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.

---

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.]

New at JPRS: Special Issue on The Sheik (and a bit about teaching romance in Sweden)

The final additions to issue 9 of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies have now gone online and are (as always) freely available to read, both on the website and in downloadable pdf.

• Love in a Cold Climate? Teaching Popular Romance at a Swedish University
  Maria Nilson and Helene Ehriander
   

[Edited to add: JPRS have just added another article to issue 9

• Venetia: Georgette Heyer’s Pastoral Romance
  Anne Lancashire

 That was added on 22 December.]

In the Special Issue on The Sheik are:

Introduction to the special issue on The Sheik
Amy Burge

The Oriental Beast: The Sheik and Fairy Tales
Pauline Suwanban

Garçon manqué: A Queer Rereading (of) The Sheik
Jessica Taylor

Olive Skin Chocolate Eyes: Echoes of The Sheik on Descriptive Patterns of the Italian Romantic Hero in Harlequin Short Contemporaries
Francesca Pierini

Let’s Not Get Carried Away by The Sheik
Laura Vivanco

The Sheik and Modernism
Ellen Turner

The Depiction of Masculinity and Nationality in The Sheik
jay Dixon

In Defence of the Perverse: Reflections on The Sheik (George Melford, 1921)
Elisabetta Girelli

On Eligible Princes: The Medieval Modernity of Sheikh Romance
Amira Jarmakani

Review essay on The Sheik
Amy Burge and Rachel Robinson

On Teaching, Not Teaching, and Teaching The Sheik
Eric Murphy Selinger

Authors on The Sheik: A conversation with Liz Fielding
Elizabeth Cole

Scheduling The Sheik

There was a screening of The Sheik (1921) at the University of Birmingham on Thursday and today's programme is:

Friday 13 September 2019
10-11:15 – Academic panel on The Sheik

• Pauline Suwanban, Beastly Figures: The Sheik and Fairy Tales
• Francesca Pierini, The Legacy of E.M. Hull’s The Sheik on the Depiction of the Italian Romantic Hero in Harlequin Short Contemporaries
• Respondent: Amy Burge
• Chair: Melissa Dickson

Tweet summary by Ali Williams here. To summarise the summary:

Pauline Suwanban is a PhD student at Birkbeck, doing research into orientalist romances. She argues that the hero of The Sheik takes on the 'devil husband figure' that has been popular over the years within popular romantic fiction. She draws parallels between the 'devil husband' and the 'beastly lover' or 'monster husband' character that can be thread through myths and fairytales. Examples include 'Beauty and the Beast'. There lies within the Arabian communities in the novel a 'sinister promise of sexual material pleasure, as well as financial security for women who can tolerate it'.

Francesca Pierini's research is focused on representations of Italian culture in Anglophone literature. Instead of the 'Latin lover', she recommends the term 'Mediterranean men', as she feels that it draws parallels with the way that South European and some Middle Eastern heroes are represented. There is a focus on the perceived 'traditional' nature of these heroes, and there are similar discursive patterns seen within the writing of these heroes within short contemporary romances. Pierini talks about the importance of the focus on 'darkness' in these 'Mediterranean men' that is qualifyingly 'foreign', especially in comparison to the white Anglo-Saxon male. Often these novels seem to play on an assumed upon link between the Mediterranean men and the natural world.

12:00-1.15pm – Author and editor panel on diversity in popular romance publishing

• Featuring Ali Williams, Ria Cheyne, Eleanor Harkstead and Jeevani Charika/Rhoda Baxter

2pm-3pm – Learning and Teaching The Sheik

• A conversation with Professor Deborah Longworth and Professor Eric Selinger

Again, a summary has been tweeted by Ali Williams. Here's small part of it:

Eric Selinger was sharing his approaches to romance. The first sets out four approaches (Historical, Philosophical, Psychological and Literary). The second tool was derived from teaching Rose Lerner's Sweet Disorder: Improving Tale; Erotic Fiction; Novel of Ideas; Novel as Aesthetic Object. Selinger translates this as

• How does this book want me to behave?
• What does this book tell me that I might desire?
• What does this book want me to think about?
• What does this book want me to appreciate about itself?

Deb Longworth commented that thinking about formalised approaches like this allows the genre of popular romance to be legitimised for students.

3:30-4:30pm – Final roundtable and discussion – where now for The Sheik? 

There should be a special issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies appearing soon, dedicated to The Sheik in its centenary year.

CFP: Symposium on The Sheik at Birmingham University

100 Years of The Sheik: A Public Research Symposium

12 & 13 September 2019, University of Birmingham, UK

This free-to-attend symposium, open to students, researchers, and members of the public, will mark the centenary of the original publication of The Sheik with a range of panels, workshops, a film screening, and a roundtable on the following broad topics:

• Critical responses to Hull's novel, its sequels or film adaptation;
• The legacy of The Sheik for twentieth- and twenty-first-century popular culture;
• Approaches to (and reflections of) learning and teaching with The Sheik;
• Parodies, imitations and the desert romance genre;
• Twentieth and twenty-first-century sheikh-themed romances;
• Diversity in romance publishing.

Since its publication in 1919, E. M. Hull's The Sheik has been a sensation, shocking and fascinating readers alike. Owing much to the literary traditions of Romantic Orientalism and golden-age women's travel writing, as well as to literary modernism and the crisis of masculinity in British culture in the aftermath of World War One, it is a novel that articulates the tensions and desires of its time. Contemporary critics regarded it as salacious and degenerate, yet its cultural legacy in Britain and North America has been significant and enduring. One hundred years on and The Sheik is considered "the ur-romance novel of the twentieth century" (Regis, 2003, p. 115), while its treatment of gender, sexuality, and race continues to trouble and provoke debate.

The symposium will showcase research conducted by contributors to a special issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies on The Sheik due to be published in Autumn 2019. We are also seeking proposals for additional research papers, lightning talks, poster presentations, and roundtable participants. We would particularly welcome proposals from current and recent students.

If you are interested in participating in the symposium, please send a short title and 200-word abstract to Dr Amy Burge by 12 July 2019. Please also direct any queries to Amy: a.burge@bham.ac.uk

Provisional symposium schedule:

Thurs 12 Sept
Late morning - Grad Seminar
Afternoon/ evening - Screening of The Sheik (1921) + panel discussion

Fri 13 Sept
10-11:30 - Academic panel
12-1pm - Author panel
1-2pm - Lunch
2-3:30pm - Learning & Teaching panel
4-5pm - Roundtable

Details transcribed from here.

New to the Wiki: Final List of 2018

I probably shouldn't have let this post grow for so long as it's rather long now.

Abdullah-Poulos, Layla, 2016. 

“Muslim Love American Style: Islamic-American Hybrid Culture and Native-Born American Black Muslim Romance.” MA thesis, SUNY Empire State College, 2016. Excerpt

Abdullah-Poulos, Layla, 2018. 

"The Stable Muslim Love Triangle - Triangular Desire in African American Muslim Romance Fiction." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 7.

Bhasin, Neeta, 2018. 

"Romancing the 'Illegal' Immigrant", Journal of Literature and Art Studies 8.10: 1459-1474. [Focuses on Serena Bell's Yours to Keep.]

 

Driscoll, Beth, Lisa Fletcher, Kim Wilkins and David Carter, 2018. 

"The Publishing Ecosystems of Contemporary Australian Genre Fiction." Creative Industries Journal 11.2: 203-221. Abstract

Fernández Rodríguez, Carolina, 2018. 

"Del cuento de hadas a la novela romántica: Una visión de la sub/literatura como gimnasio mental y laboratorio de sub/versión cultural", Repercusión de la lectura y otras formas de arte en nuestra vida y nuestra obra: Memorias del VII coloquio de LART, Centro Español de Manhattan, Nueva York, 26-28 de octubre de 2016. Ed. Paquita Suárez Coalla, Sonia Rivera Valdés, Ainoa Íñigo. West Hurley, NY: Editorial Campana, 2018. 69-95.

 

Fong, Katrina, Justin B. Mullin and Raymond A. Mar, 2013. 

"What You Read Matters: The Role of Fiction Genre in Predicting Interpersonal Sensitivity". Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 7.4 (2013): 370-376.

 

Gillis, Stacy, 2018. 

“Manners, Money, and Marriage: Austen, Heyer, and the Literary Genealogy of the Regency Romance”. After Austen: Reinventions, Rewritings, Revisitings. Ed. Lisa Hopkins. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 81-101. [This focuses on the "social and sexual precarity" of female characters, in particular in Heyer's Regency Buck.]

 

Glennemeier, Jaelyn, 2018. 

“And he was an Arab!:” Imperial Femininity and Pleasure in E. M. Hull's 1919 Desert Romance, The Sheik', Honors thesis, University of Kansas. Abstract and link to pdf [Bonnie Loshbaugh reports that this contains details of "a 1922 interview with [E. M.] Hull in Nash’s and Pall Mall Magazine, and implies that it includes a photograph of Hull in front of her home." With the centenary of the publication of The Sheik coming up, it might be nice if someone could put this online.]

Gunne, Sorcha. 

‘Gender, Genre and Modernity: Popular Romance Fiction in Ireland’, Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction, Ed. L Harte. Oxford: Oxford University Press [in press]. [I've added this to the section about chick lit, because that's what the content mostly seems to discuss.]

 

Hopkins, Lisa, 2018. 

"Georgette Heyer: What Austen Left Out". After Austen: Reinventions, Rewritings, Revisitings. Ed. Lisa Hopkins. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 61-79. [This chapter looks in detail at military metaphors/language used by Heyer, as well as her allusions to Austen.]

 

McAlister, Jodi, 2015. 

‘Breaking the Hard Limits: Romance, Pornography, and the Question of Genre in the Fifty Shades Trilogy.’ Analyses/Rereadings/Theories 3.2: 23-33.

 

McAlister, Jodi, 2018. 

‘Defining and Redefining Popular Genres: The Evolution of ‘New Adult’ Fiction.’ Australian Literary Studies 33.4 (2018).

 

Parnell, Claire, 2018. 

‘Models of Publishing and Opportunities for Change: Representations in Harlequin, Montlake and Self-Published Romance Novels.’ Australian Literary Studies 33.4.

 

Sanders, Lise Shapiro, 2018. 

"Making the Modern Girl: Fantasy, Consumption, and Desire in Romance Weeklies of the 1920s". Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918-1939: The Interwar Period. Ed. Catherine Clay, Maria DiCenzo, Barbara Green, and Fiona Hackney. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 

Sewell Matter, Laura, 2007. 

“Pursuing the Great Bad Novelist”, The Georgia Review 61.3 (2007): 444-459.

 

Turner, Ellen, 2014. 

'The Sheik Returns: Imitations and Parodies of the Desert Romance', in Hype: Bestsellers and Literary Cultures, ed. Jon Helgason, Sara Kärrholm, and Ann Steiner (Lund, Sweden: Nordic Academic Press), pp. 185-202.

Vani, Christina, 2018. 

Immortal Words: The Language and Style of the Contemporary Italian Undead-Romance Novel. Ph.D. thesis. University of Toronto, 2018.

 

Williams, Elizabeth W., 2019. 

"Queering Settler Romance: The Reparative Eugenic Landscape in Nora Strange's Kenyan Novels", Archiving Settler Colonialism: Culture, Space and Race. Ed. Yu-ting Huang and Rebecca Weaver-Hightower. Abingdon: Routledge, 2019. 190-204 ??. ["Williams reads Nora Strange’s interwar romance novels as they archive settler preoccupation with white sexuality in a settled space. In Strange’s novels, a repressed and declining Britain needs the “Edenic paradise” of Kenya to let loose British sexual vitality. The Kenyan environment tests would-​be parents for their moral and physical fitness in producing good settler children and awakens healthy heterosexual desires to ready parents for reproductive duty."]

Happy reading and happy 2019!

CFP: Special JPRS issue on The Sheik

Special Issue Call for Papers  

100 Years of The Sheik

Since its publication in 1919, E. M. Hull’s The Sheik has been a sensation. Beloved by its contemporary readers, the novel’s cultural impact in Britain and North America has been significant and enduring. Considered “the ur-romance novel of the twentieth century” (Regis, 2003, p. 115), The Sheik has been extensively studied by academics and students alike, who have written on the novel’s treatment of gender, sexuality, and race as well as its position in literary modernism.

This special issue and connected symposium will mark the centenary of the original publication of The Sheik. We are seeking submissions for original research articles and short reflective pieces on a number of topics relating to The Sheik and its legacy. The symposium will take place in Birmingham, UK in September 2019 with the publication of the special issue also happening that month. A CFP for the symposium will be circulated separately.

For the special issue, we welcome proposals for original research articles (5000-10,000 words) on any aspect of The Sheik including, but not limited to:

• The Sheik and masculinity (post-war crisis of masculinity, masculinity and race, hegemonic masculinities)
• Adaptations of The Sheik (including the 1921 film)
• Audience and reception studies (of the book and its adaptations)
• The legacy of The Sheik (including its sequel)
• The Sheik and gender and sexuality
• The Sheik and literary modernism

We also invite proposals for short pieces (1000-2000 words) on teaching and learning The Sheik from teachers and students.

The deadline for 250-word abstracts is 1 December 2018 with full drafts due by 1 March 2019. Please send abstracts and direct any enquiries to Dr Amy Burge at a.burge@bham.ac.uk.

New to the Romance Wiki Bibliography: Gothic Romances, Heyer, Medical Women, Pakistan, Sexuality, Spain, The Sheik

Ali, Abu-Bakar, 2018. 

"Agency, Gender, Nationalism, and the Romantic Imaginary in Pakistan", Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing. Ed. Aroosa Kanwal and Saiyma Aslam. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. 225-235. Abstract

Arnold-Forster, Agnes and Alison Moulds. 

"Medical women in popular fiction", The BMJ Opinion, September 26, 2018. [Includes details about Mona Maclean, Medical Student (1892), a medical romance written by one of the earliest "registered female practitioners"]

Drakulić-Ilić, Slavenka. 1984. 

“Zašto žene vole bajke?” [“Why do women like fairy tales?”], Smrtni grijesi feminizma. Ogledi u mudologiji [Mortal Sins of Feminism. Essays on Testicology]. Zagreb: Znanje, 1984. 33-45. The article was first published on the pages of Start, no. 299. 3 July 1980. [Details from Lóránd Zsófia's dissertation, "“Learning a Feminist Language”: The Intellectual History of Feminism in Yugoslavia in the 1970s and 1980s", Central European University, Budapest, Hungary, 2014, in which it is stated that "In the essay “Why do women like fairy tales?” Drakulić argues that despite their simplicity, trivial romance novels mean an escape from the everyday reality of state socialism." (208-209) and "examines the popularity of trivial romances (in Serbo-Croatian: herz-roman) available at the newsstands and also published in women’s magazines as a series. She sees “erotic” men’s magazines as a counterpart to the cheap romantic stories, as both started to flourish on the market as a result of the “sexual revolution” [...] and both use traditional and stereotypical images of women, which do not exclude, but complement each other (36). It shows both the double-faced nature of the sexual revolution and the consistency in the logic of patriarchy. Drakulić describes the basic plot of the romance novels and how they present clichés of femininity and masculinity, romantic love and happy marriage (35). Despite their triviality, Drakulić emphasises their social relevance: only one title, Život [Life] was sold in 3.600.000 copies in 1978 (34). There is a demand for the genre, what cannot be left out of consideration, even if there was not domestic, Yugoslav production of these, those available were mostly imported from Western, English-speaking countries. Besides the presentation of traditional gender roles, a regular objection against the trivial romances is their low literary quality: the media should inform and educate, and one’s free time should be used creatively [...]. Drakulić analyses an unpublished survey by the publisher Vjesnik on the readers’ habits and remarks of reading trivial romances. All in all, the conclusion is that the majority of the readers are overburdened women who do not have either time or strength to read anything more complexly written, whereas they do notice the poor literary quality of the novels. These readers, adds Drakulić, lack real relationships and love – exactly the dream, the “fairy tale” offered by these booklets. Drakulić claims that simply “by abolishing and stigmatising this kind of a press, we do not abolish the demand/need” of women in Yugoslavia (44)." (232-33)]

 

Paige, Lori A., 2018. 

The Gothic Romance Wave: A Critical History of the Mass Market Novels, 1960-1993. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2018. Excerpt

 

Pérez-Gil, María del Mar, 2018. 

"Representations of Nation and Spanish Masculinity in Popular Romance Novels: The Alpha Male as “Other”", The Journal of Men’s Studies. Online First September 23, 2018. Abstract

Suwanban, Pauline, 2018. 

"From Exhalation to Transformation: The Female Body in the Orientalist Romance". Dandelion: Postgraduate Arts Journal & Research Network 9.1 Abstract and link to pdf

 

Wei, Po-Yu, Rick, 2018. 

‘“She is a Jade”: A Georgian Gaming Woman Re-imagined in Georgette Heyer’s Faro’s Daughter’, Crossings 9: 122-131.

New to the Romance Wiki Bibliography: Feminism, Love, Heyer and Orientalism

Laura Vivanco

Arvanitaki, Eirini, 2017. 

"Postmillennial femininities in the popular romance novel." Journal of Gender Studies. Published online: 28 Aug 2017. Abstract

McAlister, Jodi, and Hsu-Ming Teo, 2017. 

"Love in Australian Romance Novels." The Popular Culture of Romantic Love in Australia. Ed. Hsu-Ming Teo. North Melbourne, VIC: Australian Scholarly Publishing, pp.194-222.

McLeod, Dion, 2017. 

"'Try-error-try-it': Love, loss, and the subversion(?) of the heteronormative romance story in Will Grayson, Will Grayson." Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature 25.1: 73-94. Abstract

And in the section of the Romance Wiki bibliography for items in languages other than English:

Bianchi, Diana, 2017. 

"I gentiluomini si prendono per la gola: cibo e identità nei romanzi di Georgette Heyer". Lingua, Traduzione, Letteratura 1: 75-89. [Diana wrote to me to notify me of the publication of this article and her translation of the title is: "The way to a gentleman's heart is through his stomach: food and identity in Georgette Heyer's novels."]

林芳玫/Lin, Fang-mei. 

"性別化東方主義：女性沙漠羅曼史的重層東方想像/Gendering Orientalism: Women's Desert Romance and the Multiplicity of Oriental Imagination." Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese, vol. 13, no. 1-2, 2016, pp. 174-200. [There is an abstract in English, even though the paper is not.]

New to the Wiki: The "Coming Soon" Edition

Laura Vivanco

Amy Burge's Representing Difference in the Medieval and Modern Orientalist Romance is due for publication in March 2016 by Palgrave Macmillan. It

proffers innovative case studies on representations of cross-religious and cross-cultural romantic relationships in a selection of late medieval and twenty-first century Orientalist popular romances. Comparing the tropes, characterization and settings of these literary phenomena, and focusing on gender, religion, and ethnicity, the study exposes the historical roots of current romance representations of the east, advancing research in Orientalism, (neo)medievalism and medieval cultural studies. Fundamentally, Representing Difference invites a closer look at medieval and modern popular attitudes towards the east, as represented in romance, and the kinds of solutions proposed for its apparent problems.

Women & Erotic Fiction: Critical Essays on Genres, Markets & Readers was published earlier this year for Kindle but isn't due for publication as a paperback until November. Unfortunately I haven't seen a copy and the snippets of information available online aren't helping me identify which of the essays deal with romance fiction. Even the titles aren't necessarily that helpful because some people use "romance" in a broader sense than the RWA or Pamela Regis do (and those are the definitions guiding me in my selection of items for the bibliography). I've added the following to the Romance Wiki bibliography:

Morrissey, Katherine, 2015. 

“Steamy, Spicy, Sensual: Tracing the Cycles of Erotic Romance.” Women & Erotic Fiction: Critical Essays on Genres, Markets & Readers. Ed. Kristen Phillips. Jefferson: McFarland, 2015. 42-58.

Veldman-Genz, Carole, 2015. 

"Selling Gay Sex to Women: The Romance of M/M and M/M/F Romantica." Women & Erotic Fiction: Critical Essays on Genres, Markets & Readers. Ed. Kristen Phillips. Jefferson: McFarland, 2015. 133-149.

I'd be grateful if anyone could let me know which of the other essays in the volume should also be included:

• Introduction: Shattering Releases (Kristen Phillips)

• From Black Lace to Shades of Grey: The Interpellation of the "Female Subject" into Erotic Discourse (Simon Hardy)

• Refiguring Penetration in Women’s Erotic Fiction (Amalia Ziv)

• Erotic Pleasure and Postsocialist Female Sexuality: Contemporary Female "Body Writing" in China (Eva Chen)

• Good Vibrations: Shaken Subjects and the Disintegrative Romance Heroine (Naomi Booth)

• On Not Reading Fifty Shades: Feminism and the Fantasy of Romantic Immunity (Tanya Serisier)

• Permissible Transgressions: Feminized ­Same-Sex Practice as ­Middle-Class Fantasy (Jude Elund)

• The Politics of Slash on the High Seas: Colonial Romance and Revolutionary Solidarity in Pirates Fan Fiction (Anne Kustritz)

• Male Homoerotic Fiction and Women’s Sexual Subjectivities: Yaoi and BL Fans in Indonesia and the Philippines (Tricia Abigail Santos Fermin)

• Selling Authentic Sex: Working Through Identity in Belle de Jour’s The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl (Victoria Ong)

• Sexing Education: Erotica in the Urban Classroom (Alyssa D. Niccolini) 

New Issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies

Laura Vivanco

"The Journal of Popular Romance Studies started publishing almost exactly five years ago: August 4, 2010" (Selinger) and Issue 5.1 is now available, for free, online.

Special Issue: Romancing the Library (Editor’s Introduction)
by Crystal Goldman
 
A Matter of Meta: Category Romance Fiction and the Interplay of Paratext and Library Metadata - by Vassiliki Veros
 
Love in the Digital Library: A Search for Racial Heterogeneity in E-Books - by Renee Bennett-Kapusniak and Adriana McCleer
 
Creating a Popular Romance Collection in an Academic Library - by Sarah E. Sheehan and Jen Stevens
 
Editor’s Note: Issue 5.1
 
True Love’s Kiss and Happily Ever After: the religion of love in American film - by Jyoti Raghu
 
Chick Lit in Historical Settings by Frida Skybäck - by Helene Ehriander
 
Love in the Desert: Images of Arab-American Reconciliation in Contemporary Sheikh Romance Novels - by Stacy E. Holden
 
Stacy Holden’s “Love in the Desert”: An Author’s Response - by Megan Crane
 
14 Weeks of Love and Labour: Teaching Regency and Desert Romance to Undergraduate Students - by Karin Heiss
 
An Interview with Susan Elizabeth Phillips - by Eric Murphy Selinger
 
Review: Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema, by Sangita Gopal; Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema, by Monika Mehta
 
Review: The Contradictions of Love: Towards a feminist-realist sociosexuality, by Lena Gunnarsson
 
Review: The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and its Discontents, by Laura Frost
 
Review: Sex, or the Unbearable, by Lauren Berland and Lee Edelman; Overcoming Objectification: A Carnal Ethics, by Ann J. Cahill; Erotic Memoirs and Postfeminism: The Politics of Pleasure, by Joel Gwynne

E. M. Hull, Robin Hood and a conference on "Love and the Word"

Laura Vivanco

A new article, about the mysterious/secretive E. M. Hull, author of The Sheik has sadly remained mysterious to me. However, the abstract of Ellen Turner's "E. M. Hull's Camping in the Sahara: desert romance meets desert reality" (published in Studies in Travel Writing) was available online and it points out that, not content with starting a Western craze for sexy fictional sheikhs, Hull also sought to position herself as an authority on non-fictional deserts and their inhabitants:

The publication of Camping in the Sahara, seven years after its author E. M. Hull was reluctantly catapulted to fame on the back of her ignominious debut novel, The Sheik (1919), made relatively little impact on her already cemented reputation as a bestselling author of desert “trash”. Nevertheless, her travelogue served to clarify her relative authority on the North African Saharan regions in which her novels were set. Hull's fictional output, abetted by Rudolph Valentino's screen performance in the novel's film adaptation, directed by George Melford (1921), served as a stimulus to the “sheik obsession” which was to capture the imagination of a generation during the 1920s. Even though Hull's name is forever wed to The Sheik, the woman herself remains something of an enigma. There is little critical or biographical information on Hull and her travels in Algeria. This article aims to piece together the available evidence. It also aims to begin to unravel the connection between Hull's fictional and non-fictional writing and to comment on its impact on the desert romance craze of the 1920s. Having examined how travel trends to the Sahara in the 1920s were informed by movements in popular culture, the essay proceeds to explore how Hull constructs the desert as a backdrop to her own story into which she writes herself. Hull's desert in Camping in the Sahara resembles a film set in which the scenery is imagined through a camera lens and the people she encounters are inadvertently assessed through the eyes of a casting director.

There aren't many romances which feature Robin Hood, but they do exist and maybe someone would like to write about them for the International Association for Robin Hood Studies (IARHS), which "is pleased to announce the creation of a new, peer-reviewed, open-access journal, The Bulletin of the International Association for Robin Hood Studies". More details here.

The Australasian Universities Languages & Literature Association Conference takes as its theme "Love and the Word" and will be held in Melbourne, Australia from 7th-9th December 2016:

The conference theme draws on AULLA’s origins as an association of scholars working in fields of philology. Thus we examine both philos (love) and logos (word). How does affection affect words? What do people mean by ‘love’ and its counterparts in the world’s languages? Or perhaps: how does it ‘do’ those meanings?

More details here. It sounds to me like the kind of conference which could benefit from romance scholarship such as Lisa Fletcher's, author of Historical Romance Fiction: Heterosexuality and Performativity (2008):

“I love you” is, for her, “the romantic speech act”: a performative utterance characteristic of the historical romance and revelatory of its function (25). “[R]omance is a fictional mode which depends on the force and familiarity of the speech act ‘I love you,’” she explains (7). To call something a “speech act,” in J.L. Austin’s terms, means that someone’s saying or writing it makes something happen: an event or condition is actually brought about by the utterance, rather than simply described by it. Statements that begin “I promise…,” “I bet…,” and “I apologize…” are all examples of speech acts. Rejecting the idea that “I love you” is simply a reliable report of its speaker’s emotional state, Fletcher focuses instead on what the sentence does—and, by extension, on what the genre defined by “I love you” also does, as though the entire genre were also a speech act, a performative utterance, in its own right. (from Pamela Regis's review of Fletcher's book).

New Book on Orientalism and Romance Novels

Laura Vivanco

Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels by Hsu-Ming Teo will be published by the University of Texas Press in November:

The Sheik—E. M. Hull’s best-selling novel that became a wildly popular film starring Rudolph Valentino—kindled “sheik fever” across the Western world in the 1920s. A craze for all things romantically “Oriental” swept through fashion, film, and literature, spawning imitations and parodies without number. While that fervor has largely subsided, tales of passion between Western women and Arab men continue to enthrall readers of today’s mass-market romance novels. In this groundbreaking cultural history, Hsu-Ming Teo traces the literary lineage of these desert romances and historical bodice rippers from the twelfth to the twenty-first century and explores the gendered cultural and political purposes that they have served at various historical moments.

Drawing on “high” literature, erotica, and popular romance fiction and films, Teo examines the changing meanings of Orientalist tropes such as crusades and conversion, abduction by Barbary pirates, sexual slavery, the fear of renegades, the Oriental despot and his harem, the figure of the powerful Western concubine, and fantasies of escape from the harem. She analyzes the impact of imperialism, decolonization, sexual liberation, feminism, and American involvement in the Middle East on women’s Orientalist fiction. Teo suggests that the rise of female-authored romance novels dramatically transformed the nature of Orientalism because it feminized the discourse; made white women central as producers, consumers, and imagined actors; and revised, reversed, or collapsed the binaries inherent in traditional analyses of Orientalism.

Here's what Eric has to say about it:

“Desert Passions is a groundbreaking study. No other book has studied mass-market romance fiction at length through this lens (Orientalism); the studies that exist are short papers that do not treat the subject with anything close to the historical depth or contextual richness this book provides. Teo demonstrates that this strand of contemporary mass-market romance fiction can profitably be read as part of a tradition that stretches back several centuries, and which includes high, middle, and lowbrow texts: a significant achievement. . . . I find Teo’s treatments of the rise of the desert romance, The Sheik, The Kadin, and several category romance novels to be exemplary work, the kind that sets a standard for future scholarship. . . . This book promises to be a major contribution to the field.”

The book can currently be pre-ordered at a significant discount from the University of Texas Press and from the Book Depository. An excerpt is available via Google Books.

Amy Reports Back: EUPOP 2012

Laura Vivanco

Amy's back from London, where she attended the first conference of the European Popular Culture Association (EUPOP). Here's what she has to say about the panel on romance,

called Romancing Europe in which I gave my own paper. The panel featured four presenters, who each discussed various aspects of popular romance in Europe.I have previously blogged details of this panel here.

The panel kicked off with An Goris whose paper, entitled ‘From Local to Global: Reading Category Romance in Europe’, discussed the translation of romances, arguing that Harlequin’s cross-cultural appeal is based on its simultaneous use of both localising and globalising strategies to achieve success in the culturally, linguistically and nationally diversified European market.

An’s paper was the perfect frame for the second speaker, Artemis Lamprinou, whose paper ‘Breaking the Rules: Translating Emotions in European Popular Romance’ considered the representation of emotion in popular romances translated from English into Greek. Lamprinou offered a detailed discussion of the apparent disjunction in emotional intensity between romances in Greek and in English.

The third paper was my own, entitled ‘A Very English Place: The Intimate Relationship Between Britain and Arabia in the Contemporary Sheikh Romance’. Examining the setting, content and authorship of some twentieth and twenty-first century sheikh romances, I argued that far from being geographically indistinct, sheikh romances remain deeply rooted within British imperial interests.

The final paper was by Tom Ue, who made a late change and gave a very up-to-date paper on the film The Amazing Spiderman which was released this summer. Tom discussed non-linearity and the protagonists’ inability to articulate. This was the only romance-related panel at the conference (a big contrast to PCA in the USA) and was well attended, with an interesting discussion afterwards.

You can read more about the conference over at Amy's blog.

Links: Librarians, Zombies, Sheihks, and Fifty Shades of Sin

Laura Vivanco

Recently Vassiliki Veros was a member of a reader’s panel at the Australian Library and Information Association's 2012 conference and she's posted her paper at her blog. She's a librarian, but

As a reader, I gave up on accessing my books from my library early on. I bought all my romances from newsagencies, supermarkets, second hand bookstores, bookshops, markets, online and swapping books with friends. As a romance reader I am not unique in this behaviour.

This is because

Libraries have treated romance readers as “the devil” for they maintain a distance from them. We see this in librarians trying to improve the readers choice, cataloguers not valuing the books the readers choose. All this is reflected in the romance readers survey responses that the library is not a provider for their reading needs.

There are a few posts about zombie romance, or "zomrom" over at Undead Studies, including one which asks

Why can’t we love the undead? So many friends push aside the idea of a zombie lover completely (you guys can’t judge me! You read about vampire sex!) [...]
As discussed before [see this post], zombie romance is more romance. Sex never enters the equation. It’s about a relationship of souls (personalities), a coming together of two people.

But still zombies aren’t good enough! The rotting is either done away with completely or can be avoided with medication. The eating of people or brains is the same. So where is the problem? They are undead humans, as are vampires. With rational thought, being capable of emotions, moral agency and free will, why are the undead any less suitable as mates?

Jessica Taylor, author of "And You Can Be My Sheikh: Gender, Race, and Orientalism in Contemporary Romance Novels" evidently prefers sheikhs. This summer

The top shelf of my largest bookshelf is stacked two rows deep with romances with titles like One Night with the Sheikh by Penny Jordan and Desert Barbarian by Charlotte Lamb. These books (and a corresponding set of binders full of photocopies from 1920s movie magazines) are the remnants of a research project on romantic Orientalism in the United States in the 1920s and 2000s which is currently on hiatus. [...] But now the blogosphere is in luck. This summer I’ve decided to set myself a lofty task:

Read and review all of my sheikh romances and post the reviews on this very blog twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays. On Wednesdays I’ll post a scan from one of the many articles about how hot Rudolph Valentino is. Is this an overly optimistic schedule for someone who’s also finishing her thesis? I guess we’ll see…

And you can read all about it here. She begins with an extended synopsis of/commentary on E. M. Hull's The Sheik (1), (2), (3) and (4).

With regards to a very much more recent phenomenon in sexually titillating fiction, Remittance Girl suggests that

Fifty Shades of Grey does an interesting dance with the explicit. It revels in the details of the taboo of BDSM while seeming to condemn it. [...] And many, many readers love this. They can masturbate furiously to the scenes played out in the Red Room of Pain, while waiting for the heroine to cure Mr. Grey of his perversions.

 I am reminded of the masses who enjoyed the spectacle of the Salem Witch Trials or denunciations of heretics during the Spanish Inquisition. 

"She consorted lewdly with the Devil!" the inquisitor proclaims, partly for the judges but loudly enough to entertain the masses. He lovingly details the proof of her perfidy. The women gasp and feel a quiver between their thighs right before they all scream, "Burn the witch!" [...]

I don't think a large portion of mainstream society has evolved much since then. And for erotica writers, who usually situate themselves firmly in the sex-positive camp, this is very hard to comprehend. We write novels about how erotic experience and the exploration of new sexual territories helps us grow as individuals. For us, sex in a doorway. Very often our themes are about revelation, completion, redemption through experience. Not through shame or rejection or closing down our sexual options.

The photo of "Zombie and Bride of the Zombie" came from Wikimedia Commons and was taken by Sam Pullara, who has made it available for use under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.


The poster of the film of The Sheik also came from Wikimedia Commons, as did Martin van Maële's "Illustration de La sorcière, de Jules Michelet. 1911" which depicts witches dancing naked.

Romance at EUPOP

Amy Burge

'Love in the European Union' by Starscream from Wikimedia Commons

Next month, I will be participating in a panel at the Inaugural Conference of the European Popular Culture Association. I’m really excited to get involved with the Association and also to hear some of the papers in my panel and in others. If you’re in or around London between the 11^th and 13^th July why not come along and hear some papers for yourself? I will undoubtedly be tweeting some of the conference and will endeavour to publish a write-up on my blog, so if you can’t make it and are interested hopefully my commentary will be useful.

Here are the details of the romance panel:

Current Perspectives in European Popular Romance

Popular romance is one of the most popular fiction genres in Europe, and one of the most widespread. Harlequin/Mills & Boon, the world’s largest romance publisher, annually sells millions of popular romance novels all over Europe. In response to this, there has been an emergence of academic work on the popular romance in Europe, led by a conference in Brussels in 2010 and a conference to be held in York in September 2012. The popular romance area at the 2012 EUPOP conference will consist of a wide-ranging, transnational panel which together feature some of the foremost European scholars of the genre. Co-chaired by Amy Burge (Conference Chair, “The Pleasures of Romance”, York 2012) and An Goris (Managing Editor, Journal of Popular Romance Studies), this panel explores several topics that are currently of particular interest in the rapidly developing field of popular romance studies.

The panel brings together four papers which each explore a different aspect of romance in Europe. Two papers focus on various aspects of the cultural and linguistic translation of popular romances, dynamics that lie at the heart of the popular romance genre in the multilingual European context. The two further papers find romance in unexpected places and find the unexpected in romance. Via discussions of the relation between Britain and Arabia in British sheik romances and of the underexplored romance in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards, this panel probes the notion of subversion in the context of both the literary and the filmic romance genre. Together, these papers seek not only to link these current issues, but also to indicate the vibrancy of current romance scholarship in the field of European popular culture.

From Local to Global: Reading Category Romance in Europe

An Goris, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium.

The romance novel is one of the most popular genres in Europe, led by Harlequin/Mills & Boon, the genre’s most eminent publisher. This paper argues that Harlequin’s noteworthy cross-cultural appeal is based on its simultaneous use of both localizing and globalizing strategies to achieve success in the culturally, linguistically and nationally diversified European market. 

Breaking the Rules: Translating Emotions in European Popular Romance

Artemis Lamprinou, University of Surrey, United Kingdom.

Emotions form an indispensable part of popular romance narratives. In the context of the translated romance texts that are predominant on the European market, this paper argues that in translated romances it is not simply the author’s but also the translator’s responsibility to optimize the reader’s experience of the emotions in the text. This argument is developed on the basis of extensive case studies of Greek translated romances.

A Very English Place: The Intimate Relationship Between Britain and Arabia in the Contemporary Sheikh Romance

Amy Burge, University of York, UK.

The fantasy settings of contemporary sheikh romances seem to serve their function as ‘otherworlds’ in which the romantic relationship between western heroine and sheikh hero takes place. However, this paper, through an examination of the setting, content and authorship of twentieth and twenty-first century sheikh romances, contends that far from being geographically indistinct, sheikh romances remain deeply rooted within British imperial interests. 

Ethical Responses, the Film Motif, and Gender: Romance in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds

Tom Ue, University College London, United Kingdom.

“Maybe they’ll make a film about your exploits,” Shosanna tells Fredrick in response to his story about killing many Russians. Fredrick replies: “Well, that’s just what Joseph Goebbels thought.  So he did and called it ‘Nation’s Pride.’” Using this conversation from the film Inglourious Basterds as a starting point, this paper traces some of Tarantino’s many nods to romances to show how he undermines and contests our understanding of the genre as a whole. 

Quick Quotes: Amira Jarmakani on the Desert Romance

Laura Vivanco

Amira Jarmakani's "Desiring the Big Bad Blade: Racing the Sheikh in Desert Romances." American Quarterly 63.4 (2011): 895-928 was published in December and it mentions one of Amy's posts on sheikh romances (published here, at Teach Me Tonight, in August 2011). Here's the abstract for Jarmakani's article:

Through a consideration of desert romances (mass-market romances whose hero is a sultan, sheikh, or desert prince), this essay argues that the racialization of Arabs and Muslims in contemporary popular culture operates by conflating ethnicity, religion, geography, and the notion of civilization. As the racialization of actual Arabs and Muslims in the global North has become more overt, the representational racialization of sheikhs in desert romances has become more covert. Ironically, precisely because romance novels must protect the fantasy narrative by submerging any overt references to race, they are useful for exploring the shifting meanings of race vis-à-vis Arabs and Muslims. 

And here's a quote:

the conflation of dark and dangerous, signifying a conflation of race and violence, in the sheikh’s eroticized sexuality functions according to longstanding U.S. racial logics that simultaneously uphold and disavow the links between race and sexuality.

To some extent, these links can be seen in the romance genre as a whole. This is not to say that there is a plethora of nonwhite heroes in mass-market romances; in fact, a common complaint among romance readers is the lack of “minorities” in romance and, in particular, of multiracial romances. However,  [...] authors sometimes use exotic tropes to give the hero his hard edges. In constructing the figure of the Latin lover, for instance, authors can mobilize mainstream assumptions about machismo to signify alpha maleness. In Native American heroes, romance authors can mobilize the fierce warrior stereotype to make him alpha and draw on typical “noble savage” associations to craft his sensitive side for the heroine.

Desert romances fall roughly into this group of exoticized romance heroes, a group that notably excludes the black hero. [...] The persistence of what seems to be a separate but equal clause in mass-market romances speaks powerfully to both the unspoken presence of racial ideologies in the romance genre and the lingering potency of stereotypes about violent black masculinity. The balance between fantasy and reality that romance authors must strike manifests tellingly when it comes to race; nonwhite characters are either segregated or contained through various devices, while race appears in phantasmic ways. More often than not, authors use the “chromatic associations” of darkness and blackness in describing racially white heroes, thereby incorporating metaphors that are deeply embedded in racial logics of the global North. (896)

The image of " 'Saladin rex Aegypti' from a 15th century manuscript" came from Wikimedia Commons.

PCA/ACA 2012 - (6)

Laura Vivanco

Romancing Race II: The International Other

Thursday, April 12, 2012 - 3:00pm - 4:30pm

The “Noble Savage” and “Happy Darky”: Race and the American Popular Romance
Maryan Wherry - Black Hawk College

This paper examines the use race in the American popular romance. Rather than focusing on “the Black Romance,” I’m interested specifically at the presence and treatment of Blacks and American Indians as secondary characters and in subplots and how this racial tension confronts (or not) the American cultural narrative.

“He Didn’t Seem Indian”: Exploring and Analyzing the Construction of Race in Meredith Duran’s The Duke of Shadows
Mallory Jagodzinski - Bowling Green State University

Historical romance novels, as a whole, tend to be overwhelmingly white, especially those set in England.  There are few characters of color in these novels and often are not privileged to be either the hero or heroine in the central love story of the novel.  Meredith Duran’s The Duke of Shadows, however, subverts this tendency by making her hero a native of India “whose blood [is] one-quarter native” (16).  This paper explores the ways in which Duran’s English heroine encounters and experiences race under the British colonial regime in India and during the rebellion of 1857. Throughout the novel, the heroine’s views on race and what is moral are challenged by the hero and his status as an individual with double consciousness.  In this paper, I will use textual analysis to analyze Duran’s portrayals of race and colonialism in order to suggest that the way she represents colonialism demonstrates that she is interested not only in depicting the reality of colonial violence, but also in making the reader uncomfortable with hierarchical systems of reality by depicting the reality of its effects.  I will be utilizing the theories of Frantz Fanon and Lola Young, each of whom discusses the process of colonization and what it does to both to the white colonizers and the colonized individuals; Young’s work in “Imperial Culture: The Primitive, the Savage and White Civilization” will be of utmost importance to my essay as she engages with issues of history and representation.  In addition to these theorists, I will make use of works that address issues of creating racial progressives such as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s Racism Without Racists to argue that Duran constructs her heroine as a woman who becomes aware of her white privilege through the understanding of her inferior position in the colonial system due to her gender.

Protest Like an Egyptian: Tracing Erotic Investments in the Middle East through Desert Romances
Amira Jarmakani - Georgia State University

The spring 2011 Arab uprisings provoked an interesting set of engagements in the U.S., such as the placards at the Wisconsin rallies to save unions from demolition, which read “Protest like an Egyptian.”  One particular engagement, the blog “Gay Girl in Damascus,” received substantial media attention for its brazen deceitfulness – many readers had been following the story of a Syrian lesbian facing persecution by the secret police only to find out that the blogger behind the story was a heterosexual white man from Georgia (USA).  Though it may be tempting to understand these kinds of investments in the Middle East as a new phenomenon, they have been clearly prefigured by the steady rise in popularity of desert romances since 2001, and, indeed, by their longstanding position within the genre as a whole.  Particularly given the ongoing “war on terror,” how can one account for the rise in desert romances as viable fantasy narratives?  Groping toward an answer to this question, I focus on the roles of fantasy and violence in both the film Sex and the City 2 (a type of desert romance, I argue, though it lacks some of the elements) and contemporary desert romances. Through mimicry, which tends to enact a kind of violence to the other (in its desire to subsume the other) and menace, which tends to play on the fear of violence from the other, I argue that the two together underscore a potential reason for the salience of the Middle East in the contemporary context: both represent actual and phantasmatic violences that perhaps psychically or subliminally connect to the violence inherent to the process of identification.

Saving China: The Transformative Power of Whiteness in the Interracial Romance
Erin Young - SUNY Empire State College

This project examines the novels of Elizabeth Lowell (Jade Island, 1998) and Katherine Stone (Pearl Moon, 1995), both of which explore romantic relationships between a white hero and a mixed-race Asian (and white) heroine.  I argue that these interracial romances invert the conventional romance formula by featuring white heroes who domesticate their Asian heroines, and in turn, the family-owned companies they represent, thereby “modernizing” corporations that are portrayed as overtly patriarchal, regressive, and anti-capitalist.  Lowell’s and Stone’s respective narratives reveal that a racial and nationalist hierarchy is potentially (re)affirmed in the formulaic conventions of popular romance.

In their negotiations of interracial romantic relationships, both novels construct conflicts between Orientalist conceptions of “East” and “West.”  The Asian heroines have been traumatized by a particular depiction of Chinese culture and its anti-capitalist leanings.  The Chinese family and community functions as a regressive past in which individual desires and feelings are painfully oppressed, and defined roles are marked by an extreme enforcement of gender inequality.  Lowell and Stone construct “Chineseness” as something that must be rescued from itself; Jade Island and Pearl Moon are essentially narratives of progress, in which the Chinese community may offer security at the expense of freedom, but the British and/or American corporation has the ability to offer more satisfactory versions of both.  The hero, who represents the (white) British or American corporation, introduces the Chinese heroine to a “domesticated” workplace—one that is specifically racialized and nationalized—and she is transformed in the process.  The conventional (white) heroine’s gendered victory is reconfigured as a racial and national victory for the heroes of interracial romance.  These novels reveal that whiteness, despite its invisibility in the majority of romance novels, is central to the formulaic conventions of the genre.  More importantly, perhaps, they suggest that the contemporary romance alleviates particular racial and national anxieties that emerge out of a global economy.    

RWA Academic Research Grant 2012

The RWA has just announced that its

2012 Academic Research Grant goes to Stacey E. Holden for her work "Not Deserted after the Storm: Images of Arab Political Systems in Romance Novels."

According to Stacy's CV, the full title of the project is “Not Deserted after the Storm: Images of Arab Political Systems in Romance Novels Published after 9/11.”

Colleagues at Work

Laura Vivanco

Over at the Popular Romance Project, Pamela Regis reveals what she's been working on recently:

I love the history of literature—watching the growth and branching of genres across the centuries. Lately I’ve been researching the history of the American romance novel, which, I quickly realized, involved pretty much starting from scratch. There was no list of American romance novels that I could peruse for suggestions for study texts, no “romance novel” subject heading in databases.

Amy Burge recently "gave a paper to the Centre for Modern Studies Postgraduate Forum at the University of York in a panel entitled 'Feminist Narratives'." The paper, titled "‘Weird and kinky and medieval’: Gender, Sexuality and the Idea of the ‘Medieval’ in Modern Popular Sheikh Romance," is up in full at Amy's blog. Amy observes that

The model used for Mills & Boon’s fictional east appears to be the hypermodern and western-friendly nations of the United Arab Emirates, particularly Dubai, thus providing the requisite exoticism, with none of the restrictions frequently outlined in the contemporary media. Moreover, most Westerners cannot name all of the United Arab Emirates, indicating the ease with which even the real Middle East can become fictionalised. The geographical shift from old colonial obsessions to a new political geography centred around the United Arab Emirates indicates a particular shift in the political tensions of sheikh novels: a liberal ally in the Middle East, but with the medieval (represented in the media by Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia) always pushing at the edges.

The novels also

reveal how deeply rooted ideas about the medieval are in issues relating to gender and sexuality. While you might not necessarily want to call Mills & Boon romances feminist narratives, although some have argued for the feminist credentials of romance novels, the vast majority of Mills & Boon readers and authors are women and romance novels frequently deal with issues commonly affecting women which are often excluded from public discourse, for example, marriage, relationships, children. Furthermore, these are precisely the aspects of sheikh romances which are described as medieval –female sexuality and the treatment of women. But, then, how ‘feminist’ is it to construct ‘medieval’ sexuality as desirable?

In the wake of an article in The Awl in which Maria Bustillos described romances as "feminist documents," Liz Mc2 explained why she doesn't think that's an accurate description:

“by, for and about women” is not the definition of feminist. Not any definition of feminist. Yes, there are lots of debates within feminism, but the definition isn’t content-free, just decide for yourself. Just because a woman chooses something does not make it a feminist choice or exempt from critique from a feminist perspective. Women’s choices can be constrained by society and sometimes by their own conventional views of gender. All-female enterprises can be both empowering in some ways and sexist in others, because they are not separate from the larger, still in some ways sexist culture. College sororities would be one example of this, I think. And I’m pretty sure Romance–individual books, the genre as a whole, and the industry itself–is another. How could it not be?

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The image is an illustration from Samuel Richardson's Pamela, which Pamela Regis mentions in her post. It came from Wikimedia Commons.