HEAs and "A Righted Universe"

Jennifer Porter's written a long thread on Twitter which examines a particular element of the Happy Ever After in more detail. The whole thread can be found here (via threadreaderapp) or here (at Twitter, but you'll have to scroll to the top). That element is what Porter (drawing on a post by Super Wendy) calls "a righted universe", and Porter states that "If the universe isn’t right, many of use reject the HEA/FN even if it exists".

I don't want to repeat the implications which Jennifer Porter draws out. They're in her thread, so there's no need to repeat them all here. But I do think that this insight into how readers feel about "a righted universe" enhances Pamela Regis's analysis of the essential elements of romance. Regis does, in fact, allude to the "righted universe". First of all, she offers "society defined" (31) as one of the essential elements of romance:

As she says, "This society is in some way flawed". Later, Regis returns to the issue of the flawed society:

The "accidental element" is the scene which demonstrates that "Society has reconstituted itself" (38) but, Regis says, "this scene is promised in every romance, even if it is not dramatized" (38). One could, then, argue that "Society reconstituted" (i.e. "a righted universe") is, for many readers, a ninth essential element.

---
Regis, Pamela. A Natural History of the Romance Novel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

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!

2019 Recipients of the RWA Academic Research Grant

These have now been announced:

E.E. Lawrence
“She didn’t really look like a librarian to him”: An Analysis of Professional Stereotype Reaffirmation and Resistance in Popular Romance Novels Authored by Librarians
RWA awarded funding to E.E. Lawrence to explore depictions of librarians in romance novels authored by librarians.

Dr. Jodi McAlister and Claire Parnell
#RomanceClass: Mapping the Genre World of English-Language Romance in the Philippines
RWA awarded funding to Dr. Jodi McAlister and Claire Parnel to conduct research on English-Language romance fiction in the Philippines through author interviews and other fieldwork.

Anna Michelson
Redefining the Romance: Classification and Social Change in Romance Genre Fiction
RWA awarded funding to Anna Michelson to conduct source and field research on classification and social change in romance fiction.


Congratulations!

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.

CFP: EUPOP 2019

Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, July 16th – 18th, 2019

Deadline: 28th February, 2019

EUPOP 2018 will explore European popular culture in all its various forms. This includes, but is by no means limited to, the following topics: European Film (past and present), Television, Music, Costume and Performance, Celebrity, The Body, Fashion, New Media, Popular Literature and Graphic Novels, Queer Studies, Sport, Curation, and Digital Culture. We also welcome abstracts which reflect the various ways of how the idea of relationship between Europe and popular culture could be formed and how the current turmoil in European identity, union, its borders and divisions are portrayed in popular cultural themes and contents.

More details here.

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.

News Round-up and Calls for Papers

On 29 August the Journal of Popular Romance Studies was added to the European Reference Index for the Humanities and Social Sciences (ERIH PLUS). This is an indicator of the quality of the journal and increases its visibility:

The main aim of ERIH has been from its very beginnings to enhance global visibility of high quality research in the humanities published in academic journals in various European languages all over Europe. The index enables researchers to better understand and promote the national and international importance of their research. (About)

Entertainment Weekly report that

Bea and Leah Koch, the sister duo who founded and own Los Angeles’ romance bookstore The Ripped Bodice, have signed an overall deal with Sony Pictures Television [...]. The Koch sisters will partner with Sony to develop romance-focused projects for television based on their unique connection to romance readers and authors.

A symposium is being held at the University of Warwick on 28th September, on the topic of "Imagining ‘We’ in the Age of ‘I’: Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture". Speakers include:

• Abhija Ghosh (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi) on ‘Orchestrating Romance: Nineties Romance Genre, Film Song and Bollywood’
• Diana Holmes (University of Leeds), on ‘Plaisirs d’amour: love and popular fiction in contemporary France’ 
• Lucy Sheerman (independent researcher) on ‘Reader I Mirrored Him: the recasting of romance tropes in Jane Eyre fanfiction'

If that makes you want to write a paper about love, then the call for papers for "Love, etc", A conference sponsored by the “Uses of Literature” Research Project at the University of Southern Denmark, October 3-4, 2019 might be of interest. The closing date for submissions is November 15 2018.

Alternatively, there are still a few days left before the closing date for submissions to the ACLA Book Lovers seminar: "Book Lovers welcomes abstracts that touch on any aspect of love". Abstracts must be received by Thursday, September 20, 2018 at 9 a.m. EST. The American Comparative Literature Association's 2019 Annual Meeting will take place at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, March 7th-10th, 2019.

There's also been a call for papers for a panel on Muslim Popular Culture in Asia: Aesthetics and Politics at the German Association for Asian Studies’ (DGA)'s biannual Conference on Contemporary Asia, which will be held in April 3–5, 2019 in Würzburg, Germany. The deadline for all paper proposal submissions is October 7, 2018, 6:00pm (CET).


Kate Cuthbert's keynote address to the 2018 Romance Writers of Australia conference, on "the romance novel and representations of sexuality after #MeToo" is now available online. It discusses hope, and how romance has a history of growing and changing.

In August a team from the Surgery and Emotion project introduced visitors to the Science Museum to Mills & Boon romances:

One participant said it was ‘such a fun station’ and that they’d ‘learnt a lot about Mills & Boon books’. Another commented it was ‘so fun’, ‘a good idea for an activity’, and that it encouraged her to think about ‘the cultural impact of medical fiction’. One attendee described it as an ‘awesome stall’, explaining that they ‘didn’t know anything about Mills & Boon before, it’s really made me think’. Finally, one visitor remarked that it was a ‘super enjoyable’ activity, and that they’d ‘learnt a lot about how the novels were ahead of their time, regarding females’ roles in a medical setting’.

More details here.

Sourcebooks is releasing new editions "of 11 of Heyer’s Regency romances as part of the Georgette Heyer Signature Collection" (Keira Soleore). The books in the "Georgette Heyer Signature Collection" include

praise from scores of bestselling authors, sharing their love of Heyer and why she’s such a gem. Each book includes a fun glossary of Regency slang, plus an Afterword by Heyer’s official biographer Jennifer Kloester, with fascinating insights about what Heyer thought about her own books and what was going on in her life at the time she was writing them. A Reading Group Guide helps readers delve into discussion of Heyer’s time and ours, and why the more things change, the more they stay the same (human nature for sure!).

Keira Soleore has interviewed Jennifer Kloester.

New to the Romance Wiki: Emotions, Ethnocentrism, Evangelicals, Parody, Readers, Robin Hood, Translations

This is a long list: I should have posted an update earlier.

Capps, Stephanie Carol, 2017. 

"What You Read and What You Believe: Genre Exposure and Beliefs about Relationships". Master of Science thesis. University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, 2017. Pdf [This seems similar to the article below by Stern et al. I wonder if Capps changed surname between 2017 and 2018, as the first name and second initial are identical, as is the title of the paper.]

Jackson, Cia, 2017. 

"Harlequin Romance: The Power of Parody and Subversion." The Ascendance of Harley Quinn: Essays on DC's Enigmatic Villain. Ed. Shelley E. Barba and Joy M. Perrin. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2017. 16-??. Excerpt [This is about how the DC comics parody romance novel conventions via the figure of Harley Quinn.]

 

Johnson, Valerie B., 2018. 

"What a Canon Wants: Robin Hood, Romance Novels, and Carrie Lofty’s What a Scoundrel Wants", Robin Hood and the Outlaw/ed Literary Canon, ed. Lesley Coote and Alexander L. Kaufman. ???: Routledge, 2018. 184-??? Excerpt

Lee, Zi-Ying and Min-Hsiu Liao, 2018. 

'The “Second” Bride: The Retranslation of Romance Novels'. Babel. Published online first 27 August 2018. Abstract and full pre-publication version

 

McAlister, Jodi, 2018. 

‘ “Feelings Like the Women in Books”: Declarations of Love in Australian Romance Novels, 1859–1891’, Emotions: History, Culture, Society 2.1: 91-112. Abstract

 

Neal, Lynn S., 2013.

‘Evangelical Love Stories: The Triumphs and Temptations of Romantic Fiction,’ in Evangelical Christians and Popular Culture: Pop Goes the Gospel, ed. Robert H. Woods, Jr, vol. 2 (Santa Barbara: Praeger): 1–20. Excerpt.

Olivarez, Omar, Ryan Hardie, and Kate G. Blackburn, 2018.

“The Language of Romance: An Open Vocabulary Analysis of the Highest Rated Words Used in Romance Novels.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology. First Published August 18, 2018. Abstract

Pérez‐Gil, María del Mar, 2018. 

"Exoticism, Ethnocentrism, and Englishness in Popular Romance Fiction: Constructing the European Other". Journal of Popular Culture. Published online first 19 July 2018. [Focuses on the Spanish "Other" in the English imagination.] Excerpt

Popova, Milena, 2018.

"Rewriting the Romance: Emotion Work and Consent in Arranged Marriage Fanfiction". Journal of Popular Romance Studies 7.

Stern, Stephanie C., Brianne Robbins, Jessica E. Black and Jennifer L. Barnes, 2018. 

"What You Read and What You Believe: Genre Exposure and Beliefs About Relationships." Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. Advance online publication. Abstract and a short summary I posted at my personal blog, focused on the findings about romance readers.

In other sections I've added:

Hall, Cailey. 

"The Consolation of Genre: On Reading Romance Novels", Los Angeles Review of Books, 27 August 2018.

Liu, S.-h, 2012. 

"The Translation/Mutation of Romantic Love: An Exploration of the Translation History of Modern Romances in Taiwan after 1960". PhD Thesis, National Taiwan Normal University. Abstract

 

Sebastian, Cat.

"Romance, Compassion, and Inclusivity (Or: How Romance Will Save the World)", Los Angeles Review of Books, 29 August 2018. [This also appeared in the LARB Print Quarterly Journal: No. 19,  Romance]

New: Encyclopedia of Romance Fiction

It's been a while since I added an item to the Romance Wiki's list of guides to the romance genre.

The Encyclopedia of Romance Fiction, ed. Kristin Ramsdell (Santa Barbara, California: Greenwood, 2018)

attempts to provide basic, relevant information on the popular Romance fiction genre in an accessible format for students and general readers who wish to know more about the topic. Subjects included cover the proverbial waterfront, ranging from detailed discussions of the various Romance subgenres and all that they entail to the nitty-gritty of the publishing and professional environment that is part of the genre - and everything in between. Each entry also includes a list of references and recommended resources for further research.

You can find an excerpt at Google Books and according to Amazon it will be published on 31 August.

The Encyclopedia's quite expensive, so I imagine it's most likely to be bought by libraries but it claims to be "the first encyclopedia solely devoted to the popular romance fiction genre" and was "written by contributors who are scholars, librarians, and industry experts with broad knowledge of the genre". Among those scholarly contributors are:

• Dr. Elizabeth Reid Boyd (Edith Cowan University)
• Dr. Amy Burge (University of Birmingham)
• jay Dixon (author of The Romance Fiction of Mills & Boon, 1909-1990s)
• Dr. Beth Driscoll (University of Melbourne)
• Associate Professor Lisa Fletcher (University of Tasmania)
• Dr. Rosemary Gaby (University of Tasmania)
• Dr. Claire Knowles (La Trobe University)
• Associate Professor John Markert (Cumberland University)
• Dr. Jodi McAlister (Deakin University)
• Professor Eric Murphy Selinger (DePaul University)
• Professor Wendy Wagner (Johnson & Wales University)

Diversity and Inclusion at RWA 2018

Diversity and inclusion were important themes of this year's Romance Writers of America conference. Avon have announced the creation of "The Beverly Jenkins Diverse Voices Sponsorship [...] to encourage Own Voices writers to be more fully represented at the RWA annual conference" in coming years. Prior to the event the RWA had announced that

In continuing its commitment to increasing diversity and inclusion within the organization and the romance industry, Romance Writers of America will hold its second Diversity Summit at the 2018 RWA Conference in Denver on Friday, July 20. The Summit is a meeting that gathers high-level publishing professionals, key contacts at major retailers, members of the RWA staff and Board, and selected committee and chapter leaders who are registered for the conference. A summary of the Summit will be provided to membership by August 6, 2018.

The Diversity Summit will once again be moderated by 2016’s Librarian of the Year recipient Robin Bradford. We'll be discussing the results of a survey RWA commissioned from NPD Book focusing on the buying habits of readers across ethnicity, age, and sexual orientation, as well as revealing initiatives within RWA to promote inclusiveness within our own organization and the industry. We will be inviting publishers to share their ideas, in-house initiatives, and ways in which RWA can be a resource for them.

Key speeches given during the conference were also indicative of the depth of the Board's commitment to "increasing diversity and inclusion".

The 2018 Librarians Day Luncheon Keynote Speech from award-winning author Sonali Dev (this is an audio file) called for librarians to think about the voices which have been silenced and pledge to help them to be heard, because librarians have power when they make decisions about which books to order for their libraries.

This is really important. We hope our library and archives colleagues take the time to sit and listen and then use our enormous power to take action. https://t.co/07YqewLXPj

— Browne Pop Culture Library @ BGSU (@BGSU_PopCultLib) 26 July 2018

LIBRARIANS!!!!! This amazing speech is for you. #CollectionDevelopment librarians, this is ESPECIALLY for you. https://t.co/En8EEoPnXL

— Robin ⚾️🍹🎼📚 (@Tuphlos) 26 July 2018

From something Dev says in the speech, I think it was given after Suzanne Brockmann's Lifetime Achievement Award Speech (link to a transcript on Brockmann's website) in which Brockmann recounted how, at the very beginning of her career, she was asked by an editor to make a gay secondary character straight. She acquiesced, but vowed that in future she 'would not write books set in a world where gay people [...] were rendered invisible, [...] erased “because that’s just the way it was.”' Brockmann also referred to current US politics.

The video below is of the entire awards ceremony. The section relating to Brockmann begins at 45:35 minutes (Brockmann herself appears just after the 56 minute mark).


Lisa Lin relates that "During her speech, I saw some who did not appear to react well, and I have seen some negative reactions on social media". Lin is among the many authors who have responded online in support of Brockmann's speech. Nicki Salcedo's response includes examples of how her writing has been marginalised:

Much of the feedback on my books was related to race. There weren’t comments on plot or pacing. No issues with dialogue or themes. The feedback was:

“We don’t have an African-American imprint at this time…”

“Your manuscript might find a better home with [insert publisher of Black books in completely unrelated genre]…”

“Are your main characters Black?” [I pondered this for a long time before responding and decided to say yes. I did not get another response.]

“I find your main character completely unbelievable…” [She was Black from an affluent family]

“We don’t know where to shelve your book in the store…” [With fiction? Or maybe romance? Just a guess…Or somewhere near the Colored People’s water fountain?] [...]

and then there's this, about the different ways the same novel was treated when Salcedo

removed all references to race in the novel. I did not revise or alter my manuscript in any other substantive way. All I did was make the main character “not Black.”

In 2012, that same manuscript became a Golden Heart Finalist. I wish I could say I was surprised. But I wasn’t.

I submitted my manuscript for the final round of judging and included my characters as I intended. Black, brown, and white. At the RWA National Conference, I sat in an appointment with an editor from a Big 5 publisher. She was a final round judge for the Golden Heart Contest. “I read your manuscript,” she said. “I hated it.” This is a direct quote.

Individual contest judges who are biased would seem to be an ongoing problem. This year, for example, Alana Albertson reported that her inter-racial romance received a very low score for the ending:

Received my RITA scores. 1 "judge" gave my interracial romance, Invaluable, 2.9 out of 10, and checked no to the question
Is the resolution of the romance emotionally satisfying and optimistic? The book ends with him proposing to her. Hmm #Rita #ritassowhite pic.twitter.com/hRpzWwSzMX

— Alana Albertson (@AlanaAlbertson) 2 August 2018

The RWA Board had already made changes to the rules governing the judging of the RITAs but these will only come into force next year:

OK, this is the new RITA judging rules for next year. It contains a warning that judges can be asked to explain their scoring, and possible consequences of up to lifetime disqualification from the RITAs (and, one hopes, from judging as a PAN member also). pic.twitter.com/He36DNbqiU

— KJ Charles (@kj_charles) 2 August 2018

RWA responded swiftly to concerns about this year's judging process with the following post:

RITA scores went out to entrants last night and we have heard the concerns of those who believe their entries were subject to biased judging.  ​This year, one of the major focuses of the RWA Board has been to evaluate procedures for the RITA Contest in light of the existence of bias among some judges. This bias results in an unfair scoring of books representative of marginalized populations, and harms the integrity of the award. ​At the July board meeting, the Board passed a new policy that we hope will allow patterns of biased judging to be identified and for actions to be taken against those judges if deemed necessary. [...]

While these policies only apply to the 2019 contest and beyond, we can begin documenting judging patterns this year. If an entrant feels their submission was judged unfairly due to invidious discrimination against content, characters or authors​, we ask that the entrant reply directly to the scoring email with this information. Deputy Executive Director Carol Ritter will review the complaint and will make a record of possible biased judging. These files will be carried over each year and if a pattern is identified, action can be taken as set out in policy.

It is the Board's goal to create a RITA Contest that allows for fair and equitable judging of all entries, and we hope the changes made put us on a path to that reality.

New to the Romance Wiki Bibliography: Lots of Free Items (including some in Spanish) on Australia, Cover Art, Publishing and more

Laura Vivanco

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

"Genre Worlds and Popular Fiction: The Case of Twenty-First-Century Australian Romance", Journal of Popular Culture. Online First 16 July 2018. Excerpt

Golubov, Nattie, 2017. 

El amor en tiempos neoliberales: apuntes críticos sobre la novela rosa contemporánea. Ciudad de México: Bonilla Artigas, 2017. [Free from a variety of sites, including the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Amazon and Academia.edu.]

González Cruz, María-Isabel, 2018. 

"Hispanismos en el discurso romántico de Harlequin y Mills & Boon. Ámbitos temáticos y funciones socio-pragmáticas". Moderna språk 112.1: 163-184. Abstract and link to pdf

Nelson, Elizabeth, 2015. 

"The Romance of Self-Publishing". Self-Publishing and Collection Development: Opportunities and Challenges for Libraries. Ed. Robert P. Holley. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2015. 149-157.[Whole volume available as a pdf here]

 

O’Mahony, Lauren and Olivia Murphy, 2018. 

'From polite society to the Pilbara: The ingénue abroad in Evelina and The Girl in Steel-Capped Boots', Outskirts 38:1-23. [Abstract and Pdf]

Pérez Casal, Inmaculada, 2018. 

"The Romance Novel as Bildungsroman in the Works of Rosamunde Pilcher and Lisa Kleypas". Taking Stock to Look Ahead: Celebrating Forty Years of English Studies in Spain. Ed. María Ferrández San Miguel and Claus-Peter Neumann. Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de la Universidad de Zaragoza, 2018. 139-144.[Whole volume available as a pdf here]

 

Spears, Jessica D., 2018. 

The Romance Novel Cover. MA Thesis (Art History). City University of New York (CUNY), Hunter College, 2018. Abstract and link to pdf.

Washington, AlTonya, 2015. 

"An Indie Author in a Library World". Self-Publishing and Collection Development: Opportunities and Challenges for Libraries. Ed. Robert P. Holley. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2015. 139-147.[Whole volume available as a pdf here]

Call for Papers: PCA/ACA 2019

From https://pcaaca.org/area/romance

Conference of the Popular Culture Association (PCA/ACA)

17-20 April 2019 – Washington, DC

In response to the 2019 conference’s location in Washington, DC, the US capital, this year’s romance area will foreground the topic of popular romance and politics. Romance has arguably always been political, but recent years have seen political engagement in romantic spaces become more explicit.
We encourage you to define “politics” broadly, not simply as party politics in a particular national or regional arena, but also as the ways that power dynamics among social groups are reproduced or challenged, naturalized or destabilized, along such faultlines as gender, sexuality, race, nationality, religion, and class, among others.  In the world of romance, such politics often has to do with inclusion and representation.  Consider the pins Alisha Rai distributed at a recent author event, which proclaimed, “HEA belongs to everyone.” 
If we think about the romance “genre world” as a “social and industrial complex in which people work together to create and circulate specific types of texts” that functions at the industrial, social, and textual level (Fletcher, Driscoll and Wilkins 2018), we can see everyday politics in action at every level:  Which authors and works get published?  Who gets taught in college classrooms?  Who gets awards?
 Paper topics on this special theme might include the following:

• The politics of the popular romance novel, romantic comedy, or any medium involving romance
• The multicultural romance as antiracist pedagogy
• M/M romance and the straight female readership/viewership/etc
• Racial segregation in the romance industry
• Politicians, activists, and elections in popular romance
• The academic politics of studying popular romance
• Party politics and military romance
• Romance as resistance and romance writers/creators as activists
• Politics within the RWA or other writers’, creators’, or makers’ organisations
• Pushing historical romance beyond the straight, white, and narrow
• Making consent hot
• The dialogues between romance and specific social movements, such as #metoo
• Mapping politics among romance readers, viewers, consumers, etc
• The politics of publication and the current industrial status quo
• Romantic love in a time of political upheaval

If you are sick of politics, or simply want to pursue your own intellectual passion, you are very welcome to do so. The Romance area invites any theoretical or (inter)disciplinary approach to any topic related to romance. We would like to emphasise that you do not need to write about romance novels to participate in this area (although that is obviously welcome!): the Romance area is open to engagements with all forms of media and culture that are concerned with romance, including, but not limited to, the following: art; literature; philosophy; radio; film; television; comics and graphic novels; videos, webzines and other online storytelling.
We are deeply interested in popular romance both within and outside of mainstream popular culture, now or in the past, anywhere in the world. Scholars, romance writers, romance readers/viewers, and any combination of the three are welcome: you do not need to be an academic to be part of the Romance area.
As we do every year, the Romance area will meet in a special Open Forum to discuss upcoming conferences, work in progress, and the future of the field of Popular Romance Studies. All are welcome to attend. In addition, if you wish to organise a roundtable, special session, or a film screening, please contact the Area Chairs, Jodi McAlister and Heather Schell.

Submit 250-word abstracts to https://pcaaca.org/node/add/presentation by October 1, 2018