More recent/forthcoming publications: Goodreads, good reading, governesses and sheikhs

I accidentally missed an item off my previous list of new publications:

Turner, Ellen and Cecilia Wadsö Lecaros, Cecilia (2022). “The desert-governess romance: Regency England meets exotic Arabia.” Lund Journal of English Studies 4:1-24.

And since I've started this post, I thought I might as well add a few snippets from an article which isn't primarily about romance but does include some findings about romance readers. I get the impression that the authors of the article aren't judging readers, they're just pointing out that  few people are really reading as widely as is claimed (but not by them) to be "good" for you.

In the Introduction to Literary Studies and Human Flourishing, the editors, James F. English and Heather Love, describe the article like this:

English, Enderle, and Dhakecha find that ordinary readers are encouraged to take joy and solace from ways of reading that are sharply at odds with what is positively valued - deemed to be "good for you" - in academic literary studies. The team's study of many thousands of ratings and reviews on the Goodreads social reading site suggests that the vast majority of readers turn to literature to enjoy the repeatable satisfactions of a single favored genre such as romance, mystery, or science fiction. Even Goodreads users who describe their attachment to reading in the academically approved terms of an eclectic openness to new kinds of literary encounter appear actually to seek the comforts of belonging to a narrow community of shared tastes. (14)

In the article itself, English, Enderle, and Dhakecha write that:

readers who favor romance novels [...] are the most balkanized, the least omnivorous, and the most distant from readers who favor literary fiction [...]. The readers of literary fiction would themselves be as sharply segregated as romance readers were it not for the blurry borderland they share with readers of historical fiction [...]. The extreme lack of affinity between the romance and literary groups conforms with a classic high/low social division, romance being the least critically respected of all popular genres and literary fiction being in a sense a tautological category consisting of precisely those novels that attract critical regard. The strong affinity [...] between literary fiction and historical fiction conforms with what we know about the increasingly close relationship between critical status and historical setting on the contemporary literary field. And these patterns [...] conform with a conventional gender hierarchy. Women are a clear majority of Goodreads fiction readers in general, but we find them most heavily concentrated, approaching 100%, in romance. (52)

They do raise questions, though, about the "academically approved [...] eclectic openness to new kinds of literary encounter":  "shouldn't we [...] direct some critical vigilance toward the orthodoxy of eclecticism itself? When exactly did the heterogeneity of one's reading become the measure of one's readerly health?" (59). Unfortunately the book's not been published yet, so I wasn't able to read any further to see if they provide any answers to those questions.

What I did find was the authors' website where you can find an interactive graph of their findings.

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English, James F., Scott Enderle, and Rahul Dhakecha. "Bad Habits on Goodreads? Eclecticism vs. Genre-Intolerance among Online Readers." Literary Studies and Human Flourishing, Ed. James F. English and Heather Love. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. 35-62. [Excerpt here.]

Ohio State University Press Texts - free pdfs

I was really happy to discover that Ohio State University Press make many of their texts free five years after publication. This includes some interesting work on popular romance fiction.

Kapila, Shuchi, 2010. 

Educating Seeta: The Anglo-Indian Family Romance and the Poetics of Indirect Rule (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State UP). ["Educating Seeta makes the case that representations of [...] inter-racial relationships in the tropes of domestic fiction create a fantasy of liberal colonial rule in nineteenth-century British India. British colonials in India were preoccupied with appearing as a benevolent, civilizing power to their British and colonial subjects" and although we see "The death of the Indian woman in many of these romances, signaling that interracial love is not socially viable [...] There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, for instance in the Orientalist idealization of the Indian woman in Maud Diver’s Lilamani, in which interracial marriage between Neville Sinclair and Lilamani heralds a new understanding between cultures with the ultimate goal of “civilizing” other cultures into European ways of life." See in particular pages 54-77.]

Lutz, Deborah, 2006. 

The Dangerous Lover; Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative. (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press). [Includes a chapter on the presence of the "dangerous lover" in the contemporary historical romance.]

Sanders, Lise Shapiro, 2006. 

Consuming Fantasies: Labor, Leisure, and the London Shopgirl, 1880-1920. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. [See Chapters 3 and 4 on "The Failures of the Romance: Boredom and the Production of Consuming Desires" and "Imagining Alternatives to the Romance: Absorption and Distraction as Modes of Reading."]

Tatlock, Lynne, 2012. 

German Writing, American Reading: Women and the Import of Fiction, 1866-1917 (Columbus: Ohio State UP). ["Chapter 4 examines German novels as American reading from the perspective of the happy ending, an international signature of romance novels and of nearly all of the German novels by women in my dataset. The chapter uncovers and analyzes variations in plotting ritual death and recovery to a state of freedom that characterize these German novels and that appealed to American readers by offering them the vicarious experience of a multiplicity of female subjectivities and female-determined male subjectivities while cautiously expanding the boundaries of home in a place called Germany."]

Also of possible interest:

Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (2006).

New to the Romance Wiki Bibliography: Romance Readers from 1880 to the present, Race, Sex and more

Driscoll, Beth, 2019. 

'Book Blogs as Tastemakers', Participations 16.1: 280-305. [Looks at romance fiction blogs Smart Bitches, Trashy Books (SBTB), Natasha is a Book Junkie (NIABJ), and Joyfully Jay.]

Farooqui, Javaria and Rabia Ashraf, 2019. 

‘Reconnaissance of “Difference” in Cognitive Maps: Authenticating Happily Ever After in Julia Quinn’s To Sir Philip with Love’, Khazar Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 22.2: 71-82.

Gardner, Dora Abigail, 2019. 

'Defending the Bodice Ripper', MA thesis, Eastern Kentucky University. Excerpt

Gruner, Elisabeth Rose, 2019. 

Constructing the Adolescent Reader in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Abstract [See in particular Chapter 3, "Misreading the Classics: Gender, Genre, and Agency in YA Romance", pp. 51-84.]

Kerr, Ashley Elizabeth, 2019. 

“Indigenous Lovers and Villainous Scientists: Rewriting Nineteenth-Century Ideas of Race in Argentine Romance Novels”, Chasqui 48.1: 293-310. Excerpt. [This is about three novels (written in 2005 and 2010) by Argentinian authors and set in the nineteenth century.]

 

Mazloomian, Maryam, and Nahid Mohammadi. 2018. 

“Discursive Vulnerability and Identity Development: A Triangular Model of Bio-Forces in Cultural Ecological Analysis of American Romance Fiction.” Forum for World Literature Studies, vol. 10, no. 3, Sept. 2018, pp. 413–432.

Moore, Laura M, 2019. 

"Sexual Agency, Safe Sex, and Consent Negotiations in Erotic Romance Novels." European Journal of Social Sciences 2.2: 92-96.

Philips, Deborah. Forthcoming. 

"Fifty Shades of Romance." International Journal of Cultural Studies. Manuscript version

Philips, Deborah. Forthcoming. 

"In defence of reading trash: feminists reading the romance." European Journal of Cultural Studies. Manuscript version

Reed, Eleanor, 2018.

"Domestic Culture in Woman's Weekly, 1918-1958", Doctoral thesis, Department of English and Creative Writing, University of Roehampton. ["This thesis [...] explores the domestic culture produced by the magazine between the end of the First World War in November 1918,and 1958." The "literary methodology for surveying periodical form [...] is based on romance, the genre to which the vast majority of Woman’s Weekly fiction printed during the period belongs" (2).]

Sanders, Lise Shapiro, 2006. 

Consuming Fantasies: Labor, Leisure, and the London Shopgirl, 1880-1920. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. [See Chapters 3 and 4 on "The Failures of the Romance: Boredom and the Production of Consuming Desires" and "Imagining Alternatives to the Romance: Absorption and Distraction as Modes of Reading."]

 

Teo, Hsu-Ming, 2018. 

"The contemporary Anglophone romance genre." Oxford research encyclopedia of literature. Ed. Paula Rabinowitz. Oxford, UK : Oxford University Press. 25 pages. Summary

Trower, Shelley, Amy Tooth Murphy and Graham Smith, 2019. 

‘“Me mum likes a book, me dad’s a newspaper man”: Reading, gender and domestic life in “100 Families”’, Participations 16.1: 554-581.

Also new, but since it's an undergraduate publication I placed it in the section for online essays:

Reitemeier, Rebecca. 

"Romance Novels and Higher Education." Inter-Text: An Undergraduate Journal for Social Sciences and Humanities 2.2 (2019).

New to the Wiki: Romance Fiction v. Real Life

Laura Vivanco

Iwai, Gaku, 2015. 

"Wartime Ideology in 'The Thimble': A Comparative Study of Popular Wartime Romance and the Anti-romance of D. H. Lawrence." Études Lawrenciennes 46.

 

Kempf, Rachel Erin, 2015. 

"Dirty Words: The Writing Process of 'Smutshop'." The University of Texas at Austin, Master of Fine Arts. ["I worked at Siren-BookStop, Inc. for three years, cleaning up manuscripts and penning gay werewolf erotica [...] It was the best and worst job I’ve ever had — the best because I got paid to write and spend my workday making dirty jokes, and the worst because real sex isn’t porn sex, and real women aren’t romance heroines, and love and relationships are messy and complicated and when you spend all day boxing it into the confines of a highly formulaic genre, you’re bound to start getting some messed-up ideas about how your love life ought to be"]

 

Meyer, Michaela D. E., 2015. 

"Living the Romance through Castle: Exploring Autoethnography, Popular Culture and Romantic Television Narratives". The Popular Culture Studies Journal 3.1&2: 245-269. [This includes a discussion of romance fiction, not just television romantic narratives]

Moody, Stephanie, 2016. 

"Identification, Affect, and Escape: Theorizing Popular Romance Reading." Pedagogy 16.1: 105-123. Abstract

Slušná, Zuzana, 2015. 

"Postfeminism, Post-romantic and New Patterns of Feminity [sic] in Popular Culture." European Journal of Science and Theology 11.6: 229-238.

Reading and Puzzle-Solving

Laura Vivanco

A Disentanglement Puzzle

Over at OnFiction Raymond A. Mar reports on some new research about reading:

We all know people who are heavily influenced by whatever they happen to be reading or watching, crying at the drop of a hat. On the other hand, there are those who seem to have no difficulty withdrawing from a narrative world, seemingly unfazed by sad films and scary books. One interesting avenue of work has found that those who are intrigued by puzzles and enjoy complicated problem-solving--a trait known as “need for cognition”--are also more likely to be deeply engaged with a story. [...] In other words, the complexities of a narrative appear to be just another puzzle that some people enjoy unlocking.

Raymond's got more details in his post.


The photo is the work of Matěj Baťha who made it available via Wikimedia Commons with a Creative Commons licence.

Sensitivity and Sexuality

Laura Vivanco

OnFiction reports that

In early July, the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature and Media held its 13th Biennial meeting. [...]

Katrina Fong (York University) examined whether how exposure to different literary genres is related to one’s ability to infer what other people are thinking and feeling. Perhaps surprisingly, after controlling for various factors, only two genres were related to interpersonal sensitivity: romance and suspense/thriller.

CFP: Contemporary Black Female Sexualities

For a collection on “Contemporary Black Female Sexualities,” the editors invite essays that explore black women’s sexualities--and representations or manifestations of black female sexual desires--marked by agency and empowerment, as well as instances wherein black women’s sexual intimacies are regulated by them. Given the degree to which black female sexuality has historically been mediated by politics of respectability or silence, as well as hindered by and constructed in opposition to Western paradigms of womanhood and “normative” female sexuality, this volume seeks contribution--both disciplinary and interdisciplinary and from a range of theoretical, ideological, methodological, socio-political, and critical frameworks--that address and illuminate contemporary black female sexualities. (More details here)

Quotes from CFPs: Reading, Pop Culture, Medievalism, Gay Marriage

Laura Vivanco

Reading has had numerous meanings for different people at different times and places. From reading an animal’s tracks, or a street sign, to reading Derrida, the act of reading has referred to a wide range of activities. People have read for practical purposes (for information, for knowledge, or for material gain), for holy ends (the Quran said “Read in the name of your Lord”), for political and social reasons (“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free,” said Frederick Douglass), for entertainment, etc. In the age of computers, cell phones, and the Internet, traditional notions about the significance of reading, its function, and value seem to be challenged in various ways. (From Cover to Cover: Reading Readers, Ankara, Turkey, November 7 – 9, 2012)

In recent years, popular culture has come to be considered a valid and fruitful point of academic inquiry, helping to infuse more established disciplines, including English studies, with fresh life. Scholars have become increasingly aware of the broader implications of popular culture, which encompasses such diverse media as magazines, books, film, television, comic books/graphic novels, and internet content, for discourses mis/unrepresented or marginalized within the mainstream. (Motley, An English Studies Journal for Diversity)

At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, popular culture finds itself at a crossroads: has the concept been drained of its meaning because of its overwhelming popularity? After the euphoria around the popular, what afterlife can be expected from it? Should we still be discussing the popular as opposed to high and folk culture? (International Conference "Report from the Pop Line: On the Life and Afterlife of Popular": 3-4 December 2012, Lisbon)

Medievalism – the reception and adaptation of the politics, history, art and literature of the Middle Ages – has burgeoned over the past decade, and is now coming of age as a subject of serious academic enquiry. (The Middle Ages in the Modern World, University of St Andrews, UK, 25-28 June, 2013)

the recent debate regarding the defense of marriage and the realities of queer, bisexual, transgender, asexual, same-sex, and nonmonogamous identities and experiences, have sometimes forced a reconceptualization of marriage and at other times uncritically perpetuated a heteronormative model linked to ideals and compulsions toward consumerism, entitlement, and conformity. (Panel titled Critical Representations of Marriage 44th Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) March 21-24, 2013)

Immersive Reading

Laura Vivanco

Glen Thomas has argued that

the [romance] genre's defenders share the underlying assumption of the genre's harshest critics that books should do something, whether that "something" entails enabling readers to better understand the vicissitudes of Life (the Leavisite great tradition), stripping away readers' false consciousness (a Marxist defense of more radical art), or soothing readers with promises of happiness and sensual "joy" (a Marxist critique of popular culture which the genre's defenders reframe as a badge of honor). (210)

In Thomas's opinion, the debates between these defenders and critics of romance are "enervating" (210). All the same, recent studies (see, for example, OnFiction's posts about the effects of fiction), suggest that reading often does seem to do things. Rather than abandon the debate altogether, perhaps we just need to postpone it until we have the results of some more studies?

Today Suzanne Brockmann tweeted about Geoff F. Kaufman and Lisa K. Libby's "Changing Beliefs and Behavior Through Experience-Taking." They don't discuss romances or come up with any findings which would put an end to the debate outlined by Thomas, but they do observe that:

Without question, our encounters with characters in fiction present us with a diverse array of personalities, perspectives, events, outcomes, and realizations. In transporting us to another place and time, literature allows us to imagine ourselves as characters who possess personality traits that are distinct from our own (such as the intellectual prowess of Sherlock Holmes or the gregariousness and pluck of the titular heroine in Anne of Green Gables) or who engage in actions or hold ideals that we often aspire to achieve (e.g., Tom Sawyer or Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird). Moreover, works of fiction often let us experience the life journeys of people from backgrounds and identity groups quite different from our own, opening our eyes and minds to the unique struggles and triumphs of individuals we may not otherwise have the opportunity or inclination to encounter in our daily lives. For example, The Color Purple offered Caucasian readers the chance to see and experience the world through the eyes of its African American characters, and Brokeback Mountain allowed many heterosexual readers to step into the shoes—or rather, boots—of a pair of conflicted homosexual cowboys.

This immersive phenomenon of simulating the mindset and persona of a protagonist is what we refer to as experience-taking. Through experience-taking, readers lose themselves and assume the identity of the character, adopting the character’s thoughts, emotions, goals, traits, and actions and experiencing the narrative as though they were that character [...]. As powerful and transformative as experience-taking might be, however, it is by no means an inevitable occurrence when reading a narrative. To live different lives and to experience novel personas through narratives require that we go beyond positioning ourselves as mere spectators of the events and connect to characters to such an extent that we instead step into their proverbial shoes and experience the story from their perspective, in essence imagining ourselves becoming those characters while we remain immersed in the world of the narrative.

Science Daily has a summary of Kaufman and Libby's findings about the real-life effects of this type of reading.

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• Kaufman, Geoff F. and Lisa K. Libby. "Changing Beliefs and Behavior Through Experience-Taking." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 26 March 2012. Advance online publication. [Abstract]
• Thomas, Glen. "Happy Readers or Sad Ones? Romance Fiction and the Problems of the Media Effects Model." New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction: Critical Essays. Ed. Sarah S. G. Frantz and Eric Murphy Selinger. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012.

The image was download under a Creative Commons license from Flikr and was created by Kristian Bjornard (bjornmeansbear).

JPRS 2.2: Special Forum on Jennifer Crusie

Laura Vivanco

As Eric writes, "This feature was first imagined, many years ago, as a book of critical essays, to be edited by Laura Vivanco and myself." We sent out the first call for papers in July 2006 and a subsequent one, for additional papers, in January 2008. In the end, we never did get enough essays to fill a whole volume. Perhaps it was all for the best; now these six essays (and a detailed introduction) are freely available to everyone with an internet connection.

"Nothing But Good Times Ahead" -  an introduction, by Eric Selinger

I would not be editor of this journal—in fact, the journal itself might not exist—had I not encountered Crusie’s novels and essays in the early 2000s.  They made me want to be a romance scholar, and since 2006, when I began to teach courses on popular romance, a novel and / or essay by Crusie has appeared on every one of my twenty-plus syllabi. [...]  To hear Crusie’s characters debate the nature of stories or watch them read the material world around them, from clothing to china to paintings to home decor, is to learn how to read, better and deeper, in the broadest sense of the verb.

"Jennifer Crusie's Literary Lingerie" - by Laura Vivanco

in Crusie’s fiction even the flimsiest piece of lingerie can be “heavy with meaning” (“Romancing” 86). This meaning is only partially encoded in the fabrics, styles and colours chosen: it is also dependent on the context in which a particular item is worn or discarded. In one situation, therefore, lingerie can function as an instrument of patriarchal oppression while in another it may serve as a weapon in the feminist struggle; it can be used to signal sexual interest and boost a woman’s confidence but may also reinforce her feelings of inadequacy about her body; it can cause her physical discomfort or give sensual pleasure; although it can indicate a lack of openness and truth, female intimacy is promoted as women discuss their lingerie and via such discussions give each other emotional support that complements the physical uplift of underwiring and padding. Crusie’s literary lingerie reflects the complexity of women’s relationships with their bodies, their desires, their sexual partners and their friends.

"Crusie and the Con" - by Christina A. Valeo

My consideration of the con in Crusie’s work, and my argument that the exchange between romance writer and romance reader itself resembles a con, focuses on the agency of the reader in the exchange, on her willing participation in this literary shell game. If we extend the conversation beyond the moral debate, the author’s intent, or the text’s effect, we can consider more completely the reader’s role in constructing the meaning and negotiating the impact of the text.

"Tell Me Lies: Lying, Storytelling and the Romance Novel as Feminist Fiction" - by Patricia Zakreski

In discussions concerning lying, many contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists agree that different cultures, and even individuals within the same culture, have varying ideas about what does and does not count as a lie. Opinion over the social impact of lying is also divided. Whether seen as immoral and self-serving or as a necessary social skill, lying is a difficult concept to define. Crusie, however, offers her own definition in The Cinderella Deal that highlights the transformative potential of fictions of romance. While Linc thinks that telling the faculty at Prescott that he is engaged is a lie, Daisy offers a different perspective [...]. Daisy’s idea of a lie is something that attempts to alter the facts of the past, while a story presents a vision of a desired present and future—something Linc wants rather than something he’s done. Presenting a version of reality as he would like it to be is therefore not a lie, but is instead a possible preview of coming truths, a story he created, which, though fictional, can be made real.

"Getting Laid, Getting Old, and Getting Fed: The Cultural Resistance of Jennifer Crusie's Romance Heroines" - by Kyra Kramer

One of the ways in which Crusie contests “a lot of the ‘truths’ that the different societal ideologies have foisted on” her heroines is through her depiction of their bodies. In several of her novels, her heroines find a satisfying romance in spite of the fact they transgress in some way the modern cultural conceptualisation of what is a “desirable” or “beautiful” woman, thereby contesting the cultural ideal of “feminine beauty.” Although there are several other areas in which the bodies of her heroines are consistent with culturally ascribed definition of what is normal or what is beautiful—in that they are white, middle-class heroines who are not transgendered, homosexual, disabled, or disfigured, among other variables—there is at least an attempt by Crusie to stretch the narrow definition of what kind of woman is ‘allowed’ to live happily ever after within the cultural narrative.

"The Heroine as Reader, the Reader as Heroine: Jennifer Crusie's Welcome to Temptation" - by Kate Moore and Eric Selinger

Crusie does not deny that individuals can confuse fantasy and reality, but rather suggests that confusion about boundaries between the two realms is not specific to women or to one form of fantasy, the romance, but rather arises in the vanity and egocentrism of the person experiencing the fantasy. To make her case, Crusie opens the novel by locating her heroine’s imaginative experience as a reader and writer in the larger context of accepted imaginative experience in American popular culture. She then juxtaposes her heroine’s fantasy experience against the experiences of a cast of secondary characters, both male and female, whose participation in popularly accepted forms of fantasy, those not subject to critical derision for association with women, leads them into moral error.

"Gossip, Liminality, and Erotic Display: Jennifer Crusie's Links to Eighteenth-Century Amatory Fiction" - by Kimberly Baldus

Tell Me Lies and the novels that followed in the next two years, Crazy for You and Welcome to Temptation, increasingly linger on moments where eroticism develops in the liminal space between private intimacy and public exposure. Crusie constructs scenes where her female characters explore the liberating possibilities of turning their private sexual encounters into public spectacles, offering themselves as objects of a voyeuristic gaze which readers are invited to share. [...] In the links she develops between liminality, gossip and erotic display, Crusie’s modern romance draws upon territory first developed in the genre of the novel designated as “amatory fiction” (Ballaster). These texts, appearing in the early eighteenth century in England, played a crucial role in shaping the emerging genre of the novel. [...] The notion of the liminal as a realm that inspires creativity and invites new possibilities underpins a model of authorship that playfully invites readers to participate in the communal act of making meaning from the textual details of their novels.

Show, Don't Tell

Laura Vivanco

Every writing student has heard the rule that you should show, not tell, but this principle seems to be among the hardest for beginners to master. [...] Why is showing better? Two reasons. First, it creates mental pictures for the reader. [...]  Second, showing is interactive and participatory: it forces the reader to become involved in the story, deducing facts [...] for himself or herself, rather than just taking information in passively. (Robert J. Sawyer)

And apparently deducing facts may be very important in assisting identification with a character. Over at OnFiction Keith Oatley reports on the findings of Maria Kotovych, Peter Dixon, Marisa Bortolussi, and Mark Holden as outlined in "Textual determinants of a component of literary identification," Scientific Study of Literature, 1 (2011): 260-291.

Their idea is that just as when in conversation we make inferences about what the other person is thinking and feeling, so we do in coming to understand a character in a book. When we need to make such inferences we come to understand the character better, and can identify with that character more strongly.  [...]

Kotovych and her colleagues argue that the literary idea of identification is not well defined, and they concentrate on just one aspect of it, which they call "transparency:" the extent to which readers understand a character. In this first experiment the researchers found that the transparency of the narrator was greater for readers who read the story with the implicit preamble than for those who read the story with the explicit preamble. [...]

In a third experiment the authors used stories by different writers, and compared versions that used free-indirect speech and directly quoted speech. Free-indirect speech requires more inferences than directly quoted speech. Again they found more transparency of characters was achieved in the versions that required more inference. [...]

The idea that in coming to know a literary character we need to make inferences as we would with a real person, not just be told about the character, is a critical insight.

Photo by anilkuzhikala and made available via Wikimedia Commons.

PCA/ACA 2012 - (4)

Laura Vivanco

Romancing the Monster: Authors, Audience, Steampunk, and Fan Fiction

Thursday, April 12, 2012 - 8:00am - 9:30am

“The Person Behind the Curtain”: Evolving Roles of Author and Audience in Paranormal Romance
Esther Guenat -  Temple College

When considering reader response criticism and its focus on examining literature and its readers in such a way that explores the diversity of readers’ responses to literary works, one might not immediately consider audiences of popular fiction, let alone audiences of romance novels. Readers of urban fantasy and paranormal romance are becoming much more diverse—both regarding who does the reading and those readers’ expectations—and the writing of each has evolved along with the audiences. While the use of supernatural aspects, sexual exploration, and urban locale were different standards of the two sub-genres, the conventional romance remained the same, as did reader expectation—heterosexual women sought out tales of supernaturally enhanced heterosexual relationships that ended in happily ever after. Recent reader-oriented critics have focused on how a given type of fiction audience’s expectations change over time; feminist and gender critics ask whether there is such a thing as “reading like a woman,” just as gay and lesbian critics ask whether there is a homosexual way of reading. Audience expectation of urban fantasy and paranormal romance has become much more diverse in its response—to gender roles, homosexual relationships, and even heterosexual relationships—and the formulas of these two sub-genres are no longer exact. Various authors have been able to somewhat adapt and evolve their writing so that it encompasses and allows for a more diverse following. Through this examination of works of various urban fantasy and paranormal romance authors, I explore the way the conventional romance novel formula is changing, how the readership of the genre is changing, and how authors of the genre are responding to and adapting to this change, thus creating a sub-genre of popular fiction that defies conventional ideas of romance and matches its audience in diversity.

"I am so over the whole vampires and werewolves and demons, oh my": How a Series of Steampunk "Romances" Offered This Romance Reader an Alternative to Paranormals
Glinda Hall - Arkansas State University

It is not difficult to acknowledge the popularity and role that the paranormal plays and has played within our culture, and especially throughout our literature.  For romance fiction, it is easy to understand the appeal because the paranormal allows for sexual expression and experimentation that readers may not dare fantasize about within mainstream and/or contemporary romance.  However, when I began my journey as a romance reader and scholar some 8 years ago, I also found paranormals appealing for this very reason; but now I have become disillusioned with the illusion.  Not to overplay a feminist approach to romance fiction, but (thanks to the saturation of the Twilight series) it seems the paranormal has outlived its usefulness in terms of its once used format for sexual exploration.

In my paper presentation, I will show how Gail Carriger’s steampunk series – Soulless, Changeless, Blameless, and Heartless – gives us a heroine, Alexia Tarabotti, that represents a strong, intelligent female, but also one literally immune to the supernatural that is a very real part of her alternative Victorian reality.  Alexia is an anti-paranormal protagonist, and this anti-paranormal plot schematic and characterization exposes devises used by romance paranormals and counters them.

Re-imagining the Heroine as a 'Slave to Desire': Power Games and (Hetero) Sexual Rhetoric in Labyrinth and Buffy the Vampire Slayer Fanfiction
Danielle Lawson - Edinboro University

This paper explores the sexual rhetoric of power games, specifically representations of erotic power exchange in fanfiction written for the Labyrinth (Jim Henson) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Joss Whedon) fandoms. In particular, this research is concerned with the erotic power dynamic represented between the primary ‘romantic’ relationships in both original stories: Jareth/Sarah (Labyrinth) and Spike/Buffy (BtVS). Although the genres and intended audiences of the movie/tv show differ greatly, there are many similarities in the way the relationship dynamic between the characters is developed by authors of fanfiction. Using a combination of rhetorical analysis and critical discourse analysis, this study demonstrates how authors of hetero-oriented fanfiction re-claim the ‘dominant male/submissive female’ construct as an acceptable relationship dynamic. Moreover, the research presented shows that this re-claiming serves to build a subtext of feminine power, wherein the heroine is empowered (rather than oppressed) by accepting that they have the freedom to submit to their desires – even if that desire is to be dominated. In reaching this point, the male antagonists engage in a three phase power game: 1) Setting the Bait, 2) The Chase and 3) The Surrender. Other themes discussed include the disconnect between romance, power and ‘happily ever after’.

Not a Family Planning Guide; Not Art Either?

Laura Vivanco

In the same week that there was extensive reporting of Susan Quilliam's condemnation of romance novels because "the values of romantic fiction – particularly at its inception – sometimes run totally counter to those which we Journal [of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care] readers espouse" (180), there was

another diagnosis, by a fellow psychologist, to the effect that fiction is actually good for you. Promoting his new book Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction on Radio 4 last week, Professor Keith Oatley, said that reading fiction assisted people's "social understanding" and helps, in the manner of a flight simulator, with the development of empathy: "The more time you spend, the better you are at understanding other people". (Bennett)

Unfortunately, I don't think Oatley's findings can be used to defend the romance genre. If anything, Oatley and Quilliam would seem to be in agreement that the romance genre has "values" and, albeit for very different reasons, this leads them to question its merit.

As Suzanne Keen has noted, "popular fiction [...] has not often been praised for the beneficial effects attributed to great literature" (ix) and Oatley's book continues in this tradition by making a distinction between popular culture fictions such as romance, and true art. Oatley mentions that

Related to the psychology of persuasion and enculturation is, of course, the psychology of advertising and propaganda. In a related way, many action stories and romances come in this category. Robin Collingwood [...] regarded such genres as action and romance as non-art, because they are not explorations. They follow formulae, and their writers intend to induce particular kinds of emotion. If successful they are entertaining. That's their intention. But they are not art, and they are not - in my view - the kinds of works that are likely to increase understanding of ourselves or others, at least when the formula of the genre is adhered to in the usual way.
But art - I'll offer a criterion - does not recruit people to believe or act or feel in a particular way. (174)

Firstly, I can't help but feel that this definition of art is very dependent on assumptions made about the intentions of the authors. Without asking authors what their intentions were, how can we know for sure which authors "intend[ed] to induce particular kinds of emotions" and which didn't?

Secondly, even if we accept that certain genres can, as a whole, be deemed to have set purposes, defining as "art" only works in which the author did not intend to "recruit people to believe or act or feel in a particular way" does, it seems to me, exclude large swathes of what many people would consider to be literature. Satire would presumably no longer be art. Nor would "thesis novels." Elegy and tragedy may perhaps also be excluded as they are too likely to evoke sadness and catharsis, while comedies can be deemed unartistic on the grounds that they are designed to evoke laughter.

Presumably works should also be disqualified if their authors hope they will assist in the development of readers' "social understanding" and/or capacity for empathy. Keen reports that

according to Coleridge, he and Wordsworth agreed in their collaboration on the Lyrical Ballads (1798) that the first of two cardinal principals of poetry was "the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature" (Biographia Literaria 5). Shelley concurred about the civilizing effects of reading poetry. (50)

and

George Eliot had a notion of character-construction as calling forth "tolerant judgment, pity, and sympathy" in her readers (Eliot to John Blackwood, 18 February 1857; Letters 2, 299). [...] Her sense of her own contribution to her readers' moral development comes through in one of her letters to Charles Bray, in which she writes that "the only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures." (Keen 53-54)

It would seem that Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Eliot hoped to "recruit people to believe or act or feel in a particular way" and therefore, judged by Oatley's criterion, their works are presumably not "art."

Thirdly, given that some readers will always respond in ways which the author could not have anticipated, the intended purpose of a work may in any case not have much bearing on whether it increases a particular reader's understanding of themselves or others.

Fourthly, as Keen observes,

middlebrow readers tend to value novels offering opportunities for strong character identification. They report feeling both empathy with and sympathy for fictional characters. They believe that novel reading opens their minds to experiences, dilemmas, time periods, places, and situations that would otherwise be closed to them. (ix)

I rather suspect that many romance readers would concur with this description of the pleasures and benefits of reading. Janice Radway, for example, "was surprised to find that immediately after extolling their benefits as an 'escape,' nearly every reader informed me that the novels teach them about faraway places and times and instruct them in the customs of other cultures" (107) and Sarah Wendell, in her forthcoming Everything I Know About Love I Learned From Romance Novels, apparently argues that they "might have more to say about love than we give them credit for." This being so, it seems possible to argue that romances, too, can "increase understanding of ourselves or others."

• Bennett, Catherine. "But Mr Darcy, shouldn't we be taking precautions?: Damning romantic fiction for failing to educate its readers is both patronising and nonsensical." Observer, 10 July 2011.
• Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007.
  
• Oatley, Keith. Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
• Quilliam, Susan. " 'He seized her in his manly arms and bent his lips to hers…': The Surprising Impact that Romantic Novels Have On Our Work." Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care 37.3 (2011): 179-181.
• Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. 1984. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: U of North Carolina Press, 1991.
  

The photo of candy floss being consumed was taken by "One Hell Of A Loser" and was made available under a Creative Commons licence.

Slowness

Jonathan A. Allan

I have been thinking about time recently, more specifically, as a virginity scholar, the first time. This post is very much about an idea that is growing slowly, too slowly. Throughout my doctoral studies, I have had the great fortune of studying under the supervision of some really engaging academics, namely, my supervisor who has been writing about some of the ideas that are floating around in my mind. My supervisor is also a fan of “experimental teaching” methods and thus when we, as a class, read Proust, none of us had read Proust. What would happen if a group of students and the professor had never read the text being considered?

To these ends, I have been thinking about the question of slowness and reading, writing, living, etc. Carl Honoré in his book In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed observes that:

These days, the whole world is time-sick. We all belong to the same cult of speed. Standing in that lineup for my flight home to London, I begin with the questions that lie at the heart of this book: Why are we always in such a rush? What is the cure for time-sickness? Is it possible, or even desirable, to slow down?” (3)

These questions strike me as provocative and worthy of consideration. Why does time have such an influence over quotidian life and how does one overcome the cult of time/speed? One of the most striking examples from his book, or perhaps only striking because of the space from which I write, is when he writes:

In 2000, David Cottrell and Mark Layton published 175 Way to Get More Done in Less Time. Written in breathless, get-on-with-it prose, the book is a manual for maximizing efficiency, for acceleration. Tip number 141 is simply: “Do Everything Faster!”

And in those three words, the authors neatly sum up what is wrong with the modern world. Think about it for a minute: Do Everything Faster. Does it really make sense to speed-read Proust, make love in half the time or cook every meal in the microwave? Surely not, but the fact that someone could write the words “Do Everything Faster” underlines just how far we have gone off the rails, and how urgently we need to rethink our whole way of life. (36)

I find his challenge interesting precisely because, like the author, I have this compulsion to do things quickly – read the book quickly, write the lecture quickly. But aren't there things that we want to slow down so as to prolong our enjoyment of them, our experience of them?

Romance novels, however, at least those that I have been reading lately about a virgin’s first time, seem to thrive on this slowness. We are slowly led through the development of the relationship between the protagonists. If one looks at a novel like Last Virgin in California by Maureen Child or The 39-Year-Old Virgin by Marie Ferrarella or The Last Male Virgin by Katherine Deauxville, things often move slowly, glacially so, in the novel. The hero or the heroine will realise that, as Anke Bernau writes in Virgins: A Cultural History, "virginity is not so much a fixed state or condition, as a journey one must undertake" (67). The whole point of the novel is the very long journey involved in losing one’s virginity, indeed, a very slow process. The paradox of romance reading, however, is that most readers read quickly (as Janice Radway noted in Reading the Romance). Regardless, I am interested in the idea of slowness whether it be in the act of reading (reading slowly) or in the act of narration (slowing down narrative). The paradox noted above seems like an interesting place to begin when we think about speed, slowness, and romance reading (of course, there is also something to be said about romance writing and slowness, but that is perhaps best left for another time).

Honoré's book covers many areas of concern ranging from food to medicine, work, leisure, sex, cities, and mind body. Perhaps, however, I can take comfort when Honoré writes:

Fast Thinking is rational, analytical, linear, logical. It is what we do under pressure, when the clock is ticking; it is the way computers think and the way the modern workplace operates; it delivers clear solutions to well-defined problems. Slow Thinking is intuitive, woolly and creative. It is what we do when the pressure is off, and we have the time to let ideas simmer at their own pace on the back burner. It yields rich and subtle insights. (120)

To these ends, I continue to think -- too slowly for my liking -- about the very notion of speed, reading, and, in particular, slowness and romance.