Events, New Items on the Romance Bibliography, Romance in the Media

Laura Vivanco

The call for papers for PopCAANZ 2017 (to be held in Wellington, New Zealand) is online, with Jodi McAlister the area chair for popular romance. The deadline for proposals is 17 March 2017 and further details can be found here.

The University of Melbourne’s Publishing and Communications program will be holding a debate on the topic “In the battle of the genres, romance will always win”. That's on the 6th of October 2016 in Melbourne (more details here).

New to the Romance Wiki:

Andreu, Alicia G., 2010. 

La construcción editorial de Corín Tellado. Vigo: Editorial Academia del Hispanismo. Excerpt

 

Bonelli, María Valentina, 2012. 

"La virgen desollada: la perdida de la virginidad en las novelas de Corín Tellado durante el franquismo", Gramma 1.4.

 

Coste, Didier, 1981. 

"Installments of the Heart: Text Delimitation in Periodical Narrative and Its Consequences." Sub-Stance10/11: 56-65.

 

de Andrade, Roberta Manuela Barros and Erotilde Honório Silva, 2010. 

"A vida em cor de rosa: o romance sentimental e a ditadura militar no Brasil", Famecos 17.2: 41-48.

 

González García, María Teresa, 1998. 

Corín Tellado: medio siglo de novela de amor, 1946-1996. Oviedo: Pentalfa Ediciones.

 

Hernández Guerrero, María José, 2016. 

"Prosumidoras de traducciones: Aproximación al fenómeno de la traducción fan de novela romántica", Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada 29.1: 88-114. Abstract

 

Oklopčić, Biljana, 2016. 

"Medieval heresy in Croatian historical romances: a case study of Marija Jurić Zagorka’s Plameni inkvizitori." Neohelicon (online first 10 August 2016). Abstract

O'Neil, Kathryn M., 2016. 

"Women's rhetoric and the romance novel genre." M.A. Thesis, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Abstract

Pöppel, Hubert, 2014. 

"Las reinas de la novela rosa en la España y Alemania: Corín Tellado y Hedwig Courths-Mahler", Lingüística y Literatura 66: 153-170.

Not new to the bibliography, but newly placed online is:

Rose, Suzanna, 1985. 

"Is Romance Dysfunctional?" International Journal of Women's Studies, 8.3: 250-265.

In the Media:

Brown, Mark, 2016. 'Mills & Boon romances are actually feminist texts, academic says: Val Derbyshire says no one should be embarrassed to read much-derided books, arguing many are literature of protest', The Guardian, Wednesday 24 August.

More coverage of Val's opinions can be found in this clip from the BBC (though I'm not sure if it's available to listeners outside the UK) and at the Daily Mail.

Stafford, Annabel, 2016. 'What's not to love about romance novels?', The Sydney Morning Herald, 27 August 2016. This discusses the academic stream at the 2016 Romance Writers of Australia conference with reference to the research being done by Jodi McAlister, Catherine Roach, Sandra Barletta and Lisa Fletcher.

Kaetrin's write-up of the conference's academic stream can be found here and Leah Ashton's is here.

Events in Australia, England and the US

Laura Vivanco

Why Read Harlequin Mills & Boon Romances?

Place: Sheffield, UK
Date: Saturday 17 and Thursday 22 September
Time: 2-2:30pm (Saturday); 4:45-5:15pm (Thursday)

Val Derbyshire believes the books have genuine literary value. In her lecture, and in the accompanying graphic novel, she has a lot of fun arguing the case. 

More details here. This is part of the Festival of the Mind.

Val's had coverage on the BBC, in The Guardian and The Daily Mail. 

The Genre World of Romance in Twenty-First Century Australia

Place: Room 346, Humanities Building, Sandy Bay Campus, University of Tasmania
Date: 23rd Sep 2016
Time: 1:00-2:00pm

Lisa Fletcher, Beth Driscoll, and Kim Wilkins report on the findings from a project funded by the Romance Writers of America in 2015, which was the first phase of a larger project on Australian popular fiction (funded through an ARC Discovery Grant 2016-2018). Our aim in the first phase was to generate new knowledge about romance in Australia by asking this research question: how do the interactions between romance fiction texts and their national and international writing and publishing communities build and maintain the genre in Australia? We propose the concept of the “genre world” as an analytical tool for examining the relationship between the textual conventions by which we typically define genre and the conventional collective behaviours and activities that govern the production of genre texts.

More details here.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Romance
Conference of the Popular and American Culture Association (PCA/ACA)

12 – 15 April 2017 – San Diego, CA

The topic of romantic love suffuses popular culture. In turn, the popular culture of romantic love shapes real life social practices, from dating to weddings to holiday shopping.  PCA/ACA Romance welcomes any theoretical or (inter)disciplinary approach to any topic related to romance, including 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, and any combination of the three are welcome: you do not need to be an academic to be part of the Romance area.

If you wish to organize a roundtable, special session, or a film screening, please contact the Area Chairs.  We have had great success with film screenings for the past several years and would be interested in hosting another one.

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.

Submit a proposal or abstract (200-300 words) proposal or abstract through the PCA/ACA website, and ONLY through that website, at conference.pcaaca.org. If you wish to submit a panel for the conference, all presenters must submit individually through the website, and then notify the Area Chairs of your intentions to present together. Please do not include panel colleagues on the electronic submission as this confuses the program. Instructions for submission can be found at https://conference.pcaaca.org/help/conference/submitting-proposals-conference.

Do not simultaneously submit the same proposal to multiple areas. Doing so will result in your proposal being disqualified and your paper being refused by the PCA/ACA. Per PCA/ACA guidelines, a person may present only one paper at the annual meeting, regardless of subject area. If you try to submit to two areas, the master program will not accept your proposals (which may result in your paper not being accepted in either area).

Submission Deadline: October 1, 2016

Please feel free to forward, cross-post, or link to this call for papers.

If you have any questions as all, please contact the area chairs:

Dr. Heather Schell                                                    Dr. Jodi McAlister

George Washington University                           University of Tasmania

Washington, DC                                                       Hobart, Australia

schellhm@gwu.edu                                                jodi.mcalister@utas.edu.au

New to the Romance Wiki Bibliography and other links

Laura Vivanco

Eric's had a post published as part of Read-a-Romance Month. Among other things, he discusses the importance of teaching romance fiction in universities:

To keep romance novels out of the classroom is to teach students there’s something radically unworthy about both these books and their readers. Sometimes it’s not even subtle. I had a senior colleague, now retired, who used to ask his intro to literature students if they’d ever read a Harlequin romance, and if anyone raised her hand—and it was usually a “her,” as you might expect—he’d say, in a withering tone, “You should be ashamed of yourself.” I had a student—a junior, a philosophy major, in our honors program—who couldn’t bring herself to buy the books for my seminar. “It’s just too embarrassing,” she told me. “I’m not the kind of person who reads books like these.”

I teach my classes for students who already love romance, and finally get the chance to say so. I teach my classes for students who’ve never thought about the genre, but are willing to give it a go. But most of all, I teach romance for students like that philosophy major: the students who think—or who’ve been told—that they’re too gifted, too jaded, too literary, too skeptical, too smart; too happily single, or married, or poly; too feminist, too radical, too queer, too male, and so on, to bother with “books like these.”

You can read the rest here. Jen Lois and Joanna Gregson, sociologists working on romance fiction, have also written a post for this month and it can be found here.

Amy Burge took romance scholarship to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with a one-off show this afternoon. It went well but since it's not scheduled to be repeated, for anyone who's in Edinburgh and wants to see a performance about romance novels Amy recommends Charlotte Gallagher's "Carlotta de Galleon - A Fool for Love!"

The Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love have a new blog, featuring interviews and updates on recent research.

New to the Romance Wiki Bibliography

Allan, Jonathan A., 2016. 

Reading from Behind: A Cultural Analysis of the Anus. Regina: University of Regina Press. [See chapter 3, "Topping from the Bottom: Anne Tenino's Frat Boy and Toppy". A review of the book by Catherine M. Roach has been published in the Journal of Popular Romance Studies]

 

Crawford, Joseph, 2014. 

The Twilight of the Gothic? Vampire Fiction and the Rise of the Paranormal Romance, 1991-2012. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014. [See also María T. Ramos-García's review of this book in the Journal of Popular Romance Studies]

 

Kahn, Laurie, director, 2015. 

Love Between the Covers. Blueberry Hill Productions. [This is a documentary about popular romance fiction and a review of it by Beth Driscoll was published in the Journal of Popular Romance Studies.]

 

McAlister, Jodi, 2016. 

'“You and I are humans, and there is something complicated between us”: Untamed and queering the heterosexual historical romance', Journal of Popular Romance Studies 5.2 (15 July 2016). [Focuses on Anna Cowan's Untamed (2013). A short response to this article can be found here.]

Wilkins, Kim, 2016. 

'“Ravished by Vikings”: The Pre-modern and the Paranormal in Viking Romance Fiction', Journal of Popular Romance Studies 5.2 (15 July 2016).