Fletcher, Lisa, Beth Driscoll, and Kim Wilkins, 2018.
"Genre Worlds and Popular Fiction: The Case of Twenty-First-Century Australian Romance", Journal of Popular Culture. Online First 16 July 2018. Excerpt
Golubov, Nattie, 2017.
El amor en tiempos neoliberales: apuntes críticos sobre la novela rosa contemporánea. Ciudad de México: Bonilla Artigas, 2017. [Free from a variety of sites, including the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Amazon and Academia.edu.]
González Cruz, María-Isabel, 2018.
"Hispanismos en el discurso romántico de Harlequin y Mills & Boon. Ámbitos temáticos y funciones socio-pragmáticas". Moderna språk 112.1: 163-184. Abstract and link to pdf
Nelson, Elizabeth, 2015.
"The Romance of Self-Publishing". Self-Publishing and Collection
Development: Opportunities and Challenges for Libraries. Ed. Robert P.
Holley. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2015. 149-157.[Whole volume available as a pdf here]
O’Mahony, Lauren and Olivia Murphy, 2018.
'From polite society to the Pilbara: The ingénue abroad in Evelina and The Girl in Steel-Capped Boots', Outskirts 38:1-23. [Abstract and Pdf]
Pérez Casal, Inmaculada, 2018.
"The Romance Novel as Bildungsroman in the Works of Rosamunde Pilcher and Lisa Kleypas". Taking Stock to Look Ahead: Celebrating Forty Years of English Studies in Spain.
Ed. María Ferrández San Miguel and Claus-Peter Neumann. Zaragoza:
Prensas Universitarias de la Universidad de Zaragoza, 2018. 139-144.[Whole volume available as a pdf here]
Spears, Jessica D., 2018.
The Romance Novel Cover. MA Thesis (Art History). City University of New York (CUNY), Hunter College, 2018. Abstract and link to pdf.
Washington, AlTonya, 2015.
"An Indie Author in a Library World". Self-Publishing and Collection Development: Opportunities and Challenges for Libraries. Ed. Robert P. Holley. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2015. 139-147.[Whole volume available as a pdf here]
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?
There's a high proportion of theses/dissertations in this round-up of new additions to the Romance Wiki Bibliography but I'll start with one which I haven't actually added to it, because it isn't exactly about romance, though it does mention romance a few times: "Breaking the Cycle of Silence: The Significance of Anya Seton's Historical Fiction," a PhD thesis
by Lindsey Marie Okoroafo (Jesnek), which can be downloaded here.
Driscoll, Beth, Lisa Fletcher and Kim Wilkins, 2016.
"Women, Akubras and Ereaders: Romance Fiction and Australian Publishing." The Return of Print?: Contemporary Australian Publishing. Ed. Emmett Stinson and Aaron Mannion. Clayton, Victoria: Monash University Publishing. 67-87. [I was very pleased to be cited in this article but unfortunately I think the information actually came from a post I wrote about Australian romance rather than, as stated, from my For Love or Money. I just thought I should mention that in case someone followed the link and then consulted FLoM to find more details.]
a team of researchers from the University of Tasmania are working on
a project tracking novels by Harlequin Mills & Boon. Specifically,
we want to find out what happens to them after they’re published.
We’ve got a list of fifty books
by Australian authors that we’re tracking between December 1, 2016 and
February 28, 2017. If you see one of these books, take a photo of it
where you found it and then post it to one of our social media accounts,
along with a quick description of where it was.
Meanwhile, Donna Maree Hanson continues her search for romance readers and (especially) romance authors who'd be willing to fill in a questionnaire for her as part of her Ph.D. research. Donna's a romance reader and author
surveying writers of popular romance fiction and readers of popular
romance fiction. [...] The response
is so good that we could go for statistically significant for reader
response so yes I’m still looking for readers of romance fiction. Please
spread the word. Do the survey if you are a reader of romance!
The irony is that I’m sadly lacking in romance fiction authors
responding to the survey, particularly in comparison to the reader
response. I know there are thousands of romance authors out there. I am
having trouble reaching them. Romance Writers of Australia has nearly a
1000 members, Romance Writers of America has over 10,000 members. You
think it would be easy. But it’s not. I’m not a member of the Romance
Writers of America for example and it’s not easy for me to wave the flag
and say lookie here.
Sexual Content in Young Adult Literature: Reading between the Sheets (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield). [See Chapter 6 on "Sexual Content in Young Adult Romance".] Excerpt
Gleason, William, 2016.
"The Inside Story: Jennifer Crusie and the Architecture of Love." Popular Fiction and Spatiality: Reading Genre Settings. Ed. Lisa Fletcher. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 79-93. ExcerptAbstract
Kitchen, Veronica, 2016.
"Veterans and Military Masculinity in Popular Romance Fiction." Critical Military Studies. Abstract
Teo, Hsu-Ming, 2016.
"Imperial Affairs: The British Empire and the Romantic Novel, 1890-1939", New Directions in Popular Fiction: Genre, Distribution, Reproduction, ed. Ken Gelder. (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 87-110. Excerpt
Tienkamp, Aaf, 2016.
"New Adult Romance: An Emerging Genre." Master’s Dissertation
Literary Studies. Programme: Writing, Editing and Mediating, University
of Groningen.
The call for papers for PopCAANZ 2017 (to be held in Wellington, New Zealand) is online, with Jodi McAlister the area chair for popular romance. The deadline for proposals is 17 March 2017 and further details can be found here.
The University of Melbourne’s Publishing and Communications program will be holding a debate on the topic “In the battle of the
genres, romance will always win”. That's on the 6th of October 2016 in Melbourne (more details here).
New to the Romance Wiki:
Andreu, Alicia G., 2010.
La construcción editorial de Corín Tellado. Vigo: Editorial Academia del Hispanismo. Excerpt
Corín Tellado: medio siglo de novela de amor, 1946-1996. Oviedo: Pentalfa Ediciones.
Hernández Guerrero, María José, 2016.
"Prosumidoras de traducciones: Aproximación al fenómeno de la traducción fan de novela romántica", Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada 29.1: 88-114. Abstract
Oklopčić, Biljana, 2016.
"Medieval heresy in Croatian historical romances: a case study of Marija Jurić Zagorka’s Plameni inkvizitori." Neohelicon (online first 10 August 2016). Abstract
O'Neil, Kathryn M., 2016.
"Women's rhetoric and the romance novel genre." M.A. Thesis, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Abstract
Stafford, Annabel, 2016. 'What's not to love about romance novels?', The Sydney Morning Herald, 27 August 2016. This discusses the academic stream at the 2016 Romance Writers of Australia conference with reference to the research being done by Jodi McAlister, Catherine Roach, Sandra Barletta and Lisa Fletcher.
Kaetrin's write-up of the conference's academic stream can be found here and Leah Ashton's is here.
Place: Sheffield, UK Date:
Saturday 17 and Thursday 22 September
Time:
2-2:30pm (Saturday); 4:45-5:15pm (Thursday)
Val Derbyshire believes the books have genuine literary value. In her
lecture, and in the accompanying graphic novel, she has a lot of fun
arguing the case.
The Genre World of Romance in Twenty-First Century Australia
Place: Room 346, Humanities Building, Sandy Bay Campus, University of Tasmania
Date: 23rd Sep 2016
Time: 1:00-2:00pm
Lisa Fletcher, Beth Driscoll, and Kim Wilkins report on the findings from a project funded by the Romance Writers of
America in 2015, which was the first phase of a larger project on
Australian popular fiction (funded through an ARC Discovery Grant
2016-2018). Our aim in the first phase was to generate new knowledge
about romance in Australia by asking this research question: how do the
interactions between romance fiction texts and their national and
international writing and publishing communities build and maintain the
genre in Australia? We propose the concept of the “genre world” as an
analytical tool for examining the relationship between the textual
conventions by which we typically define genre and the conventional
collective behaviours and activities that govern the production of genre
texts.
Romance Conference of the Popular and American Culture Association (PCA/ACA)
12 – 15 April 2017 – San Diego, CA
The topic of romantic love suffuses popular culture. In
turn, the popular culture of romantic love shapes real life social
practices, from dating to weddings to holiday shopping. PCA/ACA Romance
welcomes any theoretical or (inter)disciplinary approach to any topic
related to romance, including 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, and any combination of the three are
welcome: you do not need to be an academic
to be part of the Romance area.
If you
wish to organize a roundtable, special session, or a film screening,
please contact the Area Chairs. We have had great success with film
screenings for the past several years and would
be interested in hosting another one.
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 proposal or abstract (200-300 words) proposal or abstract through the PCA/ACA website, and ONLY through that website,
at conference.pcaaca.org.
If you wish to submit a panel
for the conference, all presenters must submit individually through the
website, and then notify the Area Chairs of your intentions to present
together. Please do not include panel colleagues on the electronic
submission as this confuses the program. Instructions
for submission can be found at https://conference.pcaaca.org/help/conference/submitting-proposals-conference.
Do not
simultaneously submit the same proposal to multiple areas. Doing so
will result in your proposal being disqualified and your paper being
refused by the PCA/ACA. Per PCA/ACA guidelines,
a person may present only one paper at
the annual meeting, regardless of subject area. If you try to submit to
two areas, the master program will not accept your proposals (which may
result
in your paper not being accepted in either area).
Submission Deadline: October 1, 2016
Please feel free to forward, cross-post, or link to this call for papers.
If you have any questions as all, please contact the area chairs:
Dr. Heather Schell Dr. Jodi McAlister
George Washington University University of Tasmania
The joint programme of events put together by the Romance Writers of Australia and Flinders University for the 2016 Romance Writers of Australia conference (18-21 August) is now online. It includes:
Cliteracy: Women and Sexual Pleasure in the Romance Novel - Presented by: Dr. Catherine Roach, New College, University of Alabama
Love and Listening: The Erotics of Talk in the Popular Romance Novel - Presented by: Dr. Jodi McAlister
The Genre World of Romance in the Twenty-First Century -
Presented by: Dr. Lisa Fletcher, University of Tasmania; Dr. Beth
Driscoll, University of Melbourne; Dr. Kim Wilkins, University of
Queensland
Defying Decorative Objectification: The Appeal of the Heroine in Historical Western Romance Fiction. - Presented by: Dr. Amy Matthews, Flinders University
Representations of Single Mothers in Contemporary American Romance Fiction - Presented by: Ms. Michelle Douglas, University of Newcastle
The (Saggy) Bottom Line: Women of a “Certain Age” and Romance Fiction - Presented by: Dr. Sandra Barletta
Full details of all the papers and activities can be found here.
to curate some “Resource Pages” of links relevant to topics raised in
Love Between the Covers, the romance documentary, and they’re now
live! They’re designed to be of use both to teachers and curious
readers.
The pages include links to video-clips, documents and other web-pages on the topics of
What Is Love? Romance Fiction in the Digital Age [...] a two-day Popular Romance Project
conference that brought romance authors, readers, publishers, and
scholars in many disciplines together for four fascinating panel
discussions.
The links below take you straight to the videos on Vimeo:
Details about all of the panelists, panels and the introduction to the conference as well as all the videos can be found here.
Also out recently is a podcast featuring Lisa Fletcher,
one of the scholars working on a project called Genre worlds: Australian popular fiction in the 21st century (2016–2019).
This project won an RWA (US) grant, followed by a very prestigious
grant from the Australia Research Council. Lisa talks about the project’s
goals and methodology, as well as other themes and topics in popular
fiction that pique her interest. She also talks about the challenges of
teaching romance at university, and some of the books and techniques she
uses in her classes.
In the Canary Islands, Dr. María-Isabel González-Cruz (Associate Professor, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain) is leading a project on:
Discourse, Gender and Identity in a Corpus of Popular Romance Fiction Novels on the Canaries and Other Atlantic Islands [Discursos, género e identidad en un corpus de novela rosa inglesa ambientada en Canarias y otras islas atlánticas] (Reference FFI2014-53962-P)
The novels in this corpus are all set, wholly or partially, in the Atlantic islands (mostly the Canaries) and are written by English Harlequin/ Mills & Boon female authors. The project begins with a corpus of 20 novels set in the Canaries, while the corpus on Madeira and other islands has just begun to be built, including only 2 novels at the moment. The texts cover a time span of almost five decades, from 1958 to 2004, which allows for an analysis of the evolution of their discourse.
The protagonists are usually a native islander hero, or an Englishman with local ancestors, who falls in Jove with an English heroine who either visits or settles temporarily on one of the islands, which are typically described as a paradise with very different sociocultural traditions. Both the narrator and the characters are aware of the sociocultural and linguistic differences and often make reference to them. This provides an interesting framework and material to carry out a variety of analyses related to a number of challenging issues, including identity and otherness, paradise discourse, and intercultural and even linguistic contact, since the texts are written in English but interspersed with Spanish and Canarian (also Portuguese) terms and expressions. These words and phrases perform different communicative functions and reach a wide international readership who become familiar with them. This may contribute, to some extent, to their diffusion and eventual adoption by readers of English or other speech communities, as González-Cruz (2011b) has argued. [...]
In short, our purposes in this Research Projects are as follows:
to carry out an interdisciplinary study of the texts we have compiled so far
to keep searching for more books in order to enlarge both corpora, the main Canarian corpus and the one referring to other Atlantic islands,
to make a comparative analysis of the novels set in this area.
-----
I don't know which novels are included in the 20-book corpus. Can you think of any books you think should be included? I can pass on any suggestions.
-----
Dr Lisa Fletcher recently announced on the RomanceScholar listserv that she's
part of a research team just awarded a 3-year (2016-2018) Australia
Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project grant of A$316,000 to study
21st-century Australian popular fiction, including romance. This
interdisciplinary project brings
together researchers from the University of Queensland (Kim Wilkins,
David Carter), the University of Melbourne (Beth Driscoll), and the
University of Tasmania (me).
Our project summary: This project intends to conduct a
systematic examination of 21st-century Australian popular fiction, the
most significant growth area in Australian trade publishing since the
turn of the century. Its three areas of investigation
are the publishing of Australian popular fiction; the
interrelationships between Australian popular fiction and Australian
genre communities; and the textual distinctiveness of Australian popular
novels in relation to genre. Research is designed to centre
on 30 novels across three genres, building a comprehensive picture of
the practices and processes of Australian popular fiction through
detailed examination of trade data, close reading of texts, and
interviews with industry figures.
-----
The maps of Australia and the Canary Islands came from Wikimedia Commons and are either in the public domain or made available under a Creative Commons licence.
A new article, about the mysterious/secretive E. M. Hull, author of The Sheik has sadly remained mysterious to me. However, the abstract of Ellen Turner's "E. M. Hull's Camping in the Sahara: desert romance meets desert reality" (published in Studies in Travel Writing) was available online and it points out that, not content with starting a Western craze for sexy fictional sheikhs, Hull also sought to position herself as an authority on non-fictional deserts and their inhabitants:
The publication of Camping in the Sahara, seven years after its author E. M. Hull was reluctantly catapulted to fame on the back of her ignominious debut novel, The Sheik
(1919), made relatively little impact on her already cemented
reputation as a bestselling author of desert “trash”. Nevertheless, her
travelogue served to clarify her relative authority on the North African
Saharan regions in which her novels were set. Hull's fictional output,
abetted by Rudolph Valentino's screen performance in the novel's film
adaptation, directed by George Melford (1921), served as a stimulus to
the “sheik obsession” which was to capture the imagination of a
generation during the 1920s. Even though Hull's name is forever wed to The Sheik,
the woman herself remains something of an enigma. There is little
critical or biographical information on Hull and her travels in Algeria.
This article aims to piece together the available evidence. It also
aims to begin to unravel the connection between Hull's fictional and
non-fictional writing and to comment on its impact on the desert romance
craze of the 1920s. Having examined how travel trends to the Sahara in
the 1920s were informed by movements in popular culture, the essay
proceeds to explore how Hull constructs the desert as a backdrop to her
own story into which she writes herself. Hull's desert in Camping in the Sahara
resembles a film set in which the scenery is imagined through a camera
lens and the people she encounters are inadvertently assessed through
the eyes of a casting director.
There aren't many romances which feature Robin Hood, but they do exist and maybe someone would like to write about them for the International Association for Robin Hood Studies (IARHS), which "is pleased to
announce the creation of a new, peer-reviewed, open-access journal, The
Bulletin of the International Association for Robin Hood Studies". More details here.
The Australasian Universities Languages & Literature Association Conference takes as its theme "Love and the Word" and will be held in Melbourne, Australia from 7th-9th December 2016:
The conference theme draws on AULLA’s origins as an association of
scholars working in fields of philology. Thus we examine both philos
(love) and logos (word). How does affection affect words? What do people
mean by ‘love’ and its counterparts in the world’s languages? Or
perhaps: how does it ‘do’ those meanings?
More details here. It sounds to me like the kind of conference which could benefit from romance scholarship such as Lisa Fletcher's, author of Historical Romance Fiction: Heterosexuality and Performativity (2008):
“I love you” is, for her, “the romantic speech act”: a performative
utterance characteristic of the historical romance and revelatory of its
function (25). “[R]omance is a fictional mode which depends on the
force and familiarity of the speech act ‘I love you,’” she explains (7).
To call something a “speech act,” in J.L. Austin’s terms, means that
someone’s saying or writing it makes something happen: an event
or condition is actually brought about by the utterance, rather than
simply described by it. Statements that begin “I promise…,” “I bet…,”
and “I apologize…” are all examples of speech acts. Rejecting the idea
that “I love you” is simply a reliable report of its speaker’s emotional
state, Fletcher focuses instead on what the sentence does—and, by
extension, on what the genre defined by “I love you” also does, as
though the entire genre were also a speech act, a performative
utterance, in its own right. (from Pamela Regis's review of Fletcher's book).
[From the RWA] Romance Writers of America is proud
to announce the recipients of its annual Academic Research Grant
competition. The grant program seeks to develop and support academic
research devoted to genre romance novels, writers, and readers.
Jonathan Andrew Allan, Ph.D., Brandon University: The Optimism of Happily Ever After.
RWA awarded funding to Jonathan Andrew Allan's project "The Optimism of
Happily Ever After." His proposed research seeks to explore one of the
most critically maligned aspects of romance, the happy ending, or, the
emotionally satisfying ending, via Affect Theory.
Drs. Beth Driscoll, University of Melbourne, Lisa Fletcher,
University of Tasmania, and Kim Wilkins, University of Queensland: The
Genre World of Romance in 21st Century Australia. RWA awarded
funding to Drs. Driscoll, Fletcher, and Wilkins' project "The Genre
World of Romance in 21st Century Australia." The researchers plan to
create detailed case studies of three authors at different stages in
their careers. The case studies will include analysis of the creative
processes for one particular book by each author using textual analysis
of the books and in-depth interviews with each author. They will also
include interviews with the other significant players involved in the
creation of and publication of each book. This research will present
romance writers and their books in a wider artistic and commercial
context.
Jessica Taylor, Ph.D., University of Toronto: Professional Business Women: Romance Writers, Feminism and "Women's Work." RWA
awarded funding to Jessica Taylor for her project "Professional
Business Women." Taylor researches how writers, who can choose to define
their work any number of ways, sometimes pitting the creative and
artistic against the professional and commercial, can negotiate
interesting blends of the two. She studies how writers think and talk
about what they do as work and its value and significance.
Issue 3.2 of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies is out now and includes a couple of essays about Georgette Heyer (including one written by me), a "roundtable" marking the the tenth anniversary of the publication of Pamela Regis's A Natural History of the Romance Novel and lots more:
At this
year’s Popular Culture Association conference there was enough interest in Lisa Fletcher's book, Historical Romance Fiction: Heterosexuality and Performativity (2008) that the publisher, Ashgate, decided to lower the price, making this important study much more readily available.
Originally it sold for about $99 USD, but the price is now going to drop to $39.95/£19.99. If
you order on line from Ashgate, the price seems to be $35.96 /£17.99. Individual scholars and libraries are both going to be happy about that--and I'll be curious to see whether this change in the price puts Lisa's ideas into broader circulation, as the next few conferences come up.
The price cut hasn't shown up yet on Amazon, etc., but I gather it will in the next couple of weeks. Meanwhile you can read the table of contents and the introduction at the Ashgate website: there's some fascinating theoretical work here, and chapters on both popular and literary historical romances, which makes the book particularly useful if you're interested in teaching or talking about texts across that great divide.
“TEACHING
& LEARNING” IN THE JOURNAL
OF POPULAR ROMANCE STUDIES
The
journal is now calling for submissions on the theory and practice of
teaching and learning in popular romance studies for a regular
section in the journal.
The
“Teaching and Learning” section of JPRSwelcomes theoretical and empirical contributions from all
relevant disciplines, as well as interdisciplinary approaches.
Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:
•
Key issues in
the teaching and learning of popular romance studies
•
The research /
teaching nexus and popular romance
•
Curriculum
design for teaching popular romance
•
Practical case
studies of teaching key texts and/or topics
•
Assessment
models for teaching popular romance
•
Teaching and
learning popular romance in the digital age
•
Student
responses to studying representations of romantic love
•
Popular romance
fans as teachers and students
•
Open Education
Resources (OER) for teaching popular romance
•
Postgraduate
students and popular romance studies
Articles
submitted should be no longer than 10,000 words. Submissions
should
be Microsoft Word documents, with citations in MLA format. Do not
include your name or the name of any co-authors in the submitted
manuscript, since the piece will be sent out for blind peer review.
In your cover-letter email, please provide your complete contact
information (address, phone number, e-mail address) and a
150-200-word abstract of the submission. You are welcome to suggest
appropriate peer reviewers. For further information about the
submission process consult the journal
(http://jprstudies.org/submissions/).
Please
email submissions to the journal’s Editor of Teaching and Learning,
Lisa Fletcher (Lisa.Fletcher@utas.edu.au).
Issue 1.2 of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies (JPRS) is now available. JPRS is a peer-reviewed academic journal which is freely accessible online. Eric Selinger, the editor of the journal, writes that
The Journal of Popular Romance Studies is dedicated to publishing scholarship on romantic love in global popular media, now and in the past, along with interviews, pedagogical discussions, and other material of use to both scholars and teachers. With this second issue, we make good on that mission in several new and exciting ways. We expand internationally, and into cyberspace, with essays on web-based Chinese romantic fiction, on single women in British middlebrow novels of the interwar years, and on debates at the popular Smart Bitches, Trashy Books website about “plus-size” heroines in popular romance fiction.
Alongside these, we have our second author interview, this time with groundbreaking science fiction author Joanna Russ, reflecting on her decades-old engagement with slash fiction and fandom. And this issue inaugurates what we hope will be an on-going series of “Pedagogy Reports,” this one focused on the challenges and rewards of “embedding” Georgette Heyer’s romance novel Sylvester in a University of Tasmania course on historical fiction, teaching it alongside canonical literary texts.
According to the most recent IASPR newsletter, the first issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies is due to appear online in the first week of August:
“There Are Six Bodies in This Relationship: An Anthropological Approach to the Romance Genre,” by Laura Vivanco and Kyra Kramer
“Getting a Good Man to Love: Popular Romance Fiction and the Problem of Patriarchy,” by Catherine Roach
“There were three of us in this biography, so it was a bit crowded: The Biographer as Suitor and the Rhetoric of Romance in Diana: Her True Story” by Giselle Bastin
You will be able to access the Journal at www.jprstudies.org the first week of August, 2010. All articles will be open access. We are also allowing moderated commentary after each article to stimulate conversation about the issues each brings up.
If you'd like to support IASPR and receive the newsletter, you can become a member.
As is apparent from the news in my last post, there's a lot going on at IASPR. But before we get to 2010, there's the conference planned for Brisbane (13-14 August):
Eminent Australian scholars Juliet Flesch and Lisa Fletcher headline the event. Presenters come from all corners of the globe, including the US, South Korea, Indonesia, India, New Zealand, Italy, and of course, Australia, filling six panels discussing everything from popular romance novels, Japanese manga, and a biography of Princess Diana, to Georgette Heyer, Bollywood movies, and Twilight.
According to Pamela Regis, one of the "eight essential elements of the romance novel" (30) is "The Declaration," "The scene or scenes in which the hero declares his love for the heroine, and the heroine her love for the hero" (34). She adds that "In romance novels from the last quarter of the twentieth century marriage is not necessary as long as it is clear that the heroine and hero will end up together" (37-38). Jan Cohn explains the primacy of the declaration of love thus:
The proposal of marriage belongs to the tradition of comedy, but the declaration of love comes properly from romance. [...] The knowledge of her own love is accessible to the heroine, a discovery she can make. She cannot, however, learn by herself of the hero's love; that love must be announced, and it is, in fact, the saying that matters, the speaking of the word. [...] With the resonance of ritual, the word "love" is uttered at the denouement of every romance. [...] The formulaic, even ritualized significance of the declaration of love cannot be exaggerated. "Declaration," in fact, is an inadequate term; it is as confession, as something wrung from the hero, that love is spoken. A ceremonial, even an incantatory word, "love" brings with it the profound and permanent metamorphosis into union toward which the story has inexorably driven. (32-33)
Lisa Fletcher's discussion of the phrase "I love you" expands on this idea of the declaration of love as a ritual:
a performative utterance contains its own referent; the act does not precede the utterance. To utter "I love you" is, in both the Austinian sense and in common understanding, to do something; love is not declared/confessed/promised until these "three little words" are spoken. It is not enough for the amorous individual to behave lovingly towards his or her beloved; he or she must say "I love you." (26)
and
Romance can only quote. "I love you" is always and only a reiteration; yet to maintain its descriptive status, it must assert its originality or uniqueness at each utterance [...] it both claims a particularly intimate moment for its speaker ("I (like no other) love you (like no other)") and, retaining its ubiquitous history and corresponding reiterative force, continues to circulate as an infinitely and endlessly appropriable utterance. To this extent it conforms to the interpretation of myth offered by Barthes in Mythologies. As a mythic utterance, "I love you" carries the baggage of innumerable citations. At each utterance, however, "I love you" is emptied out, its history hidden, in order to facilitate the supposed and essential uniqueness of the particular relation it intends to communicate. [...] "I love you" is both a confession and a cliché; it is simultaneously meaning and form - an apparently empty utterance to be refilled by each lover, but which silently retains its history. (30)
It's also an utterance which is refilled by each author, and I'm sure we all have on our virtual or real "keeper shelves" romances in which the utterance of those words was particularly moving or interesting to us.
That said, are those three very specific words an utterance which it is essential to include in order for the novel to be a romance? When Jessica reviewed Stephanie Laurens's Devil's Bride, many commenters responded by saying that it was one of their very favourite of Laurens's novels. Yet Kaetrin observed that it isn't, in fact, until a later novel in the Cynster series that the hero of Devil's Bride actually says "I love you":
On a Wicked Dawn (I think I have that right - it was the second one of the twins books anyway and their titles are disconcertingly similar…) [...] is [...] the book **Minor Spoiler** where Devil finally says “I love you” to Honoria - (did you notice he didn’t in DB?) and after I read DB, I went back and re-read it and it was delicious!!
In Jennifer Crusie and Bob Meyer's first collaborative novel, Don't Look Down, Crusie insisted on the inclusion of the "mythic utterance":
When we presented in Reno at National last year the crowd of 300 women hissed at me when Jenny told how my hero never said "I love you" to the heroine in the course of the book. So I rewrote, bowing to the pressure, and as the chopper comes flying in for the final showdown and JT is standing on one skid and Lucy is standing on the other side on the other skid, he yells across the cargo bay: "Hey, I love you." Well, that didn't go over well either. (He Wrote, She Wrote)
How does this work in translations and languages other than English? In Spanish, for example, one could have "Te quiero," "Te amo," or "Te adoro." Does having more possible variations in the essential speech act make a difference to the ritual aspect of the declaration?
Cohn focuses on the hero's declaration of love, but has so much emphasis been placed on the hero's declaration rather than the heroine's only because of the heroine-centric point of view in which romances tended to be written? Is it also due, at least in part, to gender roles and particular ideas about masculinity and male sexuality? If so, are both "I love you"s equally important in m/m romance? Are both less important in f/f romance?
Is it absolutely essential for the characters to say "I love you"? Would another form of words be just as good? Have you ever read a romance in which there is no "declaration" at all?
Could it be that even if the characters don't actually say the words "I love you" themselves, we as readers might appropriate those words which "circulate as an infinitely and endlessly appropriable utterance" and, in some way, say them on behalf of the characters?
The photo of the love hearts comes from www.lovehearts.com. The hearts can carry a variety of declarations/confessions/promises/questions, but it's noticeable that the one in the very centre of the photo is the one with "I love you" written on it.
“There Are Six Bodies in This Relationship: An Anthropological Approach to the Romance Genre,” by 
