romance and I'll include excerpts from their abstracts. The conference continues tomorrow, and I'll add links to Twitter threads as they appear.
popular romance fiction regularly depicts feminist social issues. In this sense, the
concept of Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’ applies
—
‘this partly unconscious “taking in” of rules,
values and dispositions...’ (Webb, Schirato, & Dahanher, 2002, p. 44). Contemporary
popular
romance novels are set in the everyday context and as such cannot but help portray the
world in which the authors and their characters exist, including social issues present in the
mind of the author, whether consciously or unconsciously. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s
and since, the woman’s movement has been politically active and
concepts of feminism
have entered into everyday discourse. [...] research indicates that writers
as well as readers of popular romance fiction have no issue reconciling their concept of
feminism with writing and reading in the genre.
Lucy Sheerman - “Exempt from all affection and from all
contempt”: necessary evil and the figure of
the Byronic hero in romance novels
Two hundred
years since his first appearance in print, the Byronic anti-hero
-
‘that man of
loneliness and mystery, / Scarce seen to smile, and seldom heard to sigh’
-
is a figure who
continues to define representations of the hero in romance novels.
The influence of
this angry and defiant fallen angel on the writing of the Brontës has been
well documented. In my paper I will consider four Governess novels, published by Mills &
Boon in 2016 as a homage to Charlotte Brontë’s iconic romance novel
Jane Eyre, and the
Byronic traces of the heroes who feature in them.
The romance novel’s continued preoccupation with the Byronic anti-hero is central to the
genre’s staged encounters with otherness and its exploration of emotional affect. The
literary device of the anti-hero shaped the development of romance tropes such as plot,
conflict and point of view, and also (as I will argue) gave rise to the Byronic anti-heroine.
Kathrina Haji Mohd Daud -
Cross-cultural romance, feminism and
femininity in Southeast Asian fiction
In this paper, I explore how the
negotiation of cross-cultural romance also elicits a particular Southeast Asian feminism in
three texts: Zen Cho’s
The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo
(2012, Malaysian), Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan’s
Sarong Party Girls
(2016, Singaporean) and Ayisha Malik’s
Jewel
(2017, Bruneian). [...] I argue in this paper that these novels construct a feminist femininity
that
allows the heroines to remain connected to and sanctioned by their individually patriarchal
heritages, while also allowing them to critique and expand existing expectations of feminine
identity through the negotiation of cross-cultural relationships.
Ellen Carter - What’s in a romance hero/ine’s name? a
corpus study of gay and straight romance
character names
The first names parents give to their female versus male children have different
phonological (sound) characteristics. My work extends this from the real to the fictional
world, studying names given by authors to their romance heroes
–
gay and straight
–
as well
as to straight heroines. My corpus contains 2,536 contemporary romance novels: 1,668 with
a male/female pairing and 868 with a male/male couple, resulting in 3,404 heroes (1,668
straight; 1,736 gay) and 1,668 (straight) heroines. My results demonstrate that the
phonological characteristics of names given to gay heroes are statistically significantly less
masculine/more feminine than the names of straight heroes. Given that gay romance is a
fast-growing
romance sub-genre predominantly written and read by straight women, I
explore possible cultural implications of this finding and how it may feed stereotypes and
shape perceptions within (straight and queer) societies.
Carter: striking result - male characters much more likely to have names with /k/ sounds, especially male characters in M/F romance. #popcaanz18
Eden French - Loving invisible bodies: transgender
representation in popular romance
The few novels that do feature trans heroines and heroes
—
niche
even in small
LGBTQ presses
—
are hailed as daring simply for permitting trans protagonists
to be plausible subjects of love and desire. [...] romance’s historically
heteronormative politics of gender has constrained writers and even scholars from treating
transgender themes; mainstream discussion around trans bodies still manifests routinely in
fetishistic and dehumanising ways. Moreover questions of embodiment (for example, the
politics of gender-affirming surgery) remain contested even in the trans community.
Speaking as a scholar and writer, I will discuss existing examples of trans embodiment in
romance, and outline possible reconciliations for the challenge of bringing trans love into
the mainstream.
French has found disclaimers and disavowals in some of her corpus which make it clear that the assumed readership is entirely cis. #popcaanz18
Francesca Pierini
- “He looks like he’s stepped out of a
painting”: The idealization and
appropriation of Italian timelessness
through the experience of romantic love
Marina Fiorato’s
The Glassblower of Murano
(2008) tells the story of Eleonora, a young
woman who travels to Venice in search of her genealogical past and existential roots.
Coming from London, Eleonora incarnates a “modern” outlook on what she assumes to be
the timeless life and culture of Venice.
At one point in the novel, admiring the old houses on
the Canal Grande, Eleonora is “on fire with enthusiasm for this culture where the houses
and the people kept their genetic essence so pure for millennia that they look the same now
as in the Renaissance” (2008, 15). [...] Within narratives centred on this notion, “falling in love in Italy”
occasions the appropriation of a privileged relation with history and the past, often
contrasted with the displacement and rootlessness that seem to characterize the modern
places, people and lifestyles of England and North America. Through a discussion of
two
Anglo-American historical popular novels set in Italy, this paper proposes an exploration of
the notion of romantic love as a force reconnecting displaced and fragmented souls with a
supposedly timeless and unbroken society; a society perceived as holding a privileged
relation with ancient traditions and the past.
Pierini has a paper freely available online which is quite similar, though lacking the focus on romantic love.
Maria Ramos-Garcia - This is not a romance novel but a telenovela”: metafiction
and bilingualism in Jane the Virgin
Jane the Virgin, based on a Venezuelan telenovela, is at the same time a parody and an
homage to the popular Latin American
television genre. Among the many unusual features
that contribute to the originality and success of this TV series are an omniscient narrator, a
metafictional discourse, a bilingual and bicultural setting and an unapologetic, unabashed,
and explicit use and abuse of the conventions of the soap-opera, with a touch of Latin
American magical realism. [...] This paper will
provide an overview of
the series, concentrating both on the Latino socio-cultural aspects that rarely make it into
mainstream US television, and on the metafictional discussions of the telenovela and the
romance novel
—
both as genres and as philosophies of love
—
that permeate the narrative.
Angela Hart - Combating the romance genre stigma: reading romance in
the digital age
Avid readers of the romance genre can find their voices in the online sphere using social
media platforms such as Twitter, utilizing the hashtags #amreadingromance and
#romancelandia. Romance readers utilize the technological affordances of the platform to
form groups, post about novels, and find relevant information on their specific genre. By
using anonymous user login information,
unidentifiable profile pictures, and unique
hashtags, romance readers are turning to Twitter.
Jodi McAlister
- Not quite YA, not yet adult: the short
but complex history of
“New Adult” fiction
This paper will trace the history of the new adult genre category, using the notion of the
“genre world,” as theorised by Lisa Fletcher, Beth Driscoll, and Kim Wilkins (2018). [...] this paper will explore the generic roots of new adult fiction in young adult
fiction, popular romance fiction, and fan fiction, and how these parent genres have given
shape to popular forms and structures of the new adult category. It will provide a much-needed scholarly framework for understanding this emergent genre category, its gradual
formation, and its complex place at the borders of several different genre worlds.
Eric Selinger - Disenchantment and its discontents: Weber, Illouz, and
popular romance
fiction
Modernity and romantic love make uncomfortable bedfellows. As Max Weber explains,
modernity is marked by “disenchantment,” not just of the natural world, but also of the
inner life and of interpersonal relations. Building on Weber, Eva Illouz argues that we now
live in an “ironic structure of romantic feeling, which marks the move from an ‘enchanted’
to a disenchanted cultural definition of love” (Why Love Hurts). This talk will look at how
several contemporary authors negotiate and resist “disenchantment.”
Of particular interest
will be Ayisha Malik’s
Sofia Khan is Not Obliged
and
The Other Side of Happiness, a pair of
“hijabi chick-lit” novels that take both sides in this great debate, Courtney Milan’s
Hold Me,
which casts a cool, modern eye on romantic love without yielding to the irony that Illouz
describes, and/or Alexis Hall’s
Glitterland, which deploys religious discourse to redeem
both love and popular media culture.
This paper is my first effort at thinking through several issues recurrent in the subgenre of
the romance police procedural: the configuration of the spaces of home, homeland and
nation as domestic territories, besieged not by a foreign but a home grown threat that
violates the integrity of the boundaries between private and public, interior and exterior;
the role of individual trauma as a mark of the vulnerability of the self and the foundation of
an affective investment in the protection of national territory; the "Americanness" of the
values and practices that govern social dynamics in the workplace, the self-chosen family
and the couple. National character is defined in opposition to the rendering of the
criminalised enemy and, together with collective, institutional agency and cooperation, is
also the best safeguard against social disorder. Eventually I intend to show that this
romance subgenre mediates and manages social fears and anxieties by highlighting the
strengths of a systemic framework and ignoring the negative aspects of surveillance: anxiety
and fear lie at the heart of romantic relationships and the novels offer a means of managing
them with the emotional investment in family and trust in law enforcement.
Kecia Ali - Writing while white: black martyrs as “Magical Negroes” in
Nora Roberts’ novels
Roberts’ heroes and heroines are nearly always white; occasional
Black characters are typically what Ikard (2017:94) describes as “magical negroes ... whose
raison d’être in white redemption narratives is to support/heal/enlighten/inspire the white
character(s) in crisis.” This paper explores four Roberts’ novels
in which the violent murder
of a Black character serves as the catalyst for vital emotional developments between a
white couple or among a team of white characters [...] the single-title adventure romance
Hot Ice
(1987), the category romance
Convincing Alex
(1994), the stand-alone mystical
romance
Three Fates
(2002), and
Morrigan’s Cross
(2006), the first installment of a
paranormal romance trilogy.
The IASPR 2018 conference now has its programme online but prior to that appearing there was a lot of very thorough tweeting by a number of attendees, using #iaspr18. Since Kat (@BookThingo) has really comprehensive threads, I've used the threadreaderapp to bundle her tweets together and I'm linking to them below.
Session 1 - Romancing Australia, with papers by Amy T. Matthews and Amy Mead (Flinders University), Kate Cuthbert and Jodi McAlister (Deakin University) SEE THREAD
There's more about changes affecting cover art, as discussed by Kate Cuthbert, here, from Claire Parnell via the @PopFicDoctors: Coverart and here's a podcast interview with Jodi McAlister in which she discusses her paper: Podcast. In addition, Renée Dahlia has written a blog post about the session.
Session 2 - Gender and Sexuality, with papers by Ellen Carter (University of Strasbourg), Christina Vogels (AUT New Zealand) and Andrea Anne Trinidad (Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines) SEE THREAD
Renée Dahlia's written a blog post about this session.
Here's a podcast from New Zealand Radio with Christina Vogels about her PhD thesis, titled It's a masculinity sort of thing: Young men talk about the rules of (hetero)romantic relationships.
Session 3 - Places and Spaces of Love, with papers by Kecia Ali (Boston University), Jacqueline Jones (LaGuardia CC, City University of New York) and Vassiliki Veros (University of Technology, Sydney) SEE THREAD
A similar presentation by Vassiliki Veros on "Exploring library metadata and how it can marginalise romance fiction" is up on YouTube.
Session 4 - Keynote Panel on “Romancing Popular Fiction Studies: A Theory of Genre Worlds” by Beth Driscoll (University of Melbourne), Lisa Fletcher (University of Tasmania) and Kim Wilkins (University of Queensland) SEE THREAD and, from Jodi McAlister, with more graphics: See thread
There's also a podcast recorded with the presenters in advance of this panel: Podcast
Session 5 - History and Romance, with papers by Stephanie Russo (Macquarie University), Jennifer Wallace and Francesca Pierini (Academia Sinica, Taiwan).
Kat had to miss most of this session, so the thread is by Jodi McAlister: SEE THREAD
Philippa B's summary of Stephanie Russo's paper on "Georgette Heyer’s Unruly Eighteenth Century" can be found here.
Phillipa B's summary of Pierini's presentation about "Italian timelessness" can be found here.
Jennifer Wallace writes romance as Jennifer Hallock and she's put her paper up on her website in two parts. Part one looks at how the bestsellers in historical romance are
disproportionately: (1) set in Great Britain; (2) overpopulated with
nobles; and (3) selective in their historical accuracy. Part two looks at how the aggregate impact of these chronotopes can be
harmful to our understanding of history, to the romance market as a
whole, and particularly to authors of diverse books. For links to more graphics and a way to help Jennifer crowdsource historical romances which differ from the chronotope she identified, go here and scroll to the end of the post.
Phillipa B's summary of Jennifer Wallace's "History Ever After: Fabricated historical chronotopes in romance genre fictions" can be found here.
Session 6 - Power and Patriarchy, with papers by Heather Schell (George Washington University), Nattie Golubov (Centro de Investigaciones sobre América del Norte, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), Therese Dryden (University of Newcastle) and Jayashree Kamblé (LaGuardia CC, City University of New York) SEE THREAD
Philippa B's post about Heather Schell's "The Soft Power of Popular Romance" can be found here.
Philippa B's post about Nattie Golubov's "Dangerous loves endangered: nationalism, violence and territoralization in US paramilitary romance fiction" is here.
Philippa B's summary of Therese Dryden/Michelle Douglas's "The Single Mother and the Law: Romance novels making room for female voices in patriarchal spaces" is here.
And details of Jayashree Kamblé's “One of the Guys? Eve Dallas as a Masculine Worker Heroine in J.D. Robb’s In Death series", also by Philippa B.
Session 7 - 19th Century Legacies, with papers by Sarah Ficke (Marymount University), Steven Gil and Lucy Sheerman SEE THREAD
See Renée Dahlia's blog post about the session.
Details here about Sarah Ficke's “House, Home, and Husband in Historical Romance Fiction", from Philippa B.
Steven Gil's "Beloved Monstrosity: Romance and Romanticism in Frankenstein" has been summarised by Philippa B.
Philippa B has summarised Lucy Sheerman's “Reader, I mirrored him: the recasting of romance tropes in Jane Eyre fanfiction" here.
Session 8 - Muslim and Middle Eastern Romance, with papers by Kathrina Daud (University of Brunei), Claire Parnell (University of Melbourne), Javaria Farooqui (University of Tasmania) and Amy Burge (University of Birmingham) SEE THREAD
See Renée Dahlia's blog post about the session.
Philippa B's posted about Kathrina Daud's "Muslims reading romance: Bruneian considerations of “Halal” and romance novels" here.
The abstract of Claire Parnell's “Reading and Writing Muslim Romance Online” and notes on the session by Philippa B can be found here.
Philippa B's post on Javaria Farooqui's “The Kitchen and Beyond: Romantic Chronotope of Pakistani Popular Fiction" is here.
Amy Burge's “Girls of Riyadh and Desperate in Dubai: Reading and writing romance in the Middle East" is summarised here by Philippa B.
Session 9 - Romancing Chinese Worlds, with papers by Fang-Mei Lin (National Taiwan Normal University), Huike Wen (Willamette University), Jin Feng (Grinnell College) and Erin S. Young (SUNY Empire State College) SEE THREAD (by Jodi McAlister)
See Renée Dahlia's blog post about the session.
The abstract of Huike Wen's “On the Way to a Better Life: Countryside themed romance in recent Chinese Television" and some additional comments from the paper are provided by Philippa B here.
Philippa B also provides these for Jin Feng's “Life Is Elsewhere: The Economy of Food and Sex in Chinese Web Romance”
and for “Romance in Chinatown: The Love Stories of Edith Maude Eaton” by Erin S. Young.
Session 10 - South/South-East Asian Romance Communities with a paper by Meghna Bohidar (University of Delhi)
Bohidar: young romantic couples are less concerned with caste and religious differences, however they still shape subjectivity e.g. through taste. #IASPR18pic.twitter.com/QrvvM5tZFt
For those who can't read the text in that photo, it contains a definition of an important term used in Bohidar's paper: "Habitus is a set of microbehaviors consisting of a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions that are unconsciously ingrained based on one's class position"
SEE THREAD and Philippa B's summary of Meghna Bohidar's “Negotiating Romantic Love in India: Family, Public Space, and Popular Cinema"
The session then moved on to Kat Mayo's interview of/conversation with Mina V. Esguerra
Session 11 - Subversions of Race, Culture and History with papers by Eric Murphy Selinger (DePaul University), Mallory Jagodzinski (Indiana University South Bend) and Johanna Hoorenman (Utrecht University) SEE THREAD and, from Jodi McAlister, A SUPPLEMENTARY THREAD
The abstract of, supplemented by notes by Philippa B on, Eric Murphy Selinger's “The Wild Heart of the Continent: Love and Place in Sherry Thomas’s Silk Road Romance Novels”
The same, but for Mallory Jagodzinski's “Love is (Color) Blind: Race, Belonging, and Nation in 21st Century Historical Romance Fiction" is here.
Again, an abstract followed by comments by Philippa B, this time on “‘You stayed’: Love, law and the reservation in Jenna Kernan’s Apache Protectors series" by Johanna Hoorenman.
Session 12 - Love in Other Worlds with papers by Donna Hanson (University of Canberra), María T. Ramos-García (South Dakota State University), Athena Bellas (University of Melbourne) and Kristin Noone (Irvine Valley College) SEE THREAD and coverage of the FINAL PAPERS in this thread by Jodi McAlister.
Philippa B's post about Donna Hanson's “Love in Outer Space: Science fiction romance
—
the ideal place to explore gender and
love” can be found here.
María T. Ramos-García's “Representations of Otherness in Paranormal Romance: Nalini Singh and J.R. Ward” is summarised by Philippa B here.
I've now come across a couple of reports on the recent Georgette Heyer conference. Sophie Weston mentions that
A terrific paper from Vanda Wilcox made
the point that, however precise Heyer’s grasp of strategic issues at
Waterloo might have been, her officers “embody World War I values and
leadership style”. At the same time Heyer’s other ranks (gorgeous Gideon
Ware’s straight-talking soldier servant, for instance) are basically
WWI Tommies in red coats, rather than Wellington’s rapists and
pillagers. Convinced me completely.
Her full report can be found here. The evening discussion session is described here by Nicola Cornick.
On 29 June, at the Gendered Emotions in History conference held at the University of Sheffield there was a paper on romance, presented by:
Agnes Arnold-Forster (QMUL) - Gender, Emotions, and Professional Identity in Twentieth Century Medical Mills and Boon Novels
The EUPOP2018 conference will be held from July 24th – 26th, 2018. One of the keynote speeches is by
Professor Petr A. Bilek (Charles University, Prague)
Distant Encounters of the Third Kind: Why Is Popular Culture Not Popular within Central European University Curricula?
