New to the Wiki: "Vocabulary Decay", Medievalism and Julie Garwood, Feminism

Laura Vivanco

This time I thought I'd also include the items I didn't add to the bibliography so you can see the kinds of things I don't include. In the cases below, I omitted some interesting items because they either didn't deal with romance fiction at length or because they weren't secondary academic works.

First, though, are the items I did include:

 

Arvanitaki, Eirini, 2015. 

"Gender in Recent Romance Novels: A Third Wave Feminist Mills and Boon Love Affair?", in Re/Presenting Gender and Love, ed. Dikmen Yakalı Çamoğlu (Interdisciplinary Net). Index of the book

 

Diamond, Geneva, 2015. 

"Medievalism and the Courtship Plot in Julie Garwood's Popular Romance Novels", in The Middle Ages in Popular Culture: Medievalism and Genre, ed. Helen Young (Amhurst, NY: Cambria). Excerpt

Elliott, Jack, 2014. 

'Vocabulary Decay in Category Romance'. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Online, December 2014. [Abstract]

Writers of a best-selling category romance imprint share a common tendency to decrease their deployment of unique words over the span of their novels—a phenomenon of ‘vocabulary decay’. This tendency cannot be found in the novels of Jane Austen, suggesting this drop is not intrinsic to the romance genre itself, and is unlikely to have any true narrative purpose. A study of Charles Dickens shows that vocabulary decay extends beyond the romance genre. Closer examination reveals vocabulary decay is a result of progressive amounts of linguistic chunking—due to author fatigue or a desire to produce a more readable narrative. 

Elliott, Jack, 2015. 

'Whole Genre Sequencing', Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Online, August 2015. [Abstract]

[Taking as its corpus] all electronically available Harlequin Presents novels—some 1,400 from 1999 to 2013—this article demonstrates that the genre’s fundamental architecture is a choir of authorial voices, that its evolution is dominated by sudden shifts due to financial pressures on the publisher, and that the order in which elements appear—the plot—is largely fixed.

[Edited to add: I've written at a bit more length about Jack Elliott's articles over at my personal blog.]

In the romance scholarship section we also have (not so comprehensive) chick lit and rom-com bibliographies. New to the chick-lit list is:

Ferris, Suzanne. 

"Working Girls: The Precariat of Chick Lit", in Cupcakes, Pinterest and Ladyporn: Feminized Popular Culture in the Early Twenty-First Century, ed. Elana Levine (University of Illinois, 2015): 177-???.

I also came across a short piece of fiction which tells the tale of a romance writer's rise and fall. Since it's fiction I haven't added it to any of the bibliographies, but it may be of interest/irritation to some of you:

Stamm, Kim (1987) "Confessions of a Romance Novelist," Manuscripts: Vol. 56: Iss. 2, Article 12.

I've also omitted Craig Williams's "Roman Homosexuality in Historical Fiction, from Robert Graves to Steven Saylor", in Ancient Rome and the Construction of Modern Homosexual Identities, ed. Jennifer Ingleheart (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015): 176-???. That's because it doesn't have a lot to say about romance fiction (at least, not as far as I could tell from the excerpt), but there is a little, starting on page 190 and (from page 192) focusing on Fae Sutherland and Marguerite Labbe's The Gladiator's Master (2011).

JPRS 2.1 continued

Laura Vivanco

Some new essays, and some reviews, have been added to issue 2.1 of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies. In “When chick lit meets romanzo rosa: Intertextual narratives in Stefania Bertola’s romantic fiction,” Federica Balducci writes of romanzo rosa ("Italy’s tradition of popular romance") that

The master of romanzo rosa was Liala (Amalia Liana Cambiasi Negretti Odescalchi, 1897-1995), who remains the most popular romance writer to date (Arslan and Pozzato 1039; Roccella 12); all her novels have been continually reprinted through the decades. Her career stretched from the early 1930s to the 1980s, and her life and writing are so deeply interwoven that they have become the rosa’s prototype and foundation stone (Lepschy; Roccella 53). A member of the Italian aristocracy, Liala married Marquis Cambiasi, almost twenty years her senior. Shortly after the marriage she met the aircraft pilot Centurione Scotto and the two fell in love. Cambiasi agreed to divorce but in 1926, before the paperwork could be completed, Scotto died while performing an acrobatic flight. Liala’s first novel Signorsì (Yes, Sir) published in 1931 by Mondadori, is inspired by these events and became an instant bestseller (Lepschy 183-84).

According to Pozzato, Signorsì presents the “estetismo di massa” (“mass aestheticism”) that would become a trademark of Liala’s writing. Characterised by a sophisticated vocabulary and syntactical constructions, this style was rooted in the late-nineteenth century literary movement of decadentismo (Decadence), whose tones and values Liala absorbed and reworked in a more popular form, aimed at a broader readership (90). The main features of Liala’s “mass aestheticism,” Pozzato explains, are stunning heroines and stylish heroes, moral integrity, exquisite settings infused with a sense of grandeur, and refined tastes expressed through close attention to visual details, particularly when describing clothes, houses, cars and other material belongings (90). From a formal perspective, Anna Laura Lepschy identifies a strategy of “double focalization” in Liala’s courtship plots; that is to say, the emotions of both male and female characters are granted equal visibility and importance in the story (186).

I was struck by the number of similarities between Liala and Barbara Cartland (1901-2000): they were of the same generation, had very long careers, become figureheads for the genre in which they wrote, had aristocratic connections and wrote novels which featured "stunning heroines and stylish heroes, moral integrity, exquisite settings infused with a sense of grandeur, and refined tastes expressed through close attention to visual details, particularly when describing clothes, houses, cars and other material belongings." As far as I know, however, no-one has yet suggested that Cartland's writing was "Characterised by a sophisticated vocabulary and syntactical constructions."

Balducci's description of the much more recent writing of Stefania Bertola makes me wish that I knew Italian (or that that Bertola's novels had been translated into English).

Another new item which discusses chick lit and romance is Suzanne Ferriss's review of Chick Lit and Postfeminism by Stephanie Harzewski. Ferriss comments that

Harzewski notes that while popular romance fiction adheres to a “one woman-one man” ratio, chick lit presents one woman involved with many men. If in romance fiction, the quest for romance is central, in chick lit, the heroine’s quest for self-definition and the need to balance work with personal relationships is given equal, if not greater, attention. The idealized protagonist of romance fiction, typically an active, intelligent beauty, is nowhere to be seen in chick lit, which features protagonists who are highly conscious and critical of their physical appearance and who are more often pictured as flawed than feisty.

More significant differences center on the characterization of men and depictions of love and sex. Harzewski argues that romance fiction presents men as objects of erotic desire who are valued for their sexual prowess. By contrast, in chick lit, she argues, men are “not really valued as individuals as much as a means to a lifestyle, wedding, or in some cases beauty boost” (33). The moments of genuine eroticism that punctuate and, for some readers, characterize romance fiction are missing in chick lit.

Above all, the two genres differ in their endings. There are no HEA (“Happily Ever After”) endings in chick lit, which offers “a more realistic portrait of single life and dating, exploring in varying degrees, the dissolution of romantic ideals, or showing those ideals as unmet, sometimes unrealistic, expectations” (40).

Other new items are:

“Romancing the Past: History, Love, and Genre in Vincent Ward’s River Queen” by Roger Nicholson.

Kay Mussell's review of Reading the Adolescent Romance: Sweet Valley High and the Popular Young Adult Romance Novel by Amy S. Pattee.

Johansen Quijano's review of Boys' Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre, ed. by Antonia Levi, Mark McHarry, and Dru Pagliassotti.

Jonathan A. Allan's review of Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think About Marrying by Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker.

Iconoclasm and Reality, Romance and Chick Lit

Laura Vivanco

The program for "Iconoclasm: The Breaking and Making of Images," a conference taking place from the 17th to the 19th of March at the University of Toronto includes a paper by Angela Toscano (English, University of Utah): “Form and the Formulaic: The Iconoclasm of Happily Ever After in Popular Romance.”

Readers who prefer chick lit to romance might well argue that it is chick lit which is iconoclastic in its breaking of the conventions of the romance genre. According to Ferriss and Young

Supporters claim that, unlike traditional, convention-bound romance, chick lit jettisons the heterosexual hero to offer a more realistic portrait of single life, dating, and the dissolution of romantic ideals.
Both fans and authors of chick lit contend that the difference lies in the genre’s realism. Chicklit.us explains that it reflects “the lives of everyday working young women and men” and appeals to readers who “want to see their own lives in all the messy detail, reflected in fiction today.” (3)

Stephanie Harzewski, who received the Romance Writers of America’s 2006-2007 Academic Research Grant to assist her in completing her recently published Chick Lit and Postfeminism (2011) is apparently one of those who think that “Chick lit is [...] a more realistic version of the popular romance" (Newswise).

I wonder how much people's evaluations of what constitutes "realism" are shaped by their own experiences and beliefs. What little chick lit I've read has not depicted anything like my life, but then, by the time I finished my undergraduate degree I was already engaged to be married, so I've never experienced life as a young, working, single person.

I'll readily admit that many things in the romance genre are unrealistic; how many vampires do you know? All the same, I find romance's central belief in the possibility of "happily ever afters" quite realistic, and perhaps that's because my "romantic ideals" remain undissolved after more than a decade of marriage.

So what do you think? Are happy endings iconoclastic, realistic, or both?

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• Ferriss, Suzanne and Mallory Young. Introduction. Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction. Ed. Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young. New York: Routledge, 2006. 1-13.
• Newswise. "Instructor’s Book Analyzes ‘Chick Lit’ Genre." 31 Jan. 2011.