IASPR Blitz on FRIDAY at RWA (including meet-up announcement)

IASPR will have a table at the Moonlight Madness Bazaar on Thursday, July 16, 8-midnight. We'll be talking about IASPR to anyone interested. We'll also be handing out IASPR swag to members: a tote bag, a membership pin, pens, a lanyard, bookmarks, etc. So come and get come cool IASPR stuff and meet the Officers.

Sarah, Pam Regis, and IASPR member, Jessica Lyn Van Slooten, will be presenting on "The Wit, Wisdom, and Writing Advice of Jennifer Crusie" on Friday, July 17, 3:15-4:15pm, in Washington 3. IASPR Board Member Jenny Crusie herself will be responding to the panel! We'd love to see IASPR members there.

The IASPR meet-up will be after the panel, from 4:30-6:30, in the second floor elevator lobby. There are really nice big elevator lobbies here, and our room is NOT a nice big room, so we'll hang around in the elevator lobby and talk about romance scholarship. We'd love to see you there.

"The Marx and Engels" of Romance Scholarship

Laura Vivanco

On the eve of the RWA conference Joanne Rendell, writing at The Huffington Post, takes a look at "a growing shift in the way the ivory tower sees romance" and the "fascinating relationship which is evolving between professors studying romance novels and the romance world itself."

In the course of this article she describes Eric Selinger and Sarah Frantz as "the Marx and Engels" of romance scholarship. It did strike me that that particular description might be more fittingly applied to any two of

• Bridget Fowler (author of The Alienated Reader: Women and Popular Romantic Literature in the Twentieth Century (1991)) who believes that

  we have seen the use [...] of commercialised forms of popular literature and television, which women consume in large numbers, to break down an autonomous anti capitalist high culture.There was an elitist high culture which was very critical of aspects of capitalism, and I think the turn to privileging women's form of expression, like the romance, may have quite often removed that critical edge culturally. Because these were forms that adjusted themselves to the market and didn't question it. Didn't take issue with the commercialisation of life in general. [...] I don't want to say that there are not valuable elements of popular women's' literature. I think they have distinctive, moral and political understanding of how people should live their lives which is important. That is a cultural achievement. We were right to say at a certain stage that it is not just high culture that should be preserved. There are elements from popular culture that are important and need saving. But we are in danger of shifting into a market based aesthetic which is a populist one.

• Jan Cohn, author of Romance and the Erotics of Property: Mass-Market Fiction for Women (1988) in which she explores how "popular romance tells the story of how the heroine gains access to money - to power - in patriarchal society" (3).

• Peter Darbyshire, who, in his "Romancing the World: Harlequin Romances, the Capitalist Dream, and the Conquest of Europe and Asia" (2000) concludes that

  Harlequin’s success in Europe and Asia is associated not with any particular interest in America itself, but it is instead associated with the ideology of capitalism that America represents and which Harlequin romances embody. For European and Asian readers, these books are capitalist fantasies as much as they are romantic fantasies and, as such, their appeal to the readers of emerging capitalist markets is obvious

• Jayashree Kamble, who in her doctoral thesis (2008), has suggested that "the very texts that appear to glamorize global capitalism, justify war, and align themselves with heteronormative fantasy contain reservations about these ideologies."

Rendell, though, doesn't seem to have meant the "Marx and Engels" description of Selinger and Frantz to suggest anything about the politics or subject-matter of their work. Rather, she's looking at important personalities in this rapidly growing area of scholarship.

Inevitably there are omissions, and a reader may receive the impression that positive scholarship on the genre emerged rather more recently than it actually did. Without wishing to in any way minimise the huge contributions of Sarah, Eric, Pamela Regis and others mentioned in Rendell's article, or the importance of the RWA's academic grant program, also mentioned there, it should be noted that just as socialism's history began long before the emergence of Marx and Engels so, as Eric observed in a comment attached to a recent post I wrote about the history of romance scholarship, "This is a field that has been going on, in one form or another, for at least forty years; the more we keep that history in mind, the better off our new work will be."

Despite all those caveats, I think we can agree that the Marx and Engels of romance have started an online revolution in romance scholarship, initially via the listserv but more recently via the IASPR website (if you haven't seen them already, please do go and take a look at the new forums) and the forthcoming online Journal of Popular Romance (which is now accepting submissions).

The photo of "Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx and his wife Jenny, and their children Laura and Eleanor" came from Wikimedia Commons.

IASPR Announcements

Sarah S. G. Frantz

An email that just went out to the IASPR membership:

I am writing today to tell you about all those exciting things that we're doing for, with, and to IASPR:

• The IASPR website.
• The IASPR members' forum.
• The IASPR Cafe Press store.
• The RWA conference next week, Washington DC.
• The IASPR conference in Brisbane, Australia next month.
• The Call For Proposals for 2010 IASPR conference in Belgium.
• Future conference plans and Call for Conference Organizers for 2011 and 2012.
• The Call for Submissions for the Journal of Popular Romance Studies.
• Do you know scholars who do popular romance studies? Let me know!

It's a lot to cover, but I hope you'll stick with me! I figured one long email was better than flooding your Inbox with every new announcement.

1. First of all, our beautiful logo and website are up and running. This the portal for most of the rest of the stuff I'll be talking about. Dennis Crothers designed our amazing logo and he and Rob Landrigan designed and built the website. We're very proud of its clean look and (hopefully) the ease of navigation.

Please click through the About tab for our History and the list of our Officers and current (growing) Board of Directors. Check our Conferences tab for news and registration for upcoming conferences. Check back regularly for IASPR updates on the front page. And please direct your friends and colleagues there for information about IASPR.

2. The interactive (and, to me, the most exciting) part of the website is the Members' Forum: a standing messageboard where IASPR members (and non-members) can interact, sharing news of and discussions about popular romance studies. Anyone can register as a member of the board and navigate through "Chatter," "Books," "Articles," "Suggested Reading," and other Topics. Members of IASPR, once they register and are approved by the Board moderator, will have access to a members only section of the forum, in which we discuss Professionalization, Job Opportunities, Publishing Venues, and in which we will create writing critique groups and beta-reading groups for academic writing. Please join us there as soon as you can so we'll have a vibrant, active community of IASPR members!

3. IASPR has a Cafe Press store where you can buy shirts, mugs, and pins with our logo as well as fun slogans like "Romance Readers Make Better Scholars," "Romance: Think About It," "In UR bodice, analyzin UR literachur," and many more. If you have any ideas for more slogans, just email me to let me know and I'll see what I can do to add it to the options. Every purchase supports IASPR, so feel free to splurge! Or tell your friends and family about the Store, so that they can spoil you.

4. A few IASPR Officers and members will be at the annual conference of the Romance Writers of America in Washington D.C. next week at various events:

• Our President Sarah Frantz, our Vice-President Pamela Regis, and NYT best-selling author Sabrina Jeffries will be presenting "If you like the Classics; Or, How to recommend romance to Literature Snobs in your library" at the Librarians' Day on June 15, 2009.
• Sarah, Pam, and IASPR member, Jessica Lyn Van Slooten, will be presenting on "The Wit, Wisdom, and Writing Advice of Jennifer Crusie" on Friday, July 17, 3:15-4:15pm, in Washington 3. IASPR Board Member Jenny Crusie herself will be responding to the panel! We'd love to see IASPR members there.
• After this panel, IASPR will have a get-together from 4:30-6:30 in a room to be announced. Watch the IASPR Twitter page for announcement.
• IASPR will have a table at the Moonlight Madness Bazaar on Thursday, July 16, 8-midnight. We'll be talking about IASPR to anyone interested. We'll also be handing out IASPR swag to members: a tote bag, a membership pin, pens, a lanyard, bookmarks, etc. So come and get come cool IASPR stuff and meet your Officers.
• Sarah, our Secretary Melissa Golden, and a few other IASPR officers will be wandering around the conference, trying to sign up members and handing out membership swag. Catch one of us and introduce yourself (and get your stuff)!

5. Our first IASPR conference will take place next month in Brisbane, Australia, 13-14 August, 2009. Our exciting, truly international schedule is up on the website. And registration is open. Registration is AU$120 for IASPR members and AU$150 for non-members (who will then be members). The registration page will collect the money in Australian Dollars through PayPal, whether or not you have a PayPal account and whether or not you live in Australia. All you need is a credit card. If you're in the area, we'd love to see you there!

The conference has been generously sponsored by Samhain Publishing, the Romance Writers of America, DePaul University, the University of Queensland, Queensland Institute of Technology, and the Fryer Library. Eminent Australian scholars of popular romance fiction, Juliet Flesch and Lisa Fletcher, will be presenting, as will 22 other amazing scholars.

6. The IASPR conference next year will be in Belgium, 5-7 August, 2010, on the theme of "Theorizing Romance." Lynne Pearce of the University of Lancaster has already agreed to be a keynote speaker. The Call for Proposals is up at the IASPR website. I've had a lot of feedback from people who are excited about having a popular romance studies conference in Europe and I'm thrilled that I'm going to be able to meet so many of you. We'd love to have you there as a presenter, so please consider submitting a proposal. Of course, you all are welcome as audience members, too. Many more details will go up on the website in the New Year about registration, etc.

7. We plan to have our 2011 conference in New York City, NY on the theme of "The Business of Romance," and our 2012 conference in Los Angeles, CA, on the theme of "The Music and Movies of Romance." I'm excited about these conferences as a chance to bring together the disparate aspects of popular romance studies--remember that popular romance studies are not just the study of literature, but of all aspects of the popular representation of romance.

If you are interested in being involved in the planning and organization of either of these conferences, please email me. I would love for a member to step up for these conferences, as they have done already for Brisbane and Belgium. This is your chance to be deeply involved IASPR. Just let me know!

8. The Journal of Popular Romance Studies has posted its Call for Submissions. Our first volume will be released on February 14, 2010, and the deadline for submission for the first volume is October 1, 2009. But if you do not make that cut-off, please still submit to the journal. We're planning on having at least two issues a year, so the second issue will be released in August, 2010.

If you're interested in writing book reviews of volumes of popular romance studies, please email our Book Review Editor. Or if you're interested in having your volume reviewed, please email her too.

9. Finally, do you know anyone else working on popular romance studies? Don't forget other fields: anthropology, sociology, art, film, business, marketing, computer science, philosophy, psychology, etc., even neurobiology? I'd love to hear about them or have them hear about IASPR. If you feel comfortable with it, send me their email address so I can invite them into IASPR. Or send them the web address of IASPR so that they can discover who we are and what it is that we do.

For example, I just connected with the Society for Philosophy of Sex and Love and made some great popular romance studies connections there. Are there scholars or other academic societies who might be excited by what we're doing here at IASPR? Let me know about them and let them know about us!

And let us know about YOUR publications and successes in the field of popular romance studies! We'll add them to our (proposed) annual bibliography of popular romance studies.

As always, if you have any questions, concerns, or, most importantly, suggestions, please let me know! I'd love to hear from any of our members about anything. I look forward to meeting most of you over the next few years of my tenure as your President.

Sincerely,
-Sarah S. G. Frantz, Ph.D., President
The International Association for the Study of Popular Romance

RWA Conference 2009

Sarah S. G. Frantz

I just got notification that two of my panel proposals (of three) were accepted for the Romance Writers of America 2009 conference, one during the RWA conference itself and one during the pre-conference Librarians' Day conference. Yay!

The panels as I proposed them:

The Wit, Wisdom, and Writing Advice of Jennifer Crusie
(In which Pamela Regis and Jessica Lyn Van Slooten examine the humor and writing advice in the novels of best-selling author Jennifer Crusie, who will herself respond to the literary criticism perpetrated upon her novels.)

Pamela Regis:“The Power of Wit: How Jennifer Crusie Harnesses the Power of the Romance Form and How You Can, Too.”
Jennifer Crusie manages to get her unique humor onto the pages of her novels and those novels onto best sellers lists. This presentation will take a hard look at Bet Me to get beyond the Krispy Kremes and chicken marsala to figure out how Crusie builds her humor and to recommend strategies for building humor into your own work. The eight elements of the romance novel, as I define them in A Natural History of the Romance Novel (U Penn Press, 2003), will be identified in Bet Me to uncover their contribution to the humor in the book. We'll characterize Crusie's humor, and look for ways to apply her techniques. Assuming, of course, that Crusie lets me get a word in edgewise.

Jessica Lyn Van Slooten: “Metanarrative and Writing Advice in Jennifer Crusie’s Novels.
The romantic and writing success of script writer Sophie in Jennifer Crusie’s Welcome to Temptation and cookbook author Agnes in Agnes and the Hitman (co-authored with Bob Mayer) emanates from their willingness to blur the line between reality and fantasy, to constantly revise, to know their audience, and to write out of their full sensory experiences. Despite their initial skepticism, both heroines successfully navigate the obstacles in their paths to write their own happily-ever-afters. Through her heroines’ narratives, Crusie counters skepticism of the romance genre, while also embedding writing advice for her careful readers—many of whom want to author their own romantic tales. I blend examples from the novels with a post-modern theoretical approach, and incorporate writing advice from writing experts to suggest practical ways to improve our own romance narratives, and to find effective ways of writing our lives following a model of writing as seduction that overcomes skepticism.

Jennifer Crusie: Respondent


"If you like the classics; or, how to recommend romance to literature snobs in your library."
10:30-11:30am, Wednesday, July 15

During this interactive presentation, Sarah Frantz and Pamela Regis, both English professors and scholars of popular romance, will discuss the history of popular romance as found in canonical literature. BUT! they will be joined by best-selling historical author and recovering academic, Sabrina Jeffries!

Topics of discussion will include:

• A structural definition of romance.
• The history of the conventions of the genre through the rise of the novel during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
• The evolution of the romantic heroine through canonical domestic fiction to popular romance.
• The evolution of the romantic hero through canonical literature writ large to popular romance.

We will use Jane Austen as the primary canonical author who embodies all that is perfect about popular romance, examining the innovations she made in genre conventions and in her construction of her heroes and heroines. We will then trace her innovations through twentieth-century and modern popular romance, making suggestions along the way of specific romance authors to recommend to library patrons.

We will hand out an annotated list of recommendations of classic literature and their popular romance descendants.


We all hope you can join us there! Can't wait to go to my first RWA.