Censored and Scorned Books, Nora Roberts, Furry Protagonists and New Publications

I'm not keen on the use of the word "spat" here, as I think it trivialises what's going on, but the news itself is of interest to Romancelandia:

Romance novelist Nora Roberts donated $50,000 Sunday to help keep the doors open at a Michigan library that was defunded in early August in a spat over LGBTQ-themed books. (Bridge Michigan)

Note that, given how prolific and popular Nora Roberts is, "Patmos Library, serving a township of 10,000 people, has 144 Nora Roberts books in its collection, compared to about 90 total books with LGBTQ themes."

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Turning from censored books to ones with low status, Vassiliki Veros has written a very personal reflection, drawing on her family history, about the importance of

the uncatalogued, the unwritten metadata of popular romance fiction [...] romance fiction collections that remain undocumented, unregistered, whose transtextual elements have been obfuscated or not fully realised—those works that remain separate, independent, successful without institutional engagement and recognition. (The Aleph Review)

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In the latest episode of the Shelf Love Podcast

Dr. Nicola Welsh-Burke, a scholar of fairy tales and romance, is here to discuss hot wolf boys, brooding Byronic figures, pseudomarriage and pseudovirginity, hot villain discourse, and why young women need beastly men to unlock their sexuality.

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And now on to the new publications:

Allan, Jonathan A. (2022). "One Sexy Daddy: Desirable Dad 'Bods' and the Popular Romance Novel." Fashionable Masculinities: Queers, Pimp Daddies, and Lumbersexuals, Ed. Vicki Karaminas, Adam Geczy and Pamela Church Gibson. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. 83-??. [Excerpt]

Aravind, G. S. Dwivedi, Laxmi Dhar (2021). "The Representation of Female Characters in the Romances of Hawthorne: A Comparison with the Popular Romance Fiction of America in the Twentieth Century." International Journal of Mechanical Engineering 6.3:1703-1706. [I'm not sure how this was published in a journal on this topic!]

Hallett, Hilary A. (2022). Inventing the It Girl: How Elinor Glyn Created the Modern Romance and Conquered Early Hollywood. Liveright Publishing Corporation. [Excerpt here. The prologue of the book makes a somewhat less sweeping claim about Glyn's relationship with the romance genre than the title does. Which, given that her most famous novel does not have an HEA, is probably for the best.]

Larson, Christine (2022). "Streaming books: confluencers, Kindle Unlimited and the platform imaginary." Communication, Culture and Critique. [Abstract]

Priyatna, Aquarini and Sri Rijati Wardiani (2022). "Naturalization and Romanticization of Violence in Indonesian Teen Lit Jingga Series by Esti Kinasih," Journal of International Women's Studies 24.5.

New Publications: an around the world edition

Farooqui, Javaria (2022). "Romance, Austen, and English-Medium Schooling in Pakistan " Language, Education, and Identity: Medium in South Asia. Ed. Chaise LaDousa, Christina P. Davis. Routledge. [Excerpt available via Google Books.]

Izharuddin, Alicia (2021). “Reading the Digital Muslim Romance.” CyberOrient 15.1: 146-171.

Kołodziej, Gaja (2021). "Unforgettably in love: uses of the amnesia trope in contemporary romance." PhD thesis in creative writing, Massey University. [Embargoed until 2023 but the abstract is available.]

Leetsch, Jennifer (2021). Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women’s Writing: Making Love, Making Worlds. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. [See the chapter on "Routes of Desire: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie" (details here).]

Long, Eileen M. (2021). Modern Love: Reading, Writing, and Publishing the Romance Novel. Master's Thesis, Purdue University.

Mäkelä, Veera (2021). "Reading Response in Mary Balogh: A Critical Engagement." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 10.

Ngoshi, Hazel Tafadzwa (2021). "Repression, Literary Dissent and the Paradox of Censorship in Zimbabwe." Journal of Southern African Studies. Online first. [Abstract and excerpt here.]

Sinha, Mona (2022). "Reading Mills and Boon in India From the Post-Colonial to the Millennial Experience." Indian Popular Fiction: Redefining the Canon, ed. Gitanjali Chawla and Sangeeta Mittal. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Sujaya, I. M., Suarka, I. N., & Sudewa, I. K. (2021). "Representation of Balinese Exoticism: Analysis of Inter-ethnic Relations Novels in Pre-independence Period." The International Journal of Language and Cultural (TIJOLAC), 3(2), 46–56.

Zibrak, Arielle (2021). Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures. New York: New York University Press. [The first chapter is about bodice-rippers, shame/guilt and "the dark hero." Excerpt available via Google Books.]

Congratulations and Recent Publications

First of all, I'd like to congratulate the 2020 winners of the RWA Academic Research Grant. The

RWA Academic Grant Committee has recommended and the RWA Board of Directors has approved Dr. Julie E. Moody-Freeman, an Associate Professor in African and Black Diaspora Studies at DePaul University, and Hannah E. Scupham, a doctoral student in Literature at the University of Kansas, as recipients of the 2021 RWA Academic Research Grant. 

and here are more details about the research for which they've received the grants:

‘Lift as We Climb’: Black Romance Writers, Social Justice, and Institution Building, Dr. Julie E. Moody-Freeman

Grant funds will be used to aid in her research that will examine black writers’ representations of racial uplift in which their romantic plots and produce one season of the Black Romance Podcast, which documents the history of the production and publication of Black Romance through Dr. Moody-Freeman’s conversations with writers, editors, journalists, and scholars.

 

Sensual Politics: Modern Romance Novel Reading and Reimagination of the Victorian Past, Hannah E. Scupham

Grant funds will be used to fund dissertation research. Scupham’s work focuses on how contemporary popular romance novels set in the nineteenth-century century seek to challenge and change modern readers’ imaginations of the nineteenth-century, specifically on issues of gender, sexuality, and race.

Here are some recent publications, one of which, by Caroline Duvezin-Caubet, touches on the same area of research as Scupham's, and it's free to read online.

Duvezin-Caubet, Caroline, 2020. "Gaily Ever After: Neo-Victorian M/M Genre Romance for the Twenty-First Century." Neo-Victorian Studies 13.1: 242-269.

Intan, Tania, 2020. "Formula Romance Dalam Perfect Romance Karya Indah Hanaco: Kajian Sastra Feminis." Alayasastra 16.2: 301-316. [More details here.]

Murias, Rosana, 2021. "In Grey and Pink: The Image of the Bride through the Spanish Postwar Novela Rosa." The Bride in the Cultural Imagination: Screen, Stage, and Literary Productions. Ed. Jo Parnell. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books. 17-34. [More details here.]

New to the Wiki: Around the World with Romance

Laura Vivanco

This is a collection of recent items in the media, journal articles and details of two new books on popular romance fiction.

 

Chandra, Elizabeth, 2015. 

"Blossoming Dahlia: Chinese Women Novelists in Colonial Indonesia", Southeast Asian Studies 4.3: 533-564.

 

De Vera, Ruel S., 2016. 'The Rise of the Filipino Romance in English', Asiannewsnetwork, 7 March 2016.

 

Markert, John, 2016. 

Publishing Romance: The History of an Industry, 1940s to the Present. ???: McFarland. Abstract and table of contents

McAlister, Jodi, 2016. 

'Traveling Through Time and Genre: Are the Outlander Books Romance Novels?', Adoring Outlander: Essays on Fandom, Genre and the Female Audience, ed. Valerie Estelle Frankel (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland), pp. 94-105. Excerpt

Page, Thomas, 2016. 'Beyond heartache and Boko Haram: Nigerian women prove love is universal', CNN, 16 February 2016.

Roach, Catherine M., 2016. 

Happily Ever After: The Romance Story in Popular Culture (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press).Excerpt