New Publications: Faith, Love, Hope, Pastoral Care; the Gothic; Houses; Publishing and Diversity in Libraries; Sex, Virginity; PTSD

I'm not sure I've mentioned this before on here (and I'm busy cross-posting this news in a variety of places, so apologies if you see it more than once) but I've been busy working on Faith, Love, Hope and Popular Romance Fiction. It's a book which, as is rather obvious from the title, is about faith, love, hope and popular romance fiction. Since we're in a pandemic, I felt particularly uncertain about what the future might hold and so I decided I'd just publish the book in whole myself, on my website. That may or may not have been a good idea, but my hope is that this way I can get feedback/constructive criticism from other romance readers, romance scholars, and also romance readers. I've had some of that already and updated the book as a result, but I hope there will be more.

Since it's all online, there probably isn't all that much point writing a synopsis here, but it does include:

* a new definition of romance which suggests that romances are a form of pastoral care

* detailed analysis of romances by Alyssa Cole, Piper Huguley, Rose Lerner and Nora Roberts

* analysis of how "devils" and protagonists "in hell" are saved

* use of guides to romance writing and statements by readers and romance authors

Please do head over to https://www.vivanco.me.uk/node/428 and let me know what you think!

In other publication news

Jodi McAlister has "signed with Palgrave, and they're going to publish my scholarly monograph The Consummate Virgin: Female Virginity Loss and Love in Anglophone Popular Literatures, which is based on that PhD I did a million years ago."

And some other items which are available already (but not all of which are freely accessible):

Anita, Mangatur Rudolf Nababan, Riyadi Santosa, Agus Hari Wibowo, 2020. “Shift on Functions of Sexual Euphemisms in English-Indonesian Translation of Duke of Her Own by Eloisa James.” International Journal of Innovation, Creativity and Change 13.4: 92-107.

Ayres, Brenda, 2020. "'A Necessary Madness': PTSD in Mary Balogh's Survivors' Club Novels." Neo-Victorian Madness: Rediagnosing Nineteenth-Century Mental Illness in Literature and Other Media. Ed. Sarah E. Maier and Brenda Ayres. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. 97-120. [See the RSDB for more details.]

Burg, Jacob, 2020. “Houses of Genre Fiction: The Shared Estrangement of Postwar American Culture.” Brandeis University. PhD thesis. [Excerpt - but not of the relevant chapter, which is about "romance" but includes discussion of books which are not romance. The romances include The Flame and the Flower and Helen Hoang's The Kiss Quotient. See the RSDB for page numbers.]

Di Leo, Jeffrey, 2020. "The Speed of Publishing." American Book Review 41.4: 2, 26-27. [Excerpt]

Hirst, Holly, 2020. There are two chapters in The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic which are about romance and both are by Holly Hirst. The first is on "The Gothic Romance" and the second is "Georgette Heyer." Hirst has also produced a video about Heyer and the gothic which can be viewed for free here. There's an accompanying blog post about Heyer and the gothic here and a bibliography to go with both.

Lawrence, E.E., 2020. "The trouble with diverse books, part I: on the limits of conceptual analysis for political negotiation in Library & Information Science." Journal of Documentation, Online First. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-04-2020-0057

Roper, Holly N., 2020. Representing the Romance: Diversity and Inclusion in the Romance Collections of Public Libraries​. M.S. in Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.