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
“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.]
"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.
"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."]
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.
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.
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.
"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
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)
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.
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, 2019might 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).
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’.
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!).
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
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.
"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
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.
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:
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".
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
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#ritassowhitepic.twitter.com/hRpzWwSzMX
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
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.
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]
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.
that Kathleen Kollman, a Ph.D. student in American Culture Studies, has
been named as the inaugural recipient of The Roberta Gellis Memorial
Paper Award. Kollman’s paper, titled “Contemporary Paranormal Romance:
Theories and Development of the Genre’s Feminism (Or Lack Thereof)” was
written for a seminar on romance novels taught in the Spring 2018
semester by Dr. Kristin Rudisill in the Department of Popular Culture,
and was also presented at the Researching the Romance conference
sponsored by the Library in April 2018.
An abstract of the paper and a link to download it as a pdf are available here.
Romantic E
-
Scapes: Popular Romance in the Digital Age
(University of the Balearic Islands, Palma de Mallorca)
9
-
11 July 2018
The conference programme can be found here. Since (a) the programme's available, (b) there are a lot of papers and (c) I don't have any additional details about them, I'll just list a selection of the ones which seem as though they could be about romance as defined by the RWA (though they might not be).
At the recent IASPR conference Jennifer Hallock was discussing how "within English-language romance sold in the United States and written at least fifty years after the events described"
mainstream bestsellers are disproportionately: (1) set in Great Britain;
(2) overpopulated with nobles; and (3) selective in their historical
accuracy.
So I was very interested to see that Harlequin now has a special imprint which publishes romances written in Spanish (i.e. not just translations from English): HQÑ - HarperCollins Ibérica
It publishes a range of sub-genres, and one of them is historicals. I haven't looked at all the historicals they've published so far, and although there are quite a lot which are set in Great Britain and/or contain nobles, there definitely seem to be a fair number set in Spain, in a variety of time-periods, from Roman Hispania in 154 BC onwards. I'm pretty certain there are a lot more set in the Iberian peninsula than one would find in the equivalent set of historicals written in English.
Does anyone know more about this imprint? I couldn't find a lot of information about it and don't know when it launched or whether there are specific guidelines for its authors.
Details are available for the PopCAANZ conference which is currently taking place at Auckland University of Technology. This year there are lots of papers on romance and I'll include excerpts from their abstracts. The conference continues tomorrow, and I'll add links to Twitter threads as they appear.
popular romance fiction regularly depicts feminist social issues. In this sense, the
concept of Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’ applies
—
‘this partly unconscious “taking in” of rules,
values and dispositions...’ (Webb, Schirato, & Dahanher, 2002, p. 44). Contemporary
popular
romance novels are set in the everyday context and as such cannot but help portray the
world in which the authors and their characters exist, including social issues present in the
mind of the author, whether consciously or unconsciously. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s
and since, the woman’s movement has been politically active and
concepts of feminism
have entered into everyday discourse. [...] research indicates that writers
as well as readers of popular romance fiction have no issue reconciling their concept of
feminism with writing and reading in the genre.
Lucy Sheerman - “Exempt from all affection and from all
contempt”: necessary evil and the figure of
the Byronic hero in romance novels
Two hundred
years since his first appearance in print, the Byronic anti-hero
-
‘that man of
loneliness and mystery, / Scarce seen to smile, and seldom heard to sigh’
-
is a figure who
continues to define representations of the hero in romance novels.
The influence of
this angry and defiant fallen angel on the writing of the Brontës has been
well documented. In my paper I will consider four Governess novels, published by Mills &
Boon in 2016 as a homage to Charlotte Brontë’s iconic romance novel
Jane Eyre, and the
Byronic traces of the heroes who feature in them.
The romance novel’s continued preoccupation with the Byronic anti-hero is central to the
genre’s staged encounters with otherness and its exploration of emotional affect. The
literary device of the anti-hero shaped the development of romance tropes such as plot,
conflict and point of view, and also (as I will argue) gave rise to the Byronic anti-heroine.
Kathrina Haji Mohd Daud -
Cross-cultural romance, feminism and
femininity in Southeast Asian fiction
In this paper, I explore how the
negotiation of cross-cultural romance also elicits a particular Southeast Asian feminism in
three texts: Zen Cho’s
The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo
(2012, Malaysian), Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan’s
Sarong Party Girls
(2016, Singaporean) and Ayisha Malik’s
Jewel
(2017, Bruneian). [...] I argue in this paper that these novels construct a feminist femininity
that
allows the heroines to remain connected to and sanctioned by their individually patriarchal
heritages, while also allowing them to critique and expand existing expectations of feminine
identity through the negotiation of cross-cultural relationships.
Ellen Carter - What’s in a romance hero/ine’s name? a
corpus study of gay and straight romance
character names
The first names parents give to their female versus male children have different
phonological (sound) characteristics. My work extends this from the real to the fictional
world, studying names given by authors to their romance heroes
–
gay and straight
–
as well
as to straight heroines. My corpus contains 2,536 contemporary romance novels: 1,668 with
a male/female pairing and 868 with a male/male couple, resulting in 3,404 heroes (1,668
straight; 1,736 gay) and 1,668 (straight) heroines. My results demonstrate that the
phonological characteristics of names given to gay heroes are statistically significantly less
masculine/more feminine than the names of straight heroes. Given that gay romance is a
fast-growing
romance sub-genre predominantly written and read by straight women, I
explore possible cultural implications of this finding and how it may feed stereotypes and
shape perceptions within (straight and queer) societies.
Carter: striking result - male characters much more likely to have names with /k/ sounds, especially male characters in M/F romance. #popcaanz18
Eden French - Loving invisible bodies: transgender
representation in popular romance
The few novels that do feature trans heroines and heroes
—
niche
even in small
LGBTQ presses
—
are hailed as daring simply for permitting trans protagonists
to be plausible subjects of love and desire. [...] romance’s historically
heteronormative politics of gender has constrained writers and even scholars from treating
transgender themes; mainstream discussion around trans bodies still manifests routinely in
fetishistic and dehumanising ways. Moreover questions of embodiment (for example, the
politics of gender-affirming surgery) remain contested even in the trans community.
Speaking as a scholar and writer, I will discuss existing examples of trans embodiment in
romance, and outline possible reconciliations for the challenge of bringing trans love into
the mainstream.
French has found disclaimers and disavowals in some of her corpus which make it clear that the assumed readership is entirely cis. #popcaanz18
Francesca Pierini
- “He looks like he’s stepped out of a
painting”: The idealization and
appropriation of Italian timelessness
through the experience of romantic love
Marina Fiorato’s
The Glassblower of Murano
(2008) tells the story of Eleonora, a young
woman who travels to Venice in search of her genealogical past and existential roots.
Coming from London, Eleonora incarnates a “modern” outlook on what she assumes to be
the timeless life and culture of Venice.
At one point in the novel, admiring the old houses on
the Canal Grande, Eleonora is “on fire with enthusiasm for this culture where the houses
and the people kept their genetic essence so pure for millennia that they look the same now
as in the Renaissance” (2008, 15). [...] Within narratives centred on this notion, “falling in love in Italy”
occasions the appropriation of a privileged relation with history and the past, often
contrasted with the displacement and rootlessness that seem to characterize the modern
places, people and lifestyles of England and North America. Through a discussion of
two
Anglo-American historical popular novels set in Italy, this paper proposes an exploration of
the notion of romantic love as a force reconnecting displaced and fragmented souls with a
supposedly timeless and unbroken society; a society perceived as holding a privileged
relation with ancient traditions and the past.
Pierini has a paper freely available online which is quite similar, though lacking the focus on romantic love.
Maria Ramos-Garcia - This is not a romance novel but a telenovela”: metafiction
and bilingualism in Jane the Virgin
Jane the Virgin, based on a Venezuelan telenovela, is at the same time a parody and an
homage to the popular Latin American
television genre. Among the many unusual features
that contribute to the originality and success of this TV series are an omniscient narrator, a
metafictional discourse, a bilingual and bicultural setting and an unapologetic, unabashed,
and explicit use and abuse of the conventions of the soap-opera, with a touch of Latin
American magical realism. [...] This paper will
provide an overview of
the series, concentrating both on the Latino socio-cultural aspects that rarely make it into
mainstream US television, and on the metafictional discussions of the telenovela and the
romance novel
—
both as genres and as philosophies of love
—
that permeate the narrative.
Angela Hart - Combating the romance genre stigma: reading romance in
the digital age
Avid readers of the romance genre can find their voices in the online sphere using social
media platforms such as Twitter, utilizing the hashtags #amreadingromance and
#romancelandia. Romance readers utilize the technological affordances of the platform to
form groups, post about novels, and find relevant information on their specific genre. By
using anonymous user login information,
unidentifiable profile pictures, and unique
hashtags, romance readers are turning to Twitter.
Jodi McAlister
- Not quite YA, not yet adult: the short
but complex history of
“New Adult” fiction
This paper will trace the history of the new adult genre category, using the notion of the
“genre world,” as theorised by Lisa Fletcher, Beth Driscoll, and Kim Wilkins (2018). [...] this paper will explore the generic roots of new adult fiction in young adult
fiction, popular romance fiction, and fan fiction, and how these parent genres have given
shape to popular forms and structures of the new adult category. It will provide a much-needed scholarly framework for understanding this emergent genre category, its gradual
formation, and its complex place at the borders of several different genre worlds.
Eric Selinger - Disenchantment and its discontents: Weber, Illouz, and
popular romance
fiction
Modernity and romantic love make uncomfortable bedfellows. As Max Weber explains,
modernity is marked by “disenchantment,” not just of the natural world, but also of the
inner life and of interpersonal relations. Building on Weber, Eva Illouz argues that we now
live in an “ironic structure of romantic feeling, which marks the move from an ‘enchanted’
to a disenchanted cultural definition of love” (Why Love Hurts). This talk will look at how
several contemporary authors negotiate and resist “disenchantment.”
Of particular interest
will be Ayisha Malik’s
Sofia Khan is Not Obliged
and
The Other Side of Happiness, a pair of
“hijabi chick-lit” novels that take both sides in this great debate, Courtney Milan’s
Hold Me,
which casts a cool, modern eye on romantic love without yielding to the irony that Illouz
describes, and/or Alexis Hall’s
Glitterland, which deploys religious discourse to redeem
both love and popular media culture.
This paper is my first effort at thinking through several issues recurrent in the subgenre of
the romance police procedural: the configuration of the spaces of home, homeland and
nation as domestic territories, besieged not by a foreign but a home grown threat that
violates the integrity of the boundaries between private and public, interior and exterior;
the role of individual trauma as a mark of the vulnerability of the self and the foundation of
an affective investment in the protection of national territory; the "Americanness" of the
values and practices that govern social dynamics in the workplace, the self-chosen family
and the couple. National character is defined in opposition to the rendering of the
criminalised enemy and, together with collective, institutional agency and cooperation, is
also the best safeguard against social disorder. Eventually I intend to show that this
romance subgenre mediates and manages social fears and anxieties by highlighting the
strengths of a systemic framework and ignoring the negative aspects of surveillance: anxiety
and fear lie at the heart of romantic relationships and the novels offer a means of managing
them with the emotional investment in family and trust in law enforcement.
Kecia Ali - Writing while white: black martyrs as “Magical Negroes” in
Nora Roberts’ novels
Roberts’ heroes and heroines are nearly always white; occasional
Black characters are typically what Ikard (2017:94) describes as “magical negroes ... whose
raison d’être in white redemption narratives is to support/heal/enlighten/inspire the white
character(s) in crisis.” This paper explores four Roberts’ novels
in which the violent murder
of a Black character serves as the catalyst for vital emotional developments between a
white couple or among a team of white characters [...] the single-title adventure romance
Hot Ice
(1987), the category romance
Convincing Alex
(1994), the stand-alone mystical
romance
Three Fates
(2002), and
Morrigan’s Cross
(2006), the first installment of a
paranormal romance trilogy.
The IASPR 2018 conference now has its programme online but prior to that appearing there was a lot of very thorough tweeting by a number of attendees, using #iaspr18. Since Kat (@BookThingo) has really comprehensive threads, I've used the threadreaderapp to bundle her tweets together and I'm linking to them below.
Session 1 - Romancing Australia, with papers by Amy T. Matthews and Amy Mead (Flinders University), Kate Cuthbert and Jodi McAlister (Deakin University) SEE THREAD
There's more about changes affecting cover art, as discussed by Kate Cuthbert, here, from Claire Parnell via the @PopFicDoctors: Coverart and here's a podcast interview with Jodi McAlister in which she discusses her paper: Podcast. In addition, Renée Dahlia has written a blog post about the session.
Session 2 - Gender and Sexuality, with papers by Ellen Carter (University of Strasbourg), Christina Vogels (AUT New Zealand) and Andrea Anne Trinidad (Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines) SEE THREAD
Renée Dahlia's written a blog post about this session.
Here's a podcast from New Zealand Radio with Christina Vogels about her PhD thesis, titled It's a masculinity sort of thing: Young men talk about the rules of (hetero)romantic relationships.
Session 3 - Places and Spaces of Love, with papers by Kecia Ali (Boston University), Jacqueline Jones (LaGuardia CC, City University of New York) and Vassiliki Veros (University of Technology, Sydney) SEE THREAD
A similar presentation by Vassiliki Veros on "Exploring library metadata and how it can marginalise romance fiction" is up on YouTube.
Session 4 - Keynote Panel on “Romancing Popular Fiction Studies: A Theory of Genre Worlds” by Beth Driscoll (University of Melbourne), Lisa Fletcher (University of Tasmania) and Kim Wilkins (University of Queensland) SEE THREAD and, from Jodi McAlister, with more graphics: See thread
There's also a podcast recorded with the presenters in advance of this panel: Podcast
Session 5 - History and Romance, with papers by Stephanie Russo (Macquarie University), Jennifer Wallace and Francesca Pierini (Academia Sinica, Taiwan).
Kat had to miss most of this session, so the thread is by Jodi McAlister: SEE THREAD
Philippa B's summary of Stephanie Russo's paper on "Georgette Heyer’s Unruly Eighteenth Century" can be found here.
Phillipa B's summary of Pierini's presentation about "Italian timelessness" can be found here.
Jennifer Wallace writes romance as Jennifer Hallock and she's put her paper up on her website in two parts. Part one looks at how the bestsellers in historical romance are
disproportionately: (1) set in Great Britain; (2) overpopulated with
nobles; and (3) selective in their historical accuracy. Part two looks at how the aggregate impact of these chronotopes can be
harmful to our understanding of history, to the romance market as a
whole, and particularly to authors of diverse books. For links to more graphics and a way to help Jennifer crowdsource historical romances which differ from the chronotope she identified, go here and scroll to the end of the post.
Phillipa B's summary of Jennifer Wallace's "History Ever After: Fabricated historical chronotopes in romance genre fictions" can be found here.
Session 6 - Power and Patriarchy, with papers by Heather Schell (George Washington University), Nattie Golubov (Centro de Investigaciones sobre América del Norte, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), Therese Dryden (University of Newcastle) and Jayashree Kamblé (LaGuardia CC, City University of New York) SEE THREAD
Philippa B's post about Heather Schell's "The Soft Power of Popular Romance" can be found here.
Philippa B's post about Nattie Golubov's "Dangerous loves endangered: nationalism, violence and territoralization in US paramilitary romance fiction" is here.
Philippa B's summary of Therese Dryden/Michelle Douglas's "The Single Mother and the Law: Romance novels making room for female voices in patriarchal spaces" is here.
And details of Jayashree Kamblé's “One of the Guys? Eve Dallas as a Masculine Worker Heroine in J.D. Robb’s In Death series", also by Philippa B.
Session 7 - 19th Century Legacies, with papers by Sarah Ficke (Marymount University), Steven Gil and Lucy Sheerman SEE THREAD
See Renée Dahlia's blog post about the session.
Details here about Sarah Ficke's “House, Home, and Husband in Historical Romance Fiction", from Philippa B.
Steven Gil's "Beloved Monstrosity: Romance and Romanticism in Frankenstein" has been summarised by Philippa B.
Philippa B has summarised Lucy Sheerman's “Reader, I mirrored him: the recasting of romance tropes in Jane Eyre fanfiction" here.
Session 8 - Muslim and Middle Eastern Romance, with papers by Kathrina Daud (University of Brunei), Claire Parnell (University of Melbourne), Javaria Farooqui (University of Tasmania) and Amy Burge (University of Birmingham) SEE THREAD
See Renée Dahlia's blog post about the session.
Philippa B's posted about Kathrina Daud's "Muslims reading romance: Bruneian considerations of “Halal” and romance novels" here.
The abstract of Claire Parnell's “Reading and Writing Muslim Romance Online” and notes on the session by Philippa B can be found here.
Philippa B's post on Javaria Farooqui's “The Kitchen and Beyond: Romantic Chronotope of Pakistani Popular Fiction" is here.
Amy Burge's “Girls of Riyadh and Desperate in Dubai: Reading and writing romance in the Middle East" is summarised here by Philippa B.
Session 9 - Romancing Chinese Worlds, with papers by Fang-Mei Lin (National Taiwan Normal University), Huike Wen (Willamette University), Jin Feng (Grinnell College) and Erin S. Young (SUNY Empire State College) SEE THREAD (by Jodi McAlister)
See Renée Dahlia's blog post about the session.
The abstract of Huike Wen's “On the Way to a Better Life: Countryside themed romance in recent Chinese Television" and some additional comments from the paper are provided by Philippa B here.
Philippa B also provides these for Jin Feng's “Life Is Elsewhere: The Economy of Food and Sex in Chinese Web Romance”
and for “Romance in Chinatown: The Love Stories of Edith Maude Eaton” by Erin S. Young.
Session 10 - South/South-East Asian Romance Communities with a paper by Meghna Bohidar (University of Delhi)
Bohidar: young romantic couples are less concerned with caste and religious differences, however they still shape subjectivity e.g. through taste. #IASPR18pic.twitter.com/QrvvM5tZFt
For those who can't read the text in that photo, it contains a definition of an important term used in Bohidar's paper: "Habitus is a set of microbehaviors consisting of a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions that are unconsciously ingrained based on one's class position"
SEE THREAD and Philippa B's summary of Meghna Bohidar's “Negotiating Romantic Love in India: Family, Public Space, and Popular Cinema"
The session then moved on to Kat Mayo's interview of/conversation with Mina V. Esguerra
Session 11 - Subversions of Race, Culture and History with papers by Eric Murphy Selinger (DePaul University), Mallory Jagodzinski (Indiana University South Bend) and Johanna Hoorenman (Utrecht University) SEE THREAD and, from Jodi McAlister, A SUPPLEMENTARY THREAD
The abstract of, supplemented by notes by Philippa B on, Eric Murphy Selinger's “The Wild Heart of the Continent: Love and Place in Sherry Thomas’s Silk Road Romance Novels”
The same, but for Mallory Jagodzinski's “Love is (Color) Blind: Race, Belonging, and Nation in 21st Century Historical Romance Fiction" is here.
Again, an abstract followed by comments by Philippa B, this time on “‘You stayed’: Love, law and the reservation in Jenna Kernan’s Apache Protectors series" by Johanna Hoorenman.
Session 12 - Love in Other Worlds with papers by Donna Hanson (University of Canberra), María T. Ramos-García (South Dakota State University), Athena Bellas (University of Melbourne) and Kristin Noone (Irvine Valley College) SEE THREAD and coverage of the FINAL PAPERS in this thread by Jodi McAlister.
Philippa B's post about Donna Hanson's “Love in Outer Space: Science fiction romance
—
the ideal place to explore gender and
love” can be found here.
María T. Ramos-García's “Representations of Otherness in Paranormal Romance: Nalini Singh and J.R. Ward” is summarised by Philippa B here.
I've now come across a couple of reports on the recent Georgette Heyer conference. Sophie Weston mentions that
A terrific paper from Vanda Wilcox made
the point that, however precise Heyer’s grasp of strategic issues at
Waterloo might have been, her officers “embody World War I values and
leadership style”. At the same time Heyer’s other ranks (gorgeous Gideon
Ware’s straight-talking soldier servant, for instance) are basically
WWI Tommies in red coats, rather than Wellington’s rapists and
pillagers. Convinced me completely.
Her full report can be found here. The evening discussion session is described here by Nicola Cornick.
On 29 June, at the Gendered Emotions in History conference held at the University of Sheffield there was a paper on romance, presented by:
Agnes Arnold-Forster (QMUL) - Gender, Emotions, and Professional Identity in Twentieth Century Medical Mills and Boon Novels
The EUPOP2018 conference will be held from July 24th – 26th, 2018. One of the keynote speeches is by
Professor Petr A. Bilek (Charles University, Prague)
Distant Encounters of the Third Kind: Why Is Popular Culture Not Popular within Central European University Curricula?
I'm really happy to be able to able to post the news that Dr Amy Burge, Book Review Editor of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies, has been appointed Lecturer in Popular Fiction in the University of Birmingham's School of English, Drama and American & Canadian Studies! Since the appointment starts in August, she doesn't yet have her details up on the University's website.
I wouldn't go quite so far as to say it's one small step for Amy, one giant leap for popular romance studies, but it's certainly a very encouraging step for the field to have someone appointed to such a post specifically for their expertise in romance, and particularly in the UK, where there are fewer university-based romance scholars than in the US or Australia.
It appears that the jig is up at #IASPR18 so it seems like a appropriate time to say that I'll be joining Uni of Birmingham @EngLit_UoB as a Lecturer in Pop Fiction from August! pic.twitter.com/bx4eqyE0xs
Mass-Market Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism, 1972–2017. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.[13]
[See Chapter 3 on 'Danielle Steel and the New Home Economics' because
Blouin refers to romance scholarship and describes Steel as "the
undisputed master of the mass-market romance" (75). This is, however,
disputed, both by many romance readers (thanks to everyone who responded to my tweets about this!) and by Steel herself, who has
"insisted that her books aren't romantic fiction. 'They're not really
about romance ... I really write more about the human condition,' she
said. '[Romance] is an element in life but I think of romance novels as
more of a category and I write about the situations we all deal with –
loss and war and illness and jobs and careers, good things, bad things,
crimes, whatever'." (The Guardian) ]
Bradford, Clare, 2013.
"Monsters: Monstrous Identities in Young Adult Romance", (Re)Imagining the World: Children’s Literature’s Response to Changing Times, ed Yan Wu, Kerry Mallan and Roderick McGillis. Heidelberg: Springer. 115-125. Excerpt and unpaginated version
Chelton, Mary K., 2018.
“Searching for Birth Parents or Adopted Children: Finding without Seeking in Romance Novels”, Reference & User Services Quarterly 57.4: 266-273. Abstract and link to pdf.
Golubov, Nattie, 2017.
"Reading the Romance Writer as an Author-Entrepreneur," Interférences littéraires/Literaire interferenties 21 (December), "Gendered Authorial Corpographies", Ed. Aina Pérez Fontdevila & Meri Torras Francès, 131-160.
Keen, Suzanne, 2018.
"Probable Impossibilities: Historical Romance Readers Talk Back." Style: A Quarterly Journal of Aesthetics, Poetics, Stylistics, and Literary Criticism, vol. 52, no. 1-2, 2018, pp. 127-132. Excerpt [This is about readers of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series, which is not necessarily considered to be composed of "romance novels".]
Keegan, Faye Jessica, 2016.
"Soft metafiction(s) : Mary Stewart and the self-reflective middlebrow." Ph.D. thesis, University of Newcastle. Details and pdf
Keegan, Faye, 2017.
"‘Snob Value’: Gender and Literary Value in Mary Stewart." Women: A Cultural Review 28.3: 240-261.
Killeen, Jarlath, 2018.
'Nora Roberts: the Power of Love', in Twenty-First Century Popular Fiction, ed. Bernice M. Murphy and Stephen Matterson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), pp.53-65.
