So, here we go. Prepare for the invasion!
TMT Sarah: I will be assigning this book if/when I ever teach romance again. You've got the history, the criticism, the analysis, all in a neat, screamingly-funny package. Were you trying to write an academically valuable book with BHB, or a "textbook" of romance analysis, or were you just writing to entertain? Is there a difference? ;)
SB Sarah: We were definitely not aiming for academic analysis or a textbook on romance. But since both of us were English majors with an unhealthy interest in critical analysis, our examination of romances as valid and worthy narratives demanded we whip out the Jung (no pun intended) (no, I lie, totally intended) and subject the romance to the same level of attention as other narrative fiction.
Candy: One of my aims while writing this book was to write a funny, entertaining dissection of the modern romance novel, and to have fun while taking a hard look at the issues that many critics either (to my mind) mischaracterized or have mostly skirted around. I don't know that I was consciously thinking "This sure will be useful for professors who are all into women's literature and pop culture studies," and to be honest, I think in some ways it's a pretty poor resource for serious academics--it is, at best, a very quick and (very, very) dirty introduction to the genre and the issues it presents. It is, however, a fast and readable intro for students, so it has that much going for it.
As for writing to entertain: while I can write in a dry, academic tone, I'm also the kind of geek who thinks it's much more awesome to write about serious academic matters while using generous amounts of parody and cussin', so yeah, I write to entertain AND to inform. (Relatedly: I also think it's easier to get my message across to the widest cross-section of interested people when I'm funny. Which term is the average person going to remember more easily: man-titty and Heroic Wang, or metonymical hypertrophied masculinity?)
TMT Sarah: Why do you feel romances are viable subjects of academic analysis? What about why they are valuable subjects? What can we learn, as academics, from studying popular romance?
SB Sarah: How could they not be? A genre devoted to women's self-actualization and sexual agency, produced during and after the feminist movement, read by women and created by women? Gee, nothing at all to see here. Please move along.
The romance genre is an anthropological history of women's sexuality in North America over the past 60+ years. If you want to study a culture, study it's popular culture - and romance novels are a crucial element to our popular culture.
Candy: I said in a recent entry for the Powell's Books blog that romance novels are the subduction zones of literature, and that sums up, in one over-stretched nerd simile, why I think they're worth academic analysis and why they're valuable subjects. There are all sorts of interesting conflicts and assumptions and subversions going on in romance novels about gender roles, courtship rituals, the constitution of families, sexual norms, etc. And they're valuable, not only for the overt conflicts they present, but for all the subtextual stuff that's assumed and unsaid, like how sexually deviant behaviors in villains (oh my god they're GAY, or holy crap they like TYING PEOPLE UP AND THEN WHIPPING THEM) serve as a symbol for a villainous rejection of other societal values.
TMT Sarah: If you were writing a dissertation about popular romance, what would the thematic focus of your analysis be and why? (Mine, for example, would be the construction of the hero.) What books would you analyze and why?
SB Sarah: If I were writing a dissertation (and concurrent with that premise is the outright fucking miracle that I'd be allowed to in a graduate program. No, not bitter, not at all) on romance, I'd probably focus on acts of violence on the part of heroines, particularly in paranormals, and likely contrast that with violence from heroes. I'd analyze the Cole series, Showalter's books, Kelley Armstrong's series, and a lot of the urban fantasy genre. I am fascinated by how adding the whizzy fizz of paranormality suddenly makes room for women to literally rip someone a new one.
Candy: I think it would have to be the evolution of sex in romance novels. God, that'd be a huge, unwieldy (and throbbing--at least, it'd make my head throb) dissertation, wouldn't it? I think I'd focus on non-consensual sex in romances--whether it's possible to create a principled distinction between forced seduction and rape in the fictional world, why rape by the hero is OK, why rape by the villain isn't, when romance hero rape stopped being the norm, and how that rape has been channeled into other avenues, like the unwilling turning of the heroine in paranormals. I started naming names of books at first, and it rapidly got out of control, especially once I realized that I'd listed mostly historicals without even thinking of all the contemporaries and category romances I'd want to cover as well, so let's just acknowledge that if I did, in fact, write this dissertation, it'd probably take me eight full years and lot of tears, cussing and bloodshed.
TMT Sarah: The one small issue people have been having with BHB is that it's very historical romance centric. Do you agree and if so, why do you think this is?
SB Sarah: Yes, it is historical-romance centric, and part of that was constraints of total word count and part of that was our desire to really portray the full history of what most people think of when they think "romance novel" - e.g. the historical bodice ripper. And in discussing it, we had to reveal it, unpack it a bit, and defend it because that's the source of the most damaging of the stereotypes hurled at the genre: ye olde "bodice ripper."
Candy: It's a fair cop; the only thing I can say in reply is that we were trying to represent the history of the genre, and historicals dominated for decades--I mean, they've only ceded ground in the last seven or eight years to paranormals. And it's also what I'm most familiar with, and what I've read the most, so when I have to trot out an example that I can examine intelligently, it's probably going to be a historical.
TMT Eric: Near the start of the book you call yourselves "lit nerds." When did you start thinking like "lit nerds" about romance fiction? Was there a particular book that got you started?
SB Sarah: I probably started thinking like a lit nerd when I had a really demanding professor in college, and when, in the course of writing papers for that course, found a literary journal called "The Explicator" which had the wonderful combination of being (a) full of concise, short, but delightfully sharp pieces of criticism of random things and (b) somewhat friendly to elements of popular culture in its subject matter. It became my go-to journal for critical backup when writing a paper. That was the type of criticism I wanted to write.
As for harnessing the lit crit thunderstick and waving it at romance (oh noes!) I am honestly not sure which one it was that started the whole mess. It might have been Kelley Armstrong's "Bitten" which really got me thinking about the subtext of otherworldly villainy in a terrorism-conscious society.
Candy: I think I first started analyzing romances after I read Loretta Chase's The Lion's Daughter when I was seventeen years old or so, because the hero and heroine were so unusual. The hero is a wastrel in a distinctly un-romantic way, because you see in a very concrete way what happens when a rich kid fritters away his fortune, whereas a lot of historicals at the time tended to present these rakish wastrels in a much more dashing light. And that got me thinking about how characters were portrayed in romance, and how the characters were made to fit into boxes, but the authors didn't seem especially aware of the boxes--or, if they were aware, they didn't really care to take the characters out of those boxes and sort of extending them to their logical conclusions. Once I went to college and learned some actual analytical tools, forget about it--I did (and to this day) still do it to just about anything I read, from magazine articles to Supreme Court opinions to romance novels. I'm fucknoxious that way.
TMT Eric: In your book and on your blog you don't just celebrate the best romance novels; you have a lot of fun with some of the worst of them. What makes a really good (or really fun) bad book? Why is it important to celebrate (as well as mock) the stuff that "makes the baby Ganesh weep with the badness"?
SB Sarah: Well, if you can't laugh at the stuff that really does suck with the badness, how would anyone take you seriously when you try to tell them how good the other stuff is?
Candy: I love lots of bad romances, and I think what tends to make then really fun for me are the ones that hit my taboo hot buttons (like Morning Song by Karen Robards, which features a truly squicky but compelling romance between a stepfather and stepdaughter), or ones that showcase a certain kind of good-natured energy, like a lot of Dara Joy's work. The bad books that are the most fun to write about, however, tend to be the ones that make me mad, because then I'm writing with passion, and sweet creamy Christ it's so cathartic to strike back at a book that's injured my aesthetic and grammatical sensibilties.
And it's important to acknowledge the bad stuff unflinchingly (well, OK, we flinch for the Indian and sheik romances) because--well, it's the same thing for any argument, isn't it? Find your weak spots and cover them before your opponents can. Like Sarah said, if we insist that everything is sparkly ponies and magical liopleurodons, when it's patently not, then it's going to be hard for people to take us seriously when we point out the awesome bits that deserve celebration. Standards require a baseline and differentiation; ignoring the bad stuff just turns us into mindless cheerleaders.
TMT Eric: What are your favorite Old Skool romances? Is there an Old Skool romance you wish that we Professors Brilliant would take a look at?
Sarah: My favorite Old Skool will always be "Midsummer Magic" by Catherine Coulter. Dowdy disguises! Forced marriages! Surly but noble hero with moral compass. AND USE OF CREAM OMG TO SMOOTH THE TENDER PASSAGE. It's full of win and omg. Plus, the original printing has a swan freaking the fuck out behind the hero, and that always makes my year.
Candy: I can't think of a genuinely Old Skool romance that I love; I read them mostly because I want to see how romances have evolved with time. And if you Professors Brilliant would look at Catherine Coulter's Devil's Embrace, which made me go OH JESUS WHAT IN THE SWEET MOTHER OF FUCK more often than any other book I've read, ever, that'd be great, because I'd love to read an academic dissection of that book.
TMT Eric: If you could magically replace The Scarlet Letter with a romance novel in every high school in America, what romance novel would it be?
SB Sarah: "The Windflower" by Laura London or "Dream Man" by Linda Howard. The former b/c it is awesome. The latter because I don't like The Scarlet Letter and would replace it with something that bothered me equally on multiple levels.
Candy: Y'know, Hawthorne was a misogynist dipshit, but I like his writing style, and he had important things to say about the human condition. If I had to replace the Scarlet Letter with a romance, I think I'd go with a one-two punch of To Love and to Cherish and To Have and to Hold by Patricia Gaffney, largely because I think they're both really, really well-written, and they present very different facets of sexuality, sex roles and sexual control.
TMT Eric In many of the interviews with you have asked about the Magic Hoo-Hoo. Why do > you think that none of the interviewers have asked about the Heroic Wang of Mighty Lovin'?
SB Sarah: I was asked by a butterscotch-voiced radio host named Dr. Alvin Jones about the Wang of Mighty Lovin' and he sounded so incredible talking about it I wanted him to say it over and over again. Heroic Wang never sounded so good.
I think otherwise "Hoo Hoo" is part of the cultural consciousness, what with Grey's Anatomy talking about the 'va-jay-jay' and the presence of other socially acceptable somewhat funny euphemisms for vagina. So Hoo Hoo is yet another.
Candy: Have you seen Sarah Haskins' absolutely hilarious video on popular discourse on the vagina called Your Garden? [ETA: TMT Sarah's response: Bwahaha! OMG!] That video, right there, expresses my answer in pretty compact form. I'll have to try answering this question more fully some time in the future, though; I think I could easily write about 1,500 words on this issue.
TMT Eric: What (if anything) have you learned from the academics who study romance fiction? What could we academics learn from you?
SB Sarah: it makes me so happy to know there are academics who take it seriously, considering a ran screaming out of grad school in part because I couldn't study romances as a contextual field in which to locate any type of critical examination. I have learned that just about any specialty within the humanities (and probably the sciences as well) can be applied to romances, and because the genre is so neglected, there's an incredible amount of room to discover what lurks beneath the texts and across the various narrative trends. A minefield of heaving bosoms, if you will.
I don't know that you can learn much from me, really, except perhaps creative cussing. And how much I really hate the word "emails."
Candy: I've learned that the breadth and scope of romance is much bigger than what I could've imagined, thanks to you guys. As for what academics can learn from us: funny, foul-mouthed ways to refer to metonymical hypertrophied masculinity? All kinds of squirrelly stuff that fall under reader response theory?
I do have one, very trivial, question. Is it just my imagination/co-incidence, or does Mavis, the stereotypical romance reader, have a face which looks a bit like SB Sarah's? Maybe it's just the shape and colour of her glasses and the length of her hair, but I think Mavis looks snarky enough to be a smart bitch blogging about trashy books. I also suspect she wears her puffy-paint kitten top and fluffy slippers in a post-modern, ironic sort of way.
ReplyDeleteI also think it's easier to get my message across to the widest cross-section of interested people when I'm funny. Which term is the average person going to remember more easily: man-titty and Heroic Wang, or metonymical hypertrophied masculinity?
I'd agree that compared to literary jargon, commonly used words/phrases will be more easily understood, and catchy phrases are more easily remembered. I'm not sure they have to be funny, though. I suppose I'm saying that because I didn't find this book funny (which no doubt says more about me than it does about the book) but I do find the phrases memorable and re
As for what academics can learn from us: funny, foul-mouthed ways to refer to metonymical hypertrophied masculinity?
I think I can safely say that I'll be using the term "Mighty Wang" in my writing in the future.
it's important to acknowledge the bad stuff unflinchingly (well, OK, we flinch for the Indian and sheik romances) because--well, it's the same thing for any argument, isn't it? Find your weak spots and cover them before your opponents can.
I very much agree that all of us who analyse the genre need to get the balance right. "The Little Professor" once wrote about two different, but both dangerous, academic responses to historical fiction which I think could equally apply to romance:
1) The dangers of inflating texts (by ascribing more "depth" to the text than is actually present, failing to reflect on one's critical terminology and aesthetic criteria, neglecting to take into account different writing or reading practices...);
2) The dangers of deflating readers and authors (through mockery, conscious or unconscious feelings of superiority, simple ignorance...).
Much of the earliest analysis of the romance genre deflated readers and authors, and some of the stuff which came after it (and Little Professor links to some romance criticism which she thinks did this) tried to inflate the whole genre by arguing that all of it was empowering, feminist, etc.
I hope you won't mind if I respond to some of the comments made in this interview in the spirit of trying to find and cover what I see as some "weak spots" and as a result of my agreement with the statement that "Standards require a baseline and differentiation; ignoring the bad stuff just turns us into mindless cheerleaders":
The romance genre is an anthropological history of women's sexuality in North America.
I definitely agree that the genre could be seen as an abundant source of material concerning changes in attitudes towards women's sexuality but I don't think it's accurate to describe the whole genre as an "anthropological history of women's sexuality" and there are romance writers and editors in places other than North America. I know everyone here knows that, but I felt the need to say it anyway, if only to preempt a comment to that effect from someone who doesn't know that you know it.
A genre devoted to women's self-actualization and sexual agency, produced during and after the feminist movement, read by women and created by women?
Again, on the same grounds, I feel compelled to point out that there are some men who read romances, some men who create them, that I didn't know the "feminist movement" had ended, and that I'm not at all sure that all of the genre is "devoted to women's [...] sexual agency."
But Beyond Heaving Bosoms does concentrate on North American romance, and it does focus (though not exclusively so) on the elements of the genre which are about women and women's sexuality, so this seems a fair representation of the contents of the book. As Sarah says, it "portray[s] the full history of what most people [in the US] think of when they think "romance novel."
Laura: you've given some excellent fodder for thought, especially in terms of the inflation/deflation cautionary principle, and how many romances aren't particularly subversive/feminist/progressive; that, together with BevBB's dislike of the term "for women, by women" (which echoes my dislike for the term) is percolating in my brain. Don't know that I'll have time to marshall these thoughts into a coherent article for Smart Bitches, given that finals are less than two weeks away, but I'm scribbling down thoughts and observations like mad.
ReplyDeleteI'm looking forward to reading your thoughts at SBTB and I hope your finals go well. I haven't had to think about exams for a long time now, but remembering them makes me feel a bit queasy.
ReplyDeleteGetting the balance right, so as to avoid both deflation and inflation can be very tricky, I think. I expect that however rational we try to be about things, it's difficult to avoid confirmation bias completely (though my understanding of what "confirmation bias" is is limited to what I read at Wikipedia so I may well have misunderstood the concept). And a while ago RfP wrote aboutA new article by Aaker, Drolet, and Griffin in the Journal of Consumer Research [which] says our memories are less reliable for experiences that provoke mixed emotions. We tend to remember our feelings as more definite than they were, and over time we forget the intensity of our initial mixed feelings.
[...] do we trick ourselves into remembering each book as all feel-good or all chills, and pure gold or utter tripe?
Anyway, although it wasn't expressed in terms of perceived inflation and deflation, those perceptions were at the heart of quite a bit of a controversy which arose as the result of the Paradoxa series of articles about romance. I don't know if you read them while doing the research for Beyond Heaving Bosoms, but the gist of it was that Tania Modleski wrote an article for Paradoxa 3.1-2 which was entirely devoted to the romance genre and in which, as Modleski put it in a rather angry-sounding follow-up essay, in another Paradoxa volume,
as I wrestled with contradictions in the genre, in myself, and in my relation with the genre, these women admitted to nothing but the achievement of a fully developed absolutely unconflicted feminist sensibility. [...] after reading the other articles I regretted having lent myself to this postfeminist celebration, and felt the need to respond. (134)
She was being included in group of critics cited as deflaters of the genre, but she felt that (a) she'd changed her opinions somewhat as the genre had changed and (b) in any case her critics were inflaters.
"If you could magically replace The Scarlet Letter with a romance novel in every high school in America, what romance novel would it be?"
ReplyDeleteActually, I would love to keep teaching Scarlet Letter, but teach it against a Jennifer Crusie novel. And then I'd throw in her critical essay, which alludes to Hawthorne:
http://www.jennycrusie.com/essays/scribblingwomen.php
Yummy!
Bonus: I teach AP Language and Comp. This is more possible for me than it would be for others. Somehow, though, I doubt "Welcome to Temptation" will ever be approved by my school board...
Hi, Kate! That essay by Jenny was partly what prompted the question, although for years I've wanted to swap out the Scarlet Letter for Harriet Jacobs' "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" (http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/Jacobs/hjhome.htm).
ReplyDeleteRe: Welcome to Temptation, let me tell you, the young ladies I teach in college would all be very happy to have that one taught to AP students. The earlier the better, they say!
It has occurred to me in passing whether anyone has ever undertaken a kind of counterpoint analysis of what this book calls the Old Skool romances with the traditional regencies. It might be interesting to choose one of each that came out the same year in the period from 1972 into the mid-1980s and contrast them.
ReplyDeleteYes, trad regencies really are rather different from "Old Skool" aren't they, and Cartland was still publishing during the same period too (she has lots of Victorian-set romances, which I'm not thinking of hers as "trad Regencies"), so it's not as though all romances in the "Old Skool" period were "Old Skool" romances.
ReplyDeleteI suspect that one can detect the "Old Skool" trends affecting at least some Harlequin M&B contemporaries, but probably with a bit of a time-lag, so a bit after the start of the trend in "Old Skool" single-titles. I haven't done any analysis of that though, and it's not been very easy for me to find lots of M&Bs from the 1970s, so that's a very tentative suggestion on my part.
Just a couple of thoughts. It's a fun book, and I am thoroughly enjoying it (haven't quite finished it yet), but I do have a few quibbles and queries.
ReplyDeleteEven though this is not intended to be an 'academic' book, it needs an INDEX. Really. I know they are tedious to compile (I am half-way through a very long and difficult one myself, and I am hating every minute), but honestly, they do make any book much more user-friendly. I can live without footnotes and precise references, but indexes are essential. I only wish novels had them, but there is no excuse for omitting an index in this kind of non-fiction. It may have been a publisher's decision, of course, rather than the authors'. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.
Otherwise, for someone of my age and nationality, the analysis simply doesn't go back far enough, but drops into the history of the genre very, very recently. Popular romance did not start in the 1970s, as we all know. Heyer is mentioned, and Austen, and I think there is a reference to the Minerva Press novels (can't check, because there is no *&^%$* index), but remember that Mills & Boon was publishing popular romance of the 'category' type regularly from 1909: jay Dixon is not in the bibliography, I notice. And writers like Mary Stewart were doing full-blown romantic suspense, with very tough and competent heroines, in the 1950s and 1960s. If anything, to me, as a Brit and an old lady, the 1970s American 'Old Skool' type of romance was something of an oddity, a short-lived foreign genre that merely interrupted the evolution of the popular romance novel.
So, a more balanced historical background would have been nice. Of course, the analysis of the changes of the 1980s and 1990s is valuable.
One more idle thought: if anal sex (yuck) is now such an erotic commonplace, how come proctologists are not yet counted amongst the sexier ranks of medical specialists? Just asking.
Sorry, people - I haven't been here for a while, and hadn't noticed that Laura had already addressed my concerns. Except possibly the one about proctologists.
ReplyDeleteIt's good to "see" you again, Tigress but I'm sorry to hear about your indexing woes.
ReplyDeleteI did wonder, when I wrote my observations about the book whether my impression of the genre from a UK perspective was one that would be shared by other romance readers from the UK, so it's reassuring to me to know that you had such a similar response to Beyond Heaving Bosom's short history of the genre.
Yes - when I settled down and read your comments, as I should have done sooner, I was nodding agreement throughout. As you see, I even mentioned some of the same names that you did, e.g. Mary Stewart, whose 1950s/60s heroines were decidedly adventurous and intrepid.
ReplyDeleteThe Smart Bitches' book is clever, witty, fun to read and full of interesting insights, but it is very, very USA-centric (well, okay, they are American!), and deals only with some selected and relatively recent trends, including one, the so-called 'Old Skool' classification, that had practically zero impact in other, not unimportant, areas of the English-speaking world.
Another example: if I were writing about the rise of gay romance, I would not omit the late Jane Rule (Canadian, but born in the US), who set the standard for serious lesbian romance and was a brilliant, and still sadly underrated, novelist in every way. And what about Mary Renault (British born, lived in S. Africa), a lesbian woman and outstanding writer, whose first novels in the late 30s/early 40s were standard category romances -- doctor-and-nurse romances, no less! -- but who in 1953, published the wonderful story The Charioteer, a contemporary male homosexual romance, and a very brave thing to write at that date. It was after that that she moved into historical fiction, the books by which she is chiefly remembered.
So, long before the internet (and even, in Renault's case, at a time when homosexuality between men was illegal, actually criminal), there were writers who addressed these subjects. I think they deserve a mention, even in a brief survey.
Sorry, off at a tangent, as usual.
:-)
"Sorry, off at a tangent, as usual."
ReplyDeleteI don't think it was a tangent, but even if it had been, it would have been an interesting one.
And now I'll go off at a slight tangent and mention that according to the brief biography of Pamela Regis, on the Princeton conference's website, she's "at work on the history of the American romance" and I'm sure her history will be covering a much longer time-period than the one in Beyond Heaving Bosoms because one of the tweets from the conference mentioned that she'd described "E.D.E.N. Southworth's Vivia or The Secret of Power [as] one of earliest inspirational romances."
Laura: you've given some excellent fodder for thought, especially in terms of the inflation/deflation cautionary principle, and how many romances aren't particularly subversive/feminist/progressive; that, together with BevBB's dislike of the term "for women, by women" (which echoes my dislike for the term) is percolating in my brain. Don't know that I'll have time to marshall these thoughts into a coherent article for Smart Bitches, given that finals are less than two weeks away, but I'm scribbling down thoughts and observations like mad.Oh, this should be good. ;)
ReplyDeleteI'll have to start watching SBTB again. I love the site but generally can't keep up with the volume of posts and comments.
It's not so much that I dislike the term "for women, by women" as I feel like it's propaganda that's not helpful to the genre.
Well, I saying suppose that ends up sounding like dislike but basically I feel like it's a marketing tool rather than a real reflection of what romance is about.
To me, romance is two people's story, not "her story" alone - which is what that mantra sure sounds like it's selling. To me, that limits the potential instead of keeping it universal, which seems counterproductive to all that respect everyone says they want for it and that doesn't add up and never has.
So, yeah, call it suspicion or call it dislike. But I just don't buy it and never will.
BevBB, I can't keep up with SBTB either. I never get there until the discussion's over.
ReplyDeleteI react similarly to "by women, for women" as to the idea that romance is inherently feminist. Not that they're the same idea, but both labels seem a bit one-dimensional; I think the genre is more varied than that. Maybe I don't understand exactly what they mean.
I react similarly to "by women, for women" as to the idea that romance is inherently feminist. Not that they're the same idea, but both labels seem a bit one-dimensional; I think the genre is more varied than that. Maybe I don't understand exactly what they mean.Ah, yes, the feminism thing. This is just speculation on my part as a long time reader and observer since being online, but I think it has something to do with an attempt to identify the genre with women's fiction and only women's fiction. I don't mean just historically or academically, necessarily.
ReplyDeleteI mean in a marketing sense.
When you get right down to it, what is the biggest issue that bothers readers online more than anything else?
Covers, covers and more covers.
On any given day, I could point to an almost infinite number of posts or articles bemoaning romance novels covers - from all sub-genres. All with varying points of view about why the publishers are doing it.
Readers online are essentially bothered by the basic fact that the books are misrepresented and yet they can't seem to agree within themselves as to what the "identity" of the genre actually is.
That's why I'm not surprised by the fact that Candy and Sarah's book focused so much on the last few decades. The last few decades have been a literal explosion in terms of marketing the genre. Oh, don't get me wrong, lurid pulp covers started at the beginning of the last century but the bodice rippers of the 1970s literally ripped the scales of the eyes of the publishers and let them know they had a female marketing gold mine right under their fingertips. And they haven't let go since.
Feminism, my ass. Female buying power, oh yeah.
I guess my point is that there are always going to be books to be studied that are going to have interesting things to say about the human condition and at least half of those humans are going to be female. Some of those books are going to show female power and redemption just as much as male power and redemption. At least one would hope so.
But that doesn't mean that either one of those things is what an entire genre is all about - unless it's actually called that. Like say, maybe…women's fiction? ;)
"Feminism, my ass. Female buying power, oh yeah."
ReplyDeleteThat's a useful distinction in a lot of these conversations. I don't think they're the same thing at all, but the lines may blur in some contexts. During the infamous swan hat debates a couple of years ago, I quoted Gloria Steinem and Amy Richards on the outward and commercial appearance of some branches of feminism. I never followed through and read their book on young feminists, though, so all I can do is cite the same interview again:
"many of the younger women are afflicted with the 'Spice Girls pencil set syndrome,' meaning they 'will wear a "Girls Rule" t-shirt, but girls do not rule.'"
Female buying power definitely =/= feminism in that case!
Okay, it took me awhile because I had to find the book to get the title and author correct but have any of you ever run across The Look of Love: The Art of the Romance Novel by Jennifer McKnight-Trontz?
ReplyDeletehttp://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-Look-of-Love/Jennifer-McKnight-Trontz/e/9781568983127/?itm=1
Yes, I've got a copy of it. You can read an excerpt from it via Google Books.
ReplyDeleteI've only flicked through my copy of it, but I did think of posting about it here when I get round to reading it properly, maybe discussing it alongside the more recent book about Mills & Boon covers.
One thing I noticed as I looked at it just now was that McKnight-Trontz says that
The first English-language, mass-market paperback was indeed a romance, Malaeska by Ann S. Stephens, published in June 1860 by Erastus and Irwin Beadle, pioneers of the dime novel. The success of this romantic tale (it sold sixty-five thousand copies within a few months of publication) of an Indian princess was such that it helped launch a whole new genre in publishing. (10)
Interesting, though I do think there's a difference between "launching a whole new genre in publishing" and "launching a whole new genre in paperback."
Once you get past the main introduction, it mostly consists of pictures of front covers (and a few back covers), with a short, one-page introduction to each section. There's a link to a small photo-gallery at this page at NPR's website.
Yes, I've got a copy of it. You can read an excerpt from it via Google Books.
ReplyDeleteOh, good, I was hoping so then I wouldn't have to go into a lot of detail explaining what's in it. ;)
Once you get past the main introduction, it mostly consists of pictures of front covers (and a few back covers), with a short, one-page introduction to each section.
Yes, but the main reason I brought it up was that it covers primarily the 40s-70s. The only actual bodice-ripper I see is a Johanna Lindsey from 1987 and that's in the introduction solely as an example of the shift during that period. (And to show the beginning of the Fabio period. ;)) What I find truly fascinating about the book, and why I was looking for it after this discussion, is how her chapter divisions and cover choices show the various types of paperback romances actively published in those "pre-bodice-ripper" decades.
Ah, I understand what you're getting at now. Yes, there were plenty of romance covers before the "man-titty" kind snarked by the Smart Bitches. There are lots more pictures of covers, from Joanna Bowring and Margaret O’Brien's book, here (they load slowly but are included in roughly chronological order from the 1920s onwards, though I did spot one which had been mislabelled with the wrong date). Those are all of Mills & Boons, and there aren't any that are in the Fabio/bodice-ripper style. Clinches, yes, and sometimes lurid colour-schemes, but no women with flowing locks displaying a raised naked leg while a horse or ship does something weird in the background and the wind blows the lovers' hair in opposite directions.
ReplyDeleteI have a copy of the book, too. It's really interesting to compare the romance cover art from those eras with the mystery and sf cover art of the same eras. IMHO, as a non-artist, they all have more in common with each other by decade than any of them do with modern covers in the same genre.
ReplyDelete