Book Now! Romance Conference in Washington DC

Laura Vivanco

The program for the "What is Love? Romance Fiction in the Digital Age" is now available and places are free. This conference will be held at the Library of Congress, Washington DC, on the 10th-11th of February.

The main event on the 10th is a screening of a "documentary film that takes its viewers into the multi-billion dollar romance fiction business and the remarkable worldwide community of women who create, consume, and love romance novels." You can book your place here.

Click here to book your place at the "international, multimedia conference of authors, scholars, publishers, and the public at the Library of Congress on February 11, 2015, hosted by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, in cooperation with corporate and foundation supporters and the Popular Romance Project."

CONFERENCE PROGRAM

 

Tuesday, February 10, 2015
The Library of Congress, Jefferson Building
Sneak Preview Screening of Love Between the Covers

6:30        Welcome; Coolidge Auditorium, Ground Floor

6:45        Love Between the Covers

8:20    Q&A with producer/director Laurie Kahn, editor William A. Anderson, and featured authors Beverly Jenkins, Len Barot/Radclyffe, Mary Bly/Eloisa James, and Joanne Lockyer     

Wednesday, February 11, 2015
The Library of Congress, Madison Building, 6th floor
What Is Love? Romance Fiction in the Digital Age

9:00         Welcome

John Y. Cole, Director of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress; Co-organizer of "What is Love?"

Laurie Kahn, Project Director, Popular Romance Project; Producer/Director of "Love Between the Covers"

Pamela Regis, Professor of English, McDaniel College; President of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance; Co-organizer of "What Is Love?"   

9:10-10:30     Panel 1: What Belongs in the Romance Canon? Why?

Panelists
•    Pamela Regis (moderator), Professor of English, McDaniel College; President of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance
•    Len Barot/Radclyffe Founder/CEO, Bold Strokes Books; Romance Author
•    Beverly Jenkins, Romance Author
•    Nicole Peeler, Associate Professor of English, Seton Hill University; Romance Author
•    Eric Murphy Selinger, Professor of English, DePaul University; Executive Editor, Journal of Popular Romance Studies
•    Susan Ostrov Weisser, Professor of English, Adelphi University

Questions to Consider
Why does romance fiction resonate globally? How many archetypal love stories are there? Who are romance novels speaking to? Should there be a romance canon? Should there be different romance canons for the sub-genres within romance? Should the canon(s) include romance novels written in non-Anglo cultures? And how far back should the canon go? What is included and excluded from this genre? How does the perception of romance fiction compare with the perception of fantasy, sci-fi and mystery? Why?

10:45-3:30    Drop-in Interactive Rooms, concurrent with Panels 2 and 3

•    Write a romance novel scene.
•    Explore the Popular Romance Project website:  PopularRomanceProject.org.
•    See the film: "Love Between the Covers."
•    Suggest a Popular Romance Library Program for the American Library Association.
•    Browse publishers' exhibits.

10:45-12:15    Panel 2: What do Science and History Reveal about Love?

Panelists
•    William Gleason (moderator), Professor of English, Princeton University
•    Stephanie Coontz, Professor of History, Evergreen State College
•    Eli Finkel, Professor, Department of Psychology and the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
•    Darlene Clark Hine, Professor of History, Northwestern University
•    William M. Reddy, Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University
•    Ronald Walters, Professor of History, The Johns Hopkins University

Questions to Consider
What do scientists know about physical attraction, lust, and love? What have historians discovered about the ideas of love in different times and cultures? When, why, and where did domestic partnerships shift from being primarily about dynastic relationships between families—often including economic benefit—to being about individual choice based on ideas of love? Is love a feminine topic? What kinds of love do we see depicted in romance novels and do we use these depictions to shape our own lives? How does knowing the history and science of love change our sense of what love is now? Is love being transformed in our digital age?

12:15-1:30    Lunch Break

1:45-3:15    Panel 3:  Community and the Romance Genre

Panelists
•    Mary Bly/Eloisa James (moderator), Professor of English, Fordham University, Romance Author
•    Kim Castillo, Author's Assistant, Eloisa James, Inc.
•    Robyn Carr, Romance Author
•    Brenda Jackson, Romance Author
•    Anne Jamison, Professor of English, University of Utah
•    Allison Kelley, Executive Director, Romance Writers of America
•    Sarah Wendell, Romance Blogger, Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

Questions to Consider
Is the romance community like other fan communities? Are there actually many romance communities – and do they communicate with one another? Why do romance fans love their books so much?  How are romance communities different in different parts of the world? Are the values of romance novels lived out in the romance community? How are books changing due to a more interactive reader community? Why have so many best-selling romance authors come from reader communities? What can we learn from the magnitude of the romance community about the world we live in? What can we learn about community building from romance writers and readers?

3:30-5:00    Panel 4:  Trending Now: Where is Romance Fiction Heading in the Digital Age?

Panelists
•    Sarah Frantz Lyons (moderator), Editorial Director, Riptide Publishing; Founder of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance
•    Jon Fine, Former Director of Author and Publisher Relations, Amazon.com
•    Liliana Hart, Romance Author
•    Angela James, Editorial Director, Carina Press/Harlequin
•    Tara McPherson, Associate Professor of Critical Studies, University of Southern California
•    Dominique Raccah, Founder/CEO, Sourcebooks
•    Claire Zion, Vice President and Editorial Director, New American Library

Questions to Consider
During this last panel of the day, we will reflect on the current tsunami of change in publishing—from traditional publishing to the explosive phenomena of ebooks and self-publication. How well is the romance industry, and the romance community writ large, poised to ride this digital wave? Where are we? Where are things heading? Together we will ponder the future of romance fiction.

Princeton Romance Conference Opening Roundtable

Sarah S. G. Frantz

Thursday, April 23
Keynote Roundtable: Romance Fiction and American Culture

Tania Modleski, USC
Used Lauren Berlant’s The Female Complaint as a point from which to analyze the romance genre. Chick lit, in particular, is the latest form of female complaint. Writing for or acting within the “intimate public” means assuming you’re writing for women (in this case) who are just like yourself. The core of complaint rhetoric is a fundamental ambivalence toward love, because it is both the source of most female complaints and also the cure. If it’s truly the cure, though, true social change will never happen. [One has to wonder why. I have a problem with statements like these, because they assume love will continue as it is currently constructed, which is not necessarily true.] Berlant focuses on middle-class, white women’s female complaint, ignoring women of color and privileging the problems and issues of those middle-class white women above those of any other female demographic. What happens, for example, when women of color write romances? Are they then more politically acceptable in their complaining? Male sentimental culture is strong: Clint Eastwood’s movies and male “weepies,” for which the men get awards and rewards, rather than the scorn women get for female-coded sentiment. This privileges male suffering when written, performed, produced by men.

Stephanie Coontz, Evergreen State University
Coontz feels like an outlier at the conference, because she’s never read romances. She can talk, though, about the evolution of marriage, courtship, romance in history. As an historian, she finds literature fascinating because it shows the tensions in people’s lives as they are soothed, resolved, highlighted. She is most interested in the variations between time periods, though, rather in the minute details. Before the eighteenth century, only adulterous relationships could count as love, because marriage was all about the practicalities. During the eighteenth century, though, western society began to imagine the concept of love in marriage and that young people should have the right to choose one’s own partners. The invention of the love match was a very scary thing to defenders of “traditional marriage.” It was seen as both a threat to male power, a threat to female safety, a threat to parental control. It was a far-reaching cultural redefinition in which marriage was no longer overtly a power relationship and men’s and women’s roles and spheres began to separate. Previously, women were seen as hyper-sexual; in 19thC, they were constructed as asexual instead, with their asexuality constructed as natural, rather than a necessity. Women began to turn to other women to talk about feelings, vulnerabilities, and increasingly foreign other gender. In the 20thC, mutual sexual attraction was reintegrated into marriage with the advent of dating, in which sexuality and attractiveness of men became associated with danger (“bad boy”). There was increasing anxiety over men’s intentions and society grappled with very real contradictions, because the dangerous but attractive Other is not a good bet for a stable marriage. Today, there are problems with maintaining sexual tension in a long relationship. Coontz finished her talk by asking how we make confidence in man’s intentions sexy? How to do eroticize equality?

Mary Bly/Eloisa James, Fordham University, speaking today as Eloisa James
Bly/James would like to see a conversation about shame in romance studies. We don’t like to think of shame as attached to reading, writing, or talking about romance, but we need to think about issues of where shame interacts with money in the romance genre. When she was growing up, her reading romance caused a family crisis. For every romance she read, she had to read a classic novel from “acceptable” literature. Her grandmother with no education was undervalued by the family, and that’s mostly where Bly/James got her romance from as a child and teen. Romance were a waste of her time, ruining her brain, like TV. Success hasn’t changed that equation for her. Money doesn’t help; in fact, it exacerbates the problem for her. When she was at Yale, she got “caught” by her friends with romances at the library. Her friends said, “I certainly see why you didn’t want anyone to see that,” and Bly/James felt intense shame. She believes very strongly that it shouldn’t have to be that way. The only way she could give herself permission to write romance was to say it was for money, and even then it became a completely underground career. Her ingrained sense of shame was so huge that she couldn’t reveal herself in the English departments she worked for. Even when she did come out, the shame didn’t go away. Any other popular genre would have been “cool,” but romance was humiliating. Romance scholars simplistically say that the romance genre is an affirmation of female desires, but for women to be reading/writing about sex is a very vexed topic. We have to recognize that and interrogate how shame and feminism and complexity can and do coexist. As scholars, we can’t ignore this. She wants another version of her, in ten years, to be able to use her romance writing as well as her scholarship of whatever kind FOR tenure, rather than having to hide it. She wants to be a part of diminishing the shame.

Jennifer Crusie, Romance Author
Crusie gets up and says, “Hi, I’m Jennifer Crusie, and I have no shame!” Her experience with romance has been very different. She rejects the assumption that people have that writers must agree that they’re writing trash because “everyone knows” that’s what romances are. She argues that romance writers and readers give away too much power because we want to belong. Romance is not merely a US tradition; it’s from all times and all places. It represents the feminizing of a form of fiction—a woman is on the center stage of a romance novel and she struggles and wins, proving that the world is an emotionally just place and that love and women can make a difference. Love is the biggest risk that humans take, but the stories about it are not cool. People turn back to literature of hope. They are not trashy, not stupid, not low class. Crusie ends, “the arc of the universe is long and bends towards justice,” claiming that romance is getting its due.

Questions:
Someone asked about the proliferation of the marriage plot in Reality TV. Bly said that she’d read that the most successful Reality shows are those that are aspirational (American Idol, for example, where you can see yourself achieving same dream). Coontz talked about the proliferation of niche marketing, but argued that there’s far less “Bachelor” on Reality TV nowadays than in the marriage markets in 18thC London.

Someone asked how the subversiveness of feminism works for or against the acceptance of romance (not sure I got that right). Crusie answered that the goal of a writer has to be to tell a good story, rather than insert a message into a book. The book succeeds with a reader because it resonates with a theme inside her, but you can’t predict that theme. Her literary criticism changed radically when she started writing. She’s trying to tell the truth of the people on the page. The true subversive message is that if you struggle, you will win.

Someone asked panelists to talk about Coontz’s final question of how we eroticize equality. Crusie said that the struggle is the story, the power dynamics are what drive it, and the equality comes at the end. Bly said that desire is very stubborn and may not be PC or cool, no matter how much we might like it to be. Coontz said that romances shouldn’t avoid the very real problems that exist in the world and in relationships. In sexuality, fear struggles with confidence. Modleski finished by saying that she thinks it would be most interesting to look at lesbian romances, where the power dynamics are necessarily different.


Overall, I’d heard or read most of the information from this panel before, except what Modleski discussed. Which is not to say that it wasn’t a perfect way to start the conference, because I absolutely think it was. We got a general historical overview (Coontz), theoretical overview (Modleski), and a clashing of some of the major themes in the study of the genre (shame, confidence, happiness, power dynamics, freedom, equality).

One thing that struck me more than anything else, and I didn’t get an opportunity to ask my question, but I was fascinated with the panel’s elision of the masculine, of the hero. Modleski talked about female complaint, Coontz about the construction of love and of the feminine, Bly and Crusie about the motivations of female writers and readers. But no one mentioned the hero of the romance and considering the thematic focus on masculinity in so many romances and romance series, this seemed an interesting omission. I asked Crusie about it after the panel finished and she said very definitely, “The hero’s the MacGuffin” (referring to the film term popularized by Alfred Hitchcock meaning the quest object that has no inherent value in and of itself except in that it catalyzes quest, which is where the real story lies). I wholeheartedly disagree. The hero might be the McGuffin for female-focused romances and romance series (like those of Crusie and James), but it certainly isn’t for me with my absolute hero-focus, and for readers like me who make Suzanne Brockmann, J.R. Ward, Sherrilyn Kenyon, and Stephanie Laurens best-selling authors and m/m romance the fastest growing field in erotic romance.

Sin and Redemption

Yesterday Sarah commented that 'Persuasion is my favorite *Austen* [...] but I still think P+P makes a better ROMANCE'. Of course, I could just have asked her why she thought that, but I didn't. Instead I sat around pondering the comment, and as I was also reading Mary Jo Putney's Thunder and Roses, of which Putney has said ' I love all my stories, but must admit that for pure romance, it's hard to beat Thunder and Roses', some ideas began to appear.

As Eric noted not so long ago, there is a

deep, deep link between all the various genres of romance--the link that makes all romance "inspirational," I suppose, even if it isn't all exactly Christian. That's a topic I'll try to come back to as the year goes by.

I hope Eric does have time to come back to this. It was touched on briefly by Rev Melinda, a poster at the joint blog to which Putney contributes, who said that

romances in general often deal with issues that could be viewed as "spiritual" if not religious—love, death, meaning, trust, betrayal, redemption, self-sacrifice, reconciliation, cruelty, kindness, generosity of spirit—and did I mention LOVE [...]?

So as Putney added, there is therefore 'at least an implicit element of spirituality in most romances' and in some, as in Thunder and Roses, it's quite explicit: 'In my book, Clare’s spiritual dilemma is her secret belief that her faith is not what it should be'.

I'd also love to read Sarah's explanation of why she thinks Pride and Prejudice is a better romance than Persuasion but in the meantime, here are some of my thoughts on romance and religion.

It's impossible not to notice that a lot of romances have titles which refer to theological concepts and beings including: sin (An Invitation to Sin, One Little Sin, Lady of Sin, Lord Sin, etc) ; wickedness (When He Was Wicked, Your Wicked Ways, Wicked Widow, Ways to be Wicked, etc); temptation (Welcome to Temptation, Slightly Tempted, My Fair Temptress etc); devils (Devil's Cub, The Devil's Bargain, Devilish, etc); angels (Angel in a Red Dress, Angel in My Bed, Kiss an Angel, etc). Pride and Prejudice, of course, has one of the seven deadly sins in its title, and the hero of Thunder and Roses is known as 'Old Nick' and is part of a group known as the 'Fallen Angels'. In this context, Persuasion seems a very mild title, and while it does include a misunderstanding between the hero and heroine, a bit of caution and timidity on her side, and a bit of misunderstanding and pique on his, it can't compare with the very much stronger disagreement between Darcy and Elizabeth, and the sin of pride.

It would seem that as well as having at a hero who is strongly associated with sin/wickedness, it helps if a romance also has at least one evil villain or villainness. Pride and Prejudice has the wicked Wickham who lies, cheats and seduces; Persuasion has Mr Elliott, who admittedly has been instrumental in the downfall of Mr and Mrs Smith, and makes Captain Wentworth jealous, but he hardly reaches the level of depravity attained by the hero's first wife in Thunder and Roses.

The actions of villains often create the tormented/tortured hero so beloved of many romance readers. Robin Uncapher has observed that

If you read many historicals you will be hard pressed to find a hero without a terrible hurt in his past. They all seem to have at least one, but I don't think that they are all tortured. To this reader, "tortured" reflects the way the hero deals with the problem. A tortured hero tortures himself. He may be wracked with guilt. He may be bitter or angry. [...] A hero I see as not tortured, is one who is mentally healthy, often in spite of the awful things that have happened to him.

What they all have in common, according to Robin Uncapher, is 'a terrible hurt'. Darcy has Wickham's betrayal to deal with, Putney's 'Old Nick' has a past full of misery and betrayal, but Captain Wentworth's biggest emotional trauma is only a postponed engagement and, as he discovers, his (very minor) pride and misunderstanding are the causes of it:

a question has suggested itself, whether there may not have been one person more my enemy even than that lady [Lady Russell, who persuaded Anne not to marry Wentworth years before]? My own self. Tell me if, when I returned to England, in the year eight, with a few thousand pounds, and was posted into the Laconia, if I had then written to you, would you have answered my letter? Would you, in short, have renewed the engagement then?"

"Would I?" was all her answer; but the accent was decisive enough.

"Good God!" he cried, "you would! It is not that I did not think of it, or desire it, as what could alone crown all my other success; but I was proud, too proud to ask again. I did not understand you. I shut my eyes, and would not understand you, or do you justice. (Chapter 23)

and as a man who describes himself as having 'been used to the gratification of believing myself to earn every blessing that I enjoyed. I have valued myself on honourable toils and just rewards', he gives no indication of either great suffering or a tormented soul.

Another feature shared by both Pride and Prejudice and Thunder and Roses is that the hero is redeemed/'tamed' as a result of his association with the heroine and in many romances the importance of the heroine is saving the hero is demonstrated in a scene in which he has to 'grovel' or beg her forgiveness. Here is Darcy, for example:

I was spoilt by my parents, who, though good themselves (my father particularly, all that was benevolent and amiable), allowed, encouraged, almost taught me to be selfish and overbearing -- to care for none beyond my own family circle, to think meanly of all the rest of the world, to wish at least to think meanly of their sense and worth compared with my own. Such I was, from eight to eight-and-twenty; and such I might still have been but for you, dearest, loveliest Elizabeth! What do I not owe you! You taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous. By you I was properly humbled. (Chapter 58)

Anne Marble writes that 'many fans read romances with tortured (or even "alpha heel") heroes because they want to read the "grovel" -- the part where he apologizes to the heroine and redeems himself in her eyes' and she's written more about 'redemption romances' at All About Romance, where she quotes from one of the readers of the board who had defined the core of this sort of romance as being 'about someone who for whatever reason has behaved badly in systematic fashion - has been a bad person, and by the end of the book has been redeemed'. Marble notes that 'heroines don't get to be redeemed as often as heroes. In fact, heroines tended to be the saviors rather than the saved'.

The most famous humbling scene in the New Testament is probably St Paul's, which takes place on the road to Damascus, and the idea that it is precisely those who are the most sinful who should be the focus of attention and redemptive efforts is at the core of the New Testament's message:

[the] scribes and Pharisees murmured against his disciples, saying, Why do ye eat and drink with publicans and sinners?
And Jesus answering said unto them, They that are whole need not a physician; but they that are sick.
I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. (Luke 5: 30-32)

In Catholic theology, the Virgin Mary is sometimes described as a 'co-redemptrix'. The term is often misunderstood, and it does not imply that she took over Christ's work or was equal to him, but rather that 'she suffered WITH the Redeemer in his act of saving us' (Vidal, 2001). The romance heroine also often suffers greatly and she may bear some resemblance to the Victorian 'angel in the house'. For the Victorians 'the ideal of femininity was encapsulated in the idea of a "woman's mission", which was that of playing a model mother, wife and daughter. Women were also seen as moral and spiritual guardians' (Nead 2004). Perhaps these female role models contribute to the scarcity of romance heroines in need of redemption?

The hero's redemption is complete when he acknowledges his love for the heroine. As John states, 'love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God' (1 John 5: 7). Of course, John was probably not thinking of love as depicted in romance novels, but as Pope Benedict XVI recently wrote in his first papal encyclical, Deus Caritas Est,

eros and agape—ascending love and descending love—can never be completely separated. The more the two, in their different aspects, find a proper unity in the one reality of love, the more the true nature of love in general is realized

With regard to the romance genre, some readers would appear to prefer stories in which the hero is sinful and inflicts suffering on the heroine because the greater his sin, the more powerful her redemptive work is shown to be. However, as the plentiful examples in this At the Back Fence column demonstrate, even among these readers there are limits on how much they will accept with regards to both the hero's behaviour (and, consequently, whether or not they believe he really has been redeemed) and the heroine's virtue (which, in extreme cases might be described as naivety) .

Not all romances are like this, but I wonder if this type is seen as a 'better ROMANCE' because it has come to be seen as the essence of what a romance story should be, both by romance readers and the general public. Is this the sort of storyline that those who mock the genre expect to find within the covers of a romance novel? And is their mockery due to a lack of belief in the hero's redemption? Or is it that these stories simply seem so extreme and incredible to them that they cannot believe in the heroine's exemplary virtue and love for the hero? I do have some sympathy for this point of view since, as noted above, many romance readers themselves would consider some heroes in this type of romance to be bullies, while their heroines may sometimes be designated TSTL (Too Stupid to Live).

But could it be that what really motivates some of these critics' scorn for the genre is their lack of belief in True Love? Scrooge declares that Christmas is 'Humbug' because 'What reason have you to be merry? You're poor enough. [...] I live in such a world of fools [...]. What's Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money [...]?', and I think many people look at romance readers and think us fools for not paying enough attention to the divorce statistics.* Maybe, then, some of the criticism of romance is due to its 'inspirational' nature which irks these non-believers.

Literature often requires some suspension of disbelief, but is enjoyment of the romance genre dependant on a sort of faith?

-----
* Stephanie Coontz suggests, however, that 'Throughout Europe and North America, divorce rates rose hand in glove with sales of romance novels'. I'm not sure what evidence she has for this, but her argument is that divorce rates rose precisely because of an increase in the belief in love as the basis for marriage because 'once marriage was based on love, people began to wonder if it wasn't better to be single than to marry or stay with someone you didn't love'.