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Wednesday, July 26, 2017

CFP: Popular Romance and Men’s / Masculinity Studies

From Eric Selinger:
Brandon University professor Jonathan A. Allan (Canada Research Chair in Queer Theory) is looking for proposals on men / masculinities in popular romance fiction for the 2018 American Men’s Studies Association conference, which will be held March 22-25 in Minneapolis, MN. The deadline in the CFP is October 15, 2017.
Jonathan was one of the guest editors of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies special issue on Queer/ing Popular Romance, and he is currently at work on a book called Men, Masculinities, and Popular Romance (Routledge).
There’s a lot of work to be done on this topic, not least because the romance archive includes masculinities that range from the hyper-hegemonic to the quietly or radically disruptive, and the Call for Papers makes it clear that the conference is open to an equally wide range of topics. Their bullet point list includes:
  • Queering masculinities, sexualities, bodies
  • Transgender studies and men’s studies
  • Men and/or masculinities in BDSM and leather cultures
  • Masculinities and sexualities (i.e. heterosexual, gay, bisexual, pansexual, etc.)
  • Effeminophobia in/and theories of masculinity
  • Fantasies and desires in/through bodies and masculinities
  • The material, phenomenological, and real body
  • Pharmaceutical and medical interventions on the body
  • Masculinities without men, men without masculinities
  • Men, bodies, and digital technologies
  • Aging, youth, and sexualities across the life-span

If you’re interested in pursuing this, please get in touch with Jonathan, or with me (Eric Selinger, IASPR president) before the October 15 deadline.
The intersection of popular romance studies and men’s / masculinity studies is a very promising development in our field. There is work, wild work, to be done!

Sunday, July 09, 2017

News + New Items: Thai Romance, Keepers, Disability and more


I'm always very happy to see scholars moving into the field of romance studies, so I'm glad to be able to mention that Johanna Hoorenman "is currently working on a cultural history of Native American themed popular romance novels, tracing the roots of the subgenre to early American women's captivity narratives and James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans" (http://muse.jhu.edu/article/662582).

Ria Cheyne's written a post for Public Books about "Disability and the Romance Novel."

Kecia Ali's been at Smart Bitches Trashy Books to talk about her Human in Death: Morality and Mortality in JD Robb’s Novels.

Mary Lynne Nielsen writes at Dear Author that "the idea of some level of financial security is interwoven in romance."

Christian Peukert and Imke Reimers have found that "romance novels are more likely to be self-published than other genres [...]. The difference becomes particularly evident after 2010, as self-publishing became a successful “mainstream” distribution channel" and "After 2008 (the year after the introduction of the Kindle), there is a small increase in advances for romance novels, compared to a slight drop in advances for other genres. More pronounced, there is a sharp increase in deal sizes for romance novels after 2010 (the introduction of the iPad), whereas the deal sizes for all other categories remain almost constant." They write that:
The fact that more deals were made with future stars among the romance genre throughout the time period of our study suggests that publishers have been able to predict the future success of romance novels better than the success of non-romance books. After 2010 – concurrent with the large rise in self-publishing among romance bestsellers – the ability to predict bestsellers among romance novels increased further, with an increase in the share of future bestsellers among romance deals from about 2% to 5%.

New to the Romance Wiki academic bibliography are:

Markert, John, 2017. 
“God is Love: The Christian Romance Market.” Publishing Research Quarterly. Online First.
Christian publishers have long produced romance novels, but the production of these slim books of love have not been a significant part of their overall output. This started to change in the 1980s in response to the increased sensuality found in secular romance novels. The Christian romance has undergone even more of a resurgence at the outset of the new millennium for the same reason: secular romances have notched up the sensuality of their romances today and Christian houses have responded to their constituents who tire of the sexual slant of these secular novels. Indeed, the strength of the Christian market has not gone unnoticed by mainstream houses and numerous secular houses, notably Harlequin, are today producing Christian-themed romances. The secular Christian message is somewhat attenuated, however, which helps explain the continued popularity of those romances produced by Christian publishers. (Abstract)
Khuankaew, Sasinee, 2017. 
"Femininity and Masculinity in Twenty-First Century Thai Romantic Fictions." The Asian Conference on Literature 2017: Official Conference Proceedings. [pdf available free in full online]
This paper is a thematically chronological supplement to the work in
Khuankaew, Sasinee, 2015. 
"Femininity and masculinity in three selected twentieth-century Thai romance fictions." Ph.D thesis, Cardiff University. Abstract Pdf
Veros, Vassiliki, 2017. 
"Keepers: Marking the Value of the Books on my Shelves." Proceedings from the Document Academy 4.1, Article 4. [pdf available free in full online]

Saturday, July 08, 2017

The Canary Islands in London (July 2017)


The Canary Islands group of romance scholars will be at EUPop2017 (The 6th international conference of the European Popular Culture Association at the University of the Arts London) on 27 July to present a panel:

"Sociolinguistic awareness in a corpus of popular romances set in the Canaries" - María Isabel González Cruz

"Sights and Insights into Spaces of Romantic Desire: Representations of Landscape and Place in contemporary romance Novels set in the Canary Islands" - Mª del Pilar González de la Rosa

"The Exotic ‘Other’ in Jane Arbor’s Golden Apple Island" - María del Mar Pérez Gil

"Cultural symbols, myth and identity in four 20th century English popular romance fiction novels set in the island of Tenerife" - María Jesús Vera Cazorla