A Quick Quote

Laura Vivanco

I happened to be reading an article by Umberto Eco which has nothing to do with romance when I came across the following, about old and new types of fiction, which did seem relevant to the study of romance:

the account greatly favored by antiquity was almost always the story of something which had already happened and of which the public was aware. One could recount for the nth time the story of Roland the Paladin, but the public already knew what happened to the hero. New additions and romantic embellishments were not lacking, but neither would they have impaired the substance of the myth being narrated. [...]
The "civilization" of the modern novel offers a story in which the reader's main interest is transferred to the unpredictable nature of what will happen and, therefore, to the plot invention which now holds our attention. The event has not happened before the story; it happens while it is being told, and usually even the author does not know what will take place.
At the time of its origin, the coup de théâtre where Oedipus finds himself guilty as a result of Tiresias' revelation "worked" for the public not because it caught them unaware of the myth, but because the mechanism of the "plot," in accordance with Aristotelian rules, succeeded in making them once more co-participants through pity and terror. The reader is brought to identify both with the situation and with the character. In contrast, there is Julien Sorel shooting Madame de Rênal, or Poe's detective discovering the party guilty of the double crime in Rue de la Morgue, or Javert paying his debt of gratitude to Jean Valjean, where we are spectators to a coup de théâtre whose unpredictable nature is part of the invention, and as such, takes on aesthetic value. (15)

It seems to me that romance novels resemble the older stories inasmuch as their readers know in advance what the ending will be. There may be considerably more room for "additions and romantic embellishments" given that the entirety of a romance's plot is not already known to the readers but I suspect that in very large part romances "work" for their readers "because the mechanism of the 'plot,' [...] succeed[s] in making them once more co-participants" in the emotions experienced by the protagonists.
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• Eco, Umberto. “The Myth of Superman.” Trans. Natalie Chilton. Diacritics 2.1 (1972): 14-22.

Molly Make-Believe: "Unreal but Not Untrue"?

Laura Vivanco

Over the holidays I'm going to be taking a break from blogging so I thought I'd leave you with a suitably wintry story and some reflections on fiction.

Jennifer Crusie wrote in one of her essays that

Folklorist Max Luthi says that fairy tales are “unreal but not untrue” because they deal with the greatest themes in literature and life, and much of genre fiction, grounded in myth, legend, and tale, retells those primal stories for adults.

In Crusie's The Cinderella Deal (1996) the hero, Lincoln Blaise, "need[s] a professional liar" (17) to help him, and he turns to Daisy Flattery, a storyteller whose card reads

Daisy Flattery
Apartment 1B

Stories Told, Ideas Illuminated

Unreal but Not Untrue (1)

Eleanor Hallowell Abbott's Molly Make-Believe (1910) is a love story which is also about fiction and truth.¹ Carl Stanton is bedridden due to a serious attack of rheumatism and his fiancée, Cordelia, has gone on holiday for six weeks. She writes to promise him that she'll send him a letter roughly once a week and suggests that he "investigate" a "ridiculous circular" because it "seems to be rather your kind" (6). The circular advertises the services of

THE SERIAL-LETTER COMPANY.

Comfort and entertainment Furnished for Invalids, Travelers, and all Lonely People.

Real Letters

from

Imaginary Persons.

Reliable as your Daily Paper. Fanciful as your Favorite
Story Magazine. Personal as a Message from your Best Friend. Offering all the Satisfaction of receiving Letters with no Possible Obligation or even Opportunity of Answering Them. (11)

I don't want to spoil the story for those who haven't read it, so I won't say much more about it, but here's one last quote, in which Stanton describes the letters he's received from the Company:

"[...] they're not lies!" snapped Stanton. "Surely you don't call anything a lie unless not only the fact is false, but the fancy, also, is maliciously distorted! (99)

Again, I'm going to be cautious about how I phrase this, so as to avoid spoilers, but since Stanton doesn't know the real identity of Molly Make-Believe he starts to speculate about what she might be like. Let's just say some of aspects of this speculation are "interesting" to a modern sensibility. But given that the novel has metafictional elements, and given the discussions of "slash" fiction we've had here, it makes me wonder what revisionist versions might be possible, in which Molly's identity turned out to be different.

You can read Molly Make-Believe in full online here, from the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive has copies available in many different formats, scanned directly from an original. I've chosen that edition because it has all the pages (and they're all in the right order) but unfortunately it doesn't have illustrations. They're available in this version and someone has them up at Flickr. The Internet Archive also has an audio version. The Project Gutenberg editions don't include any pictures or the original page layout, but they too are available free in many different text formats and also many different audio formats as well as being available to be read online.

One advantage of reading an original version is that you get to see some of the advertising that would have been seen by the original readers of the book. At the end of this novel we can find an advertisement for romances by Margaret Pedler (some details about her can be found at Wikipedia) and Ethel M. Dell (and some details about her can also be found at Wikipedia). She was born in 1881 and died in 1939. Her

success rests with The Way of an Eagle (1912), which was refused by eight publishers before re-typing and final acceptance by T. Fisher Unwin. By 1915 the book accounted for half Unwin’s turnover! By the end of the First World War, Dell was earning a huge income from her books – one of the wealthiest authors in Britain. Her easy style and clear eroticism made her an illicit favourite with middle-class adolescents and working-class servants and gained her the title of ‘the housemaid’s choice’ for her success in writing what Rebecca West called ‘tosh’. […]

During the 1930s Dell was still one of the most popular women’s authors to be asked for at the ‘tuppenny’ libraries (alongside Elinor Glyn and Marie Corelli). Although ‘spiritual’ and conservative, Dell’s stories also contained the violent passions so enjoyed by women (especially young girls) before World War Two. Her influence on women’s romance is still evident and can be seen clearly in the ‘sexier’ women’s writers of a later age, but also in works like E. M. Hull’s The Sheik (1919). She was also an early influence on Barbara Cartland and Catherine Cookson; she is one of the great progenitors of Mills and Boon. (Bloom 134-35).

---

• Bloom, Clive. Bestsellers: Popular Fiction Since 1900. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
• Crusie, Jennifer. "Let Us Now Praise Scribbling Women." Originally published in Inside Borders March 1998: 19.
• Crusie, Jennifer. The Cinderella Deal. New York: Bantam, 1996.
• Hallowell Abbot, Eleanor. Molly Make-Believe. 1910. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1920.

---

1 Molly Make-Believe was number 9 in the 1910 best-selling fiction rankings from Bowker's Annual/Publisher's Weekly.

The image is of Carl Stanton, in his sickbed, chuckling after he's read the advertisement from The Serial-Letter Company.

Romancing Northrop Frye

Jonathan A. Allan

When I came to study "Romance," it was because of Northrop Frye's The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (1976). Indeed, much of my blogging has been over at The Educated Imagination where I write mostly about Frye and the Academy. As such, to start my blogging here, I present a preliminary Call for Papers, not an official CFP, but rather one which aims to get people thinking about what they might present at this conference.

***

Educating the Imagination: A Conference in Honour of Northrop Frye on the Centenary of His Birth.

September 27-30, 2012, University of Toronto

Twenty years after his death, Northrop Frye, the author of Fearful Symmetry and Anatomy of Criticism, continues to be one of the most read and the most quoted of literary critics. His attention to form, specifically to genre and mode, and his understanding of literature as a totality have directly influenced two later generations of critics, including Hayden White, Fredric Jameson, and Franco Moretti. In order to celebrate this ongoing legacy, the Department of English and the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, Frye’s home throughout his career, have organized a three-day symposium in his honour.

There will be panels devoted to Frye’s specific legacy, which we are now in a better position to appreciate because of the completed publication of theCollected Works in thirty volumes. But we also invite speakers to take inspiration from Frye and to consider literary and cultural topics such as:

1. Educating the Imagination when the Humanities are under threat

Frye and Comparative Literature

2. the place of Western Literature and theory in a global context.

The spread and the provincialization of Europe.

The limits of the Great Code

3. Contemporary manifestations of traditional literary modes:

the popular romance

contemporary tragedy

irony after postmodernism

4. the place of the Bible in an era of fundamentalism and secularism

5. The survival of the literary imagination in a digital age

6. Canadian literature in a postnational age

7. The Great Code and Islam

8. History as Narrative

9. Frye and Ecology

10. Local literature, local forms

Organizers: Alan Bewell, Chair, Department of English (a.bewell@utoronto.ca)

Neil ten Kortenaar, Director, Centre for Comparative Literature (neil.kortenaar@utoronto.ca)

Braving the Scottish Romance

Laura Vivanco

Misconceptions about Scotland and the Scots seem rather common in the romance genre. This recent post, written by one Scottish romance reader about supposedly "Scottish Gaelic Names," might be instructive to some. She grew up in the Highlands and

It was rare to meet a male adult who kept ‘Jamie’. Dropping Jamie in favour of Jim, James, surname or chosen nickname was a rite of passage for most young men in the area. Jamie is heavily associated with youth or childhood, which is I think why most were anxious to stop people using the childish form when they became old enough. (I think this is why in romance genre novels, having heroes named Jamie seems icky or funny, depending on my mood.) ("Random")

In a short essay titled "A Very Interesting Place: Representing Scotland in American Romance Novels" Euan Hague and David Stenhouse

review this unexplored branch of 'Scottish literature' and argue that Scottish-themed American romances are marginalised from 'literature', 'Scottish literature', and 'Scottish writing' in ways which test the boundaries of critical conventions surrounding the study of Scottish writing in the academy. (354)

I think it would take rather more than eight pages to do full justice to the topic, but Hague and Stenhouse make a start. They begin by describing this romance subgenre: "Scottish-themed American romances often draw on unexpected aspects of Scottish history, not just comprising a parade of kilts, castles and lochs, but also bending the laws of history by allowing the hero or heroine to travel through time" (354). Perhaps because of the limited length of the essay, they resort to generalisations, but they're not the only ones to do so when writing about Scottish romances. Jane at Dear Author has a humorous list of them, including:

• All Scottish men wear kilts, even when they were outlawed and even when they didn’t exist. All clans have an identifying tartan.
• All Scottish men carry claymores.
• Everyone is a Highlander because the Highlands start right at the border between England and Scotland.
• Half the country has red hair and half has black. Not brown, mind you but raven, midnight black. There are no fair haired lassies in Scotland. [...]
  
• They all say “didnae, cannae, willnae, wouldnae” with the emphasis on the “ae.”

Hague and Stenhouse's generalisations appear in statements such as:

All the novels have a historical setting, with a clear preference for the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, possibly due to this era's association with William Wallace, Robert the Bruce and Bravehart. Another favourite period is the eighteenth century, which enables plots about the Union of the Parliaments in 1707 and the subsequent Jacobite rebellions. (360)

They also describe the cover art:

the covers of Scottish historical romances tend to fall into two broad types, featuring either illustrations or a model positioned against an illustrated backdrop. A number of typical Scottish indicators appear, most commonly a length of tartan cloth, heather, thistles or other purple flowers, a castle with ramparts looming from a grassy, craggy hilltop, a red-haired woman and a bare-chested, long-haired, muscular man, [...] the latter often wearing a kilt and carrying a claymore or other similarly sizeable sword. (355-56)

As is apparent from the covers I've included in this post, and from those featured in Anabel MacKenzie's short "Guide to Scottish Romance and Historical Fiction," there are indeed many covers adorned with tartan, castles, large swords and/or muscular men, though not all the covers in MacKenzie's Guide are of the types described by Hague and Stenhouse.

They found that the hero of a Scottish romance

assumes a quasi-fetishised sexual power. As Karen Kosztolnyik, senior editor of romance titles with Warner Books [...] explained [...] 'part of the appeal of the Highlander is the sense that he is a powerful, dangerously masculine figure, but that he shows through his clan loyalties that he has a caring nurturing side. That way, while readers find the exterior excitingly strange, there is a reassurance that inside there are values they can feel comfortable with.' (356)¹

Hague and Stenhouse add that the use of "The time-travel device allows for an explicit comparison of contemporary American masculinity, implicitly depicted as emasculated, with the raw, primordial manliness of pre-modern Scots" (359).² Further support for this theory is provided by Eloisa James, who has stated that

in the world of historical romance fiction, a man in a skirt with a bagpipe at his side is pure gold. Think of the 1980s film Highlander and the TV show that followed, not to mention the wildly popular film Braveheart: in these imaginative realms, Scotland is a world of swashbuckling, ultra-sexy, bare-kneed men who act like Errol Flynn with a testosterone update.

and in an interview with Shirley English,

Cindy Hwang, an editor at Jove Books, which publishes Heaven and Heather, said that women are attracted to an improbable ideal. “The image of the Highlander is very romanticised,” she said. “They are seen as very rugged and independent — in terms of how Americans see the Scots, anyway. That rebellious side has its appeal.”

In Scotland, women greet such descriptions of the local talent with incredulity. “If you find him, let me know,” is a common response.

Indeed. And while it would be unwise to assume that all Scots living in Scotland will feel the same way, it should be noted that

There is evidence (MacGregor 1980, Shepperson 1981, Fry 2003) that members of the Scottish diaspora have a rather unrealistic view of the country. For example, the experiences of Alan Bain, President of the American Scottish Foundation, whose romanticised views of Scotland are not always shared by native born Scots are described in Devine and Logue (2002). (Sim and McIntosh 84)

Scottish "cultural critics" (Hague and Stenhouse 361), for example, are "made queasy by Scottish tartanry, a discourse which Andrew Ross identifies as 'the longest running caricature of national identity in a field of world-class competitors'" (361).

Scotland's "national tourism organisation," however, decided to take advantage of the Scotsman's international appeal and in 2006 "compiled an online list of the country's 20 most eligible bachelors in an attempt to lure visitors to the country" (Gray) and

In a statement released to the media about the unique campaign strategy, marketing director Denise Hill points out that the department simply decided to promote one of Scotland's best-known assets.

"Women across the globe love Scottish men – the kilts, the accents, the sense of humour – it's a fact," Hill says. (Greenwood Davis)

For their part, Hague and Stenhouse point to another fact about the popularity of the Scotsman and argue that "the mere fact that novels reviving tartanry constitute such a thriving subgenre of contemporary American writing ought to give pause to those who categorically dismiss representations of this kind of 'Scottishness' as an artistic dead end" (361).

-------------

1 According to an article published in The Sunday Times, she also told Stenhouse that “I think part of the appeal for readers is that the Scottish hero is a sexy one, and it takes a special kind of woman to tame him. But he has a loyal side too, which you can see in the Scottish clans. That kind of extreme loyalty is very appealing to women readers.” Another version of the same quote from Karen Kosztolnyik, appeared in The Scotsman:

"The image - whether true or not - of the be-kilted Scot as wild beast, just waiting to be tamed, was the key attraction.

"The Scottish hero is a sexy one, and it takes a special kind of woman to tame him.

"But he has a loyal side, too, which you can see in the Scottish clans. That kind of extreme loyalty is very appealing to women readers." (McVeigh)

2 In this essay Hague and Stenhouse focus on how a hero being Scottish creates an expectation of virility. Elsewhere Hague has written more about ethnic identity:

In his assessment of the construction of ethnic identities, Eugeen Roosens proposes that "one can make use of any number of signs for differentiation as long as they are credible - that is, as long as they could be in line with a particular cultural tradition." Between 1975 and 1988 a series of scholarly studies "ethnicized" white Southern identity past and present as Celtic. [...] Under such a definition, Celtic Southerners thus became written as ethnically and culturally distinct from other whites in the United States, this latter group being identified as "English" or "Anglo-Saxon." "Southern people," therefore, are supposedly distinguishable from other U.S. whites because they exhibit Celtic culture and behavior. ("Neo-confederacy" 101)

This and the romance genre's vision of Scotland are very far from being the only modern American uses of Scottishness. Hague suggests elsewhere that "Scottish identities are being reclaimed, reconfigured and appropriated in the USA in the 1990s by both individuals and institutions and in often quite different ways" ("The Scottish" 140). He also notes that the "coalescence of Scotland and Scottish people with Celticity began in the eighteenth century [...]. The idea that Highland Scotland was the legacy of an ancient Celtic civilisation was widely promulgated [...]. By the nineteenth century, representations of a 'Celtic' Gaelic-speaking Highland Scotland had come to represent Scotland as a whole" (142). Highland Scotland is, of course, the Scotland which would appear to be most popular in romances, and the Highlander has perhaps "come to represent" Scotsmen as a whole. These other articles by Hague, although not about the romance genre, demonstrate how a particular national or ethnic identity can be appropriated and associated with a particular set of values/qualities. To do this, certain aspects of history may be ignored or underplayed.

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• English, Shirley. "Devil in a Kilt may be ravishing the US, but the reality leaves Scots women cold." The Times 2 April 2005.
• Gray, Louise. "Tourism chiefs market Scots hunks." The Scotsman 11 February 2006.
• Greenwood Davis, Heather. "Great Scots: Women of the world get a dream date with the lusty laird or hunky highlander of their choice in a unique campaign to promote nation's hottest assets." The Star 8 March 2007.
• Hague, Euan. "The Scottish Diaspora: Tartan Day and the Appropriation of Scottish Identities in the United States." Celtic Geographies: Old Culture, New Times. Ed. David Harvey, Rhys Jones, Neil McInroy and Christine Milligan. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. 139-56.
  
• Hague, Euan and David Stenhouse. "A Very Interesting Place: Representing Scotland in American Romance Novels." The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature. Ed. Berthold Schoene. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007. 354-61.
• Hague, Euan and Edward H. Sebesta. "Neo-Confederacy, Culture, and Ethnicity: A White Anglo-Celtic People." Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction. Ed. Euan Hague, Heidi Beirich, and Edward H. Sebesta. Austin, Texas: U of Texas P, 2008. 97-130.
• James, Eloisa. "Some Like It Scots." Barnes & Noble Review. 4 August 2008.
• Jane. "Everything We Know About Scotland, We Learned from Romance Books." Dear Author 1 May 2007.
• McVeigh, Karen. "Kilted heroes' novel role as US women's heart-throbs." The Scotsman 29 March 2005.
• "Random: Scottish Gaelic Names – Separating the Wheat from the Chaff." The Fancy Reader 12 November 2010.
• Sim, Duncan and Ian McIntosh. "Connecting with the Scottish Diaspora." Scottish Affairs 58 (2007): 78-95.
  
• Stenhouse, David. "America is turned on by kilt-ripping yarns." The Sunday Times 27 March 2005.

Final Calls: PCA 2011 (Dec 15, 2010 deadline) and IASPR NYC 2011 (Jan 1, 2011 deadline)

Sarah S. G. Frantz

Final Calls for the Romance Area at PCA 2011 and for IASPR 2011 in New York City (just before RWA's conference).

PCA 2011 is in San Antonio, TX. As always, it's over Easter weekend!!! April 20-23, 2011. So if it's a problem to be away from your family for Easter/Passover, we'll miss you, but we'll understand.

PCA is an amazing conference to go to to experience the joy and sheer intellectual brilliance of the field of Popular Romance Studies. We are truly a community. We hang around together all weekend, eating most of our meals together, talking between panels. It's a VERY inviting conference for new scholars, and for interested non-scholars. We've had undergraduates and brand new graduate students present their papers at PCA and they loved it. We're welcoming, friendly, fun, a little bawdy, and very very interesting.

PCA/ACA 2010 National Conference

San Antonio, TX, April 20-23, 2011
Call For Papers: Romance Area

(Conference info: http://pcaaca.org/conference/national.php)

Deadline for submission: December 15, 2010.

We are interested in any and all topics about or related to popular romance: all genres, all media, all countries, all kinds, and all eras. All representations of romance in popular culture (fiction, stage, screen—large or small, commercial, advertising, music, song, dance, online, real life, etc.), from anywhere and anywhen, are welcome topics of discussion.

We will consider proposals for individual papers, sessions organized around a theme, and special panels. Sessions are scheduled in one-hour slots, ideally with four papers or speakers per standard session.

If you are involved in the creative industry of popular romance (romance author/editor, film director/producer, singer/songwriter, etc.) and are interested in speaking on your own work or on developments in the representations of popular romance, please contact us!

Some possible topics (although we are by no means limited to these):

• Popular Romance on the World Stage (texts in translation, Western and non-Western media, local and comparative approaches)
• Romance Across the Media: crossover texts and the relationships between romance fiction and romantic films, music, art, drama, etc.; also the paratexts and contexts of popular romance
• Romance High and Low: texts that fall between “high” and “low” culture, or that complicate the distinctions between these critical categories
• Romance Then and Now: representations of Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, Romantic, Modern, Postmodern love
• Romancing the Marketplace: romantic love in advertising, marketing, and consumer culture
• Queering the Romance: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender romance, and representations of same-sex love within predominantly heterosexual texts
• BDSM Romance and representations of romantic/erotic power exchange
• Romance communities
• New Critical Approaches, such as readings informed by critical race theory, queer theory, postcolonial studies, or empirical science (e.g., the neurobiology of love)
• The Politics of Romance, and romantic love in political discourse (revolutionary, reactionary, colonial / anti-colonial, etc.)
• Individual Creative Producers or Texts of Popular Romance (novels, authors, film, directors, writers, songwriters, actors, composers, dancers, etc.)
• Gender-Bending and Gender-Crossing / Genre-Bending and Genre-Crossing / Media-Bending and Media-Crossing Popular Romance
• African-American, Latina, Asian, and other Multicultural romance
• Young Adult Romance
• History of/in Popular Romance
• Romance and Region: places, histories, mythologies, traditions
• Definitions and Theoretical Models of Popular Romance: it’s not all just happily ever after

As we have done for the past three years, 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. Of particular interest this year: the 2011 New York City conference for the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR), planning for the 2012 IASPR conference, and the first volume of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies (JPRS).

Submit a one-page (200-300 words) proposal or abstract (via regular mail or e-mail) by December 15, 2010, to the Area Chairs in Romance:

Sarah S. G. Frantz
Department of English and Foreign Languages
Fayetteville State University
1200 Murchison Road
Fayetteville, NC 28301
(910) 672-1438
sarahfrantz AT gmail DOT com

Darcy Martin
Adjunct Faculty, Women's Studies
East Tennessee State University
12 Wataugua Court
Bluffton, SC 29909
(843)705-4861
martindj AT etsu DOT edu

If you have any questions as all, please contact one or both of the area chairs. Please feel free to forward, cross-post, or link to this call for papers.

IASPR 2011:

A Call For Proposals
for
The Third Annual International Conference on Popular Romance

Can’t Buy Me Love?
Sex, Money, Power, and Romance
New York City June 26-28, 2011

The International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR) is seeking proposals for innovative panels, papers, roundtables, discussion groups, and multi-media presentations that contribute to a sustained conversation about romantic love and its representations in global popular media. We welcome analyses of individual books, films, television series, websites, songs, etc., as well as broader inquiries into the reception of popular romance and into the creative industries that produce and market it worldwide.

This conference has four main goals:

1. To explore the relationships between the conference’s key thematic terms (sex, money, power, and romantic love) in the texts and contexts of popular romance, in all forms and media, from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives
2. To foster comparative and intercultural analyses of these recurring themes, by documenting and/or theorizing the ways that different nations, cultures, and communities think about love and sex, love and money, love and power, and so on, in the various media of popular romance
3. To explore how ideas and images of romantic love—especially love as shaped by issues of sex, money, or power—circulate between elite and popular culture, between different media (e.g., from novel to film), and between cultural representations and the lived experience of readers, viewers, listeners, and lovers
4. To explore the popular romance industry–publishing, marketing, film, television, music, gaming, etc.—and the roles played by sex, money, power, and love in the discourse of (and about) the business side of romance

After the conference, proceedings will be subjected to peer-review and published.

Please submit proposals by January 1, 2011 and direct questions to conferences@iaspr.org.

CFPs: Romance and Culture

Laura Vivanco

Lynne Hapgood, in her Margins of Desire: The Suburbs in Fiction and Culture 1880-1925, writes that

Popular fiction and in particular romance, were seen as the locus of suburban culture and as indicative of a range of social ills. As with so many controversial topics at the turn of the twentieth century, social anxieties about popular fiction can be traced to questions of scale and gender. Popular fiction in magazines and books seemed to indicate the failure of universal education to deliver discrimination as well as skills. It signalled the commodification of culture, and was proof of women's intellectual weakness. (115)

and

the consensus among the literary classes was that romance fiction was the 'froth of the moment', 'day-dreaming fiction', a morbid 'feeding of the imagination' liable to take workers from their duties and turn women into 'fiction-vampires'. (117)

"Romance" in this period didn't, of course, refer solely to works with "a central love story and an emotionally-satisfying and optimistic ending" (RWA) but it's clearly a very important period in the formation of the modern romance genre and attitudes towards it.

The next Middlebrow Network conference, which will also be the 13th annual Space Between Society conference, focuses on

The Battle of the Brows: Cultural Distinctions in the Space Between, 1914-1945

With the massive growth in the production and consumption of literature, music and art in the period 1914-1945 came powerful anxieties about cultural authority and transmission. As audiences and artists increasingly came from middle or lower classes, critics tried to distinguish between the “serious” and the “popular.” Cultural distinctions that relied, directly or indirectly, on attitudes toward hierarchies of gender, class, and race came under increasing scrutiny. It was a time of debate and radical change: new media and materials (radio, film, jazz, paperback novels) gained ground over traditional forms and venues (classical music, poetry, theatre); many arts became professionalized, rather than relying on inherited incomes; institutions such as the Book of the Month Club and the BBC formed new communities of cultural consumption.

The conference is being held at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, June 16-18, 2011. Among the many topics listed in the call for papers is "Genres and modes: melodrama, social realism, adventure fiction, spy thrillers, romances." The deadline is 15 January 2011 and more details can be found here.

In other news, An Goris reports that

A few months ago the journal Mosaic launched a CFP for a special issue they are planning on Romance. The deadline for submission, which originally was October 30 2010, has been pushed back to May 2011. The issue focuses on romance in the broad sense, but Mosaic has indicated to me they are interested in including articles on popular romance.

Here's the text of the

Call for Submissions
Special Issue: Romance

The OED has to give some three pages to defining the word ROMANCE that, with all of its rich history, is at the center of this Mosaic Call for Papers. We invite innovative interdisciplinary literary and critical submissions for a special issue we are planning on this theme. For this issue, our interests include, but are not limited to, the following: ‘the Romantics,’ who have undergone a renascence of late; the French novel, the roman; romantic fiction; Romanticism; the state of the love story in literature and/or film; and the figure of the “romantic.”

More details can be found here.
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• Hapgood, Lynne. Margins of Desire: The Suburbs in Fiction and Culture 1880-1925. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005. [Excerpts available via Google Books.]
  
• RWA. "About the Romance Genre."