New Publications: French Canadian Romance, Strangled Women and Dark Romance, Migration and Marriage, A Trans Romance author from 1909, Black Romance, Trauma

Love Stories Now and Then: A History of Les romans d'amour, by Marie-Pier Luneau and Jean-Philippe Warren was published in October. However, since they kindly sent me a copy so I could add more details about it to the Romance Scholarship Database, I put off mentioning it here until I'd been able to read it. It's a translation of their L’amour comme un roman. Le roman sentimental au Québec d’hier à aujourd’hui (2022). The book (in both versions)

is the first comprehensive survey of Quebec and French-Canadian romance novels. It tackles questions that everybody asks. What is “love at first sight”? How do class, national identity, religion, and race influence choice of partners? What are the rules to flirting? What are the limits to expressing one’s desires? What are people’s expectations in marriage? What is the place of sexuality and how does it differ in French and English culture in North America? (from the publisher's website)

I've added quotations from the book to the entry in the Database, and those give more information about the content of the chapters: "Repressed Love (1830-1860)"; "Sublimated Love (1860-1920)"; "Domesticated Love (1920-1940)"; "Celebrated Love (1940-1965)"; "Serial Love (1965-2000)"; "Love Despite Everything (since 2000).

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Mary, E. (2024). "Strangled Women: Popular Culture, ‘Conservative Modernity’ and Erotic Violence in Britain, c.1890–1950." Cultural and Social History, 1–19. 

This open access paper "analyses popular novels and films in early-mid twentieth-century Britain. It argues that strangled women were increasingly depicted in violent narratives of adventure and domination by a male lover". That includes E. M. Hull's The Sheik, which is one of a number of novels (mostly non-romance) that are discussed here, which is why I thought it might be of interest to readers of this blog. 

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Here's a piece in The Conversation by Magali Bigey on "dark romance" and why we shouldn't worry about its readers but we should be encouraging discussion about these novels: https://theconversation.com/reading-dark-romance-the-ambiguities-of-a-fascinating-genre-243982  

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And onto the new arrivals in the romance scholarship database:

Burge, Amy (2024). "Marriage migration, intimacy and genre in Helen Hoang’s The Bride Test (2019) and Brigitte Bautista’s You, Me, U.S. (2019)." Literature, Critique, and Empire Today.

Imperitura, Lorenzo (2024). The Forgotten Queer Utopia. Master’s thesis, The Arctic University of Norway. [Since I think the genderqueer novel discussed here (Beatrice the Sixteenth, published in 1909 and written by Irene Clyde, an author described "variously as non-binary, genderfluid, transgender, or a trans woman") sounds like a romance, I feel it's worth sharing this thesis with readers of this blog, even though Imperitura is primarily assessing the work as utopian fiction.]

Johnson, Jacqueline Elizabeth (2024). Labors of Love: Black Women, Cultural Production, and the Romance Genre. PhD thesis, University of Southern California. [Analyses work by Rebekah Weatherspoon and Katrina Jackson.]

Kindleysides, Alicia (2024). Broken Hearts: Writing The Representation of Trauma and Trauma Recovery in a Post-Trauma Romance Novel. PhD, Central Queensland University.

New Publications: Migration, India, Gender, Consent, Libraries and Translation

Burge, Amy (2024). "Marriage migration, intimacy and genre in Helen Hoang’s The Bride Test (2019) and Brigitte Bautista’s You, Me, U.S. (2019)." The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. [This is forthcoming, but a pre-print is available from the page I've linked to.]

Montebello, Sophie (2024). The Representation and Self-Representation of Anglo-Indians in Literature from 1885 to the Present Day. PhD thesis. The Open University.

Moussaoui, Abdelghani (2024). "Gender as a ‘Discursive Practice’ in Romance Discourse." International Journal of Language and Literary Studies 6.2:654–665.

 

Speese, Erin K. Johns (2024). "Came for the Smut, Stayed by Consent: Desire and Consent in Sarah J. Maas’s Fictional Worlds." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 13.

Velasquez, Diane L. and Jennifer Campbell-Meier, Jennifer (2024). "Romance Genre and Collection Management in Australia and New Zealand Public Libraries." Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association. [Online first. Abstract here, with the article itself available only with a login.]

Vişan, Nadina (2024). "Untranslatability in Regency Romances: Explicitation or Implicitation?" British and American Studies 30:233-241. [Discusses translation from English into Romanian.]

IASPR Conference and New Publications: Climate Change, Migration, Readers, History, Libraries

The IASPR conference starts tomorrow and the schedule (with abstracts of the papers to be presented) is available for download here: https://www.iaspr.org/conferences/schedule-romance-revitalised/ . The topics for the various panels include: Booktok, Black Romance, Historical Romance, Love Studies, Paranormal Romance, Queer Romance and much more!

The conference will also see the launch of Jayashree Kamblé's new book, Creating Identity The Popular Romance Heroine's Journey to Selfhood and Self-Presentation (which you can read more about here).

In addition, this week only, the ebook version of Publishing Romance Fiction in the Philippines by Jodi McAlister, Claire Parnell  and Andrea Anne Trinidad, which was published earlier this year by Cambridge University Press, is available for free download here.

Here's a list of some other recent publications:

Ali, Kecia (2023). "The End of the World as We Know It: Climate Catastrophe in Nalini Singh's Paranormal Romance Fiction." The Journal of the Core Curriculum: An Annual Literary and Academic Anthology in the College of Arts and Sciences at Boston University 32:81-86. [At the time of adding this to the list, the 2023 volume of this journal wasn't yet available online.]

Burge, Amy (2023). "Romantic Love across Borders: Marriage Migration in Popular Romance Fiction." Contemporary Love Studies in the Arts and Humanities: What's Love Got To Do With It? Ed. Madalena Grobbelaar, Elizabeth Reid Boyd and Debra Dudek. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. 39-49. [Abstract]

Parks, Amy Noelle (2023). "The Feminist Possibilities of Heteroglossic Spaces in Contemporary Young Adult Romance Novels." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 12.

Phipps, Catherine (2023). "‘The Machine for Showing Desire’: Desert Romance Fiction and Knowing Sexual Desire." Historical Research, Creative Writing, and the Past: Methods of Knowing. Ed. Kevin A. Morrison and Pälvi Rantala. New York: Routledge. [Abstract and Excerpt]

Richey, Weston (2023). "(Loves) Me, (Loves) Me Not: Unbuilding of Selfhood in the Romance of the Present." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 12.

Veros, Vassiliki (2023). "Nobody Puts Romance Fiction in the Corner: Public Librarians in New South Wales and Their Dalliance with Romance Fiction." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 12.

News, Commentary, Registration for IASPR 2023 and New Publications

The closing date for early-bird registration for the IASPR conference is 31 March. There's a hybrid as well as an in-person option.

The BBC has published an article with the annoying premise that, as the most formulaic genre of popular fiction, romance is presumably the most at risk of being produced by artificial intelligence. However, the article does also mention that

Last year, sales of romantic fiction in the US shot up by 52.4%, compared with an increase of just 8.5% for adult fiction overall.

Meanwhile, sales of the genre in the UK have increased more than two fold over the past three years.

Erin at The Smut Report explores the preponderance of penetrative sex in m/m romance and concludes that 

Sexual fantasy and wish fulfillment is all over the place in romance. But while wish fulfillment and smoothing out rough edges (I mean, is douching sexy? Apparently not, because—while showers are prolific—these guys never do it.) is one indisputable component of genre romance, it also often contributes to certain groups of readers feeling invisible. Fantasy is great and all, but sometimes it would be nice also to stop the barrage of input that maybe something’s broken because one hasn’t met one’s perfect Romance Novel Partner yet, and that’s why one struggles to orgasm / doesn’t enjoy penetration / doesn’t enjoy sex at all / fill in the blank.

And on the topic of inaccuracies/fantasies, Scientific American offers a reminder that wolves generally do not behave the way that shifter/werewolf romances imply they do: "The idea that wolf packs are led by a merciless dictator, or alpha wolf, comes from old studies of captive wolves. In the wild, wolf packs are simply families."

This year's issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies has begun to appear online, and includes:

• Genre-savvy Protagonists in Queer YA Rom-coms
  Alex Henderson
• Literary Fiction from the Perspective of Romance: Normal People
  Francesca Pierini

Other recently published works on romance are:

Burge, Amy (2022) "Beyond Outlander: Annie S. Swan and the Scottish popular romance novel." Scottish Literary Review 14.2:1-19 [I've linked to the entry at the Romance Scholarship Database as there's both an official version (behind a paywall) and a free, pre-print version.]

Cannon, Emanni N (2022). Contemporary Romance and the Question of Literary Value. Master of Arts in English Literature, San Francisco State University. 

Ghosh, Srijani (2023). "Diversity Sells: Uzma Jalaluddin’s Muslim Adaptation of Pride and Prejudice." English Studies. Online First. [Abstract]

Lindström Kruse, Miranda (2022). Pinsamma läsningar: En affektteoretisk studie av #SpicyBooks på TikTok. Masters thesis, Uppsala universitet. 

McDade, Monique (2023). California Dreams and American Contradictions: Women Writers and the Western Ideal. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. [There is a chapter on Eva Rutland, and though the focus is not on her romance novels, this is the first significant academic work about her. See the RSDB for more details.]

Pupipat, Apisak (2023). "Should a Book Be Judged by its Back Cover? Some Written/Formal Features as Observed in Happily- Ever-After Women’s Novel Blurbs." LEARN Journal: Language Education and Acquisition Research Network 16.1:604-630.

Rattanamathuwong, Bancha (2023). "Time Is on Our Side?: Homo Economicus in Time-Travel Romance." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. [Abstract]

News and New Publications: Publishing Woe, a Forthcoming Book on the Romance Heroine's Journey, etc

I've now left Twitter but I can still be contacted via my website, via responses to posts here, and I'm also on Mastodon as @lauravivanco@romancelandia.club .

I would say "Happy New Year!" but SmartBitchesTrashy Books is reporting that

It’s a bleak time in the professional world of media and book publishing.

The Harper Collins Union remains on strike after more than a month, and HarperCollins is refusing to negotiate. Publishing shuts down at Christmas, so it’s likely they’ll be on strike into next year. [...]

There are layoffs happening at so many publications, too, including in books coverage. BuzzFeed has laid off a portion of their workforce, including their books editor, Farrah Penn.

And Gannett, parent to USA Today, laid off a portion of their workforce, including Mary Cadden, who compiled the USA Today bestseller list

To continue the bleak midwinter theme, Jezebel is reporting that 

In October 2020, a post on indie romance author Susan Meachen’s Facebook page, allegedly written by her daughter, announced that Meachen had tragically died by suicide a month earlier. This news was followed by more posts from Meachen’s “daughter” (on Meachen’s account) in the author’s private writers group, The Ward, suggesting her mother took her own life because her peers in the online indie book community bullied her.

In light of this horrible news, authors and online friends helped fund Meachen’s funeral, created an anti-bullying anthology in her memory, and offered to help her daughter edit her mother’s final book, free of charge. On Monday—over two years later—Meachen’s account posted something new in The Ward. This time, it was Susan saying she’s actually been alive this whole time.

On a happier note than redundancies and possible fraud, romance academic Dr. Amy Burge was quoted on the BBC website recommending romance-themed Christmas movies/books. She ended with a quick summary of what romance scholarship's about:  "While many read [...] romance for comfort and entertainment, readers can also think more critically about the genre, questioning the way these books represent the dreams, desires, and values of a particular society."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zbrmp9q

This is evident in Jayashree Kamblé's Creating Identity: The Popular Romance Heroine's Journey to Selfhood and Self-Presentation forthcoming (due in the summer) new book, which is now available for pre-order. You can read an excerpt here. I've collected some of the key quotes from that excerpt, describing the contents, here.

And now on to a list of recent publications:

Long, Veronica Lee (2022). “Individuation and the Romance Novel.” PhD thesis, Pacifica Graduate Institute.

Pupipat, A., Rungkaew, T., & Meeparp, L. (2022). "Judging a Book by its Back Cover: Spoken/Informal Register as Found in Happily-Ever-After Women’s Novel Blurbs." Journal of Studies in the English Language, 17(2), 1–31.

Sheehan, Sarah E. (2022) "The “Popular Romance Canon”: An Academic Librarian’s Response." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 11. [I would like to note that there are some academic libraries with significant romance collections, as listed at the Romance Wiki (unfortunately I've been unable to log in to it and update it with details about the acquisition made by Indiana University's Lilly Library) and I've also added some to the sidebar here at Teach Me Tonight.]

New Publications and Blog Update: Definitions, Canons and more (but probably less in future)

Twitter's been an important source of information for me in finding links and keeping up with what's been happening in the romance world, but with all the upheaval there, I've decided it's time to leave. Unfortunately, that means I'll lose an important source of content for this blog and there will probably be far fewer, maybe even no, notifications of calls for papers. I'll still be posting updates about items added to the Romance Scholarship Database, though.

The last thing I've been present for in online "Romancelandia" is a heated debate about the definition of "romance." I'm not the arbiter of that: my work's about romance as it has been defined, not as it will be. But I am the arbiter of what I add to the database, and so I've added an "About page" to give a brief explanation. I'm using the definition of "romance" given by the editors of The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction. [Incidentally one of the new items listed below takes a very interesting, in-depth look at debates about the definition of romance - see Michelson.]

Another contentious topic (which has not, as far as I know, been provoking controversy recently online), is that of a "canon." There's a trio of short articles about the "romance canon" (would it be helpful? is the concept intrinsically flawed?) in the Journal of Popular Romance Studies:

• Cant and Canonicity
  Eric Murphy Selinger
• Response to Eric Selinger’s “Cant and Canonicity”
  Julie E. Moody-Freeman
• Isn’t It Iconic: Canonical Logics and the Romance Genre
  Jodi McAlister

Other new publications are:

Burge, Amy (2022). "Beyond Outlander: Annie S. Swan and the Scottish popular romance novel." Scottish Literary Review. [This is still forthcoming, but a pre-print is available for free via the University of Birmingham.]

Grinnell, Natalie (2022). "The Challenge to Dominance Theory in Patricia Brigg's and Carrie Vaughn's Paranormal Romance Novels." Femspec 22.2:40-65. [Abstract]

Hua, Shaoqi and Chengli Xiao (2023). "What shapes a parasocial relationship in RVGs? The effects of avatar images, avatar identification, and romantic jealousy among potential, casual, and core players." Computers in Human Behavior 139. [Abstract and excerpt]

Konle, Leonard and Fotis Jannidis (2022). "Modeling Plots of Narrative Texts as Temporal Graphs." CHR 2022: Computational Humanities Research Conference, December 12 – 14, 2022, Antwerp, Belgium :318-336.

Michelson, Anna (2022). Redefining the Romance: Classification and Community in a Popular Fiction Genre. PhD thesis, Northwestern University. https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-4tj1-6567

Sharma, Vishal, Kirsten E. Bray, Neha Kumar, Rebecca E. Grinter (2022). “Romancing the Algorithm: Navigating Constantly, Frequently, and Silently Changing Algorithms for Digital Work.” Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery on Human-Computer Interaction.Volume 6, Issue CSCW:1–29. https://doi.org/10.1145/3555651

One last item, which I'm not adding to the database because it only mentions romance in passing, is a thesis by Leon Kooijmans titled "Christianity after the Death of God: Christian Atheism and the Materiality of Absence." In it Kooijmans observes that, "Since the 1990s, an increasing amount of (post-)evangelical Christians in North America and Europe sought to form communities in creative and innovative ways [...]. One notable group associated with this Emerging Church Movement is called ‘Ikon’, a small collective of artists and disillusioned Christians, agnostics and atheists located in Belfast, Northern Ireland that was active from 2001 to 2013." The connection with romance is that at one of their first meetings (on the topic of the prodigal son), "Around the room dozens of Mills and Boon novels that we had purchased in a second-hand bookshop have been scattered around the various surfaces" (18) and "As the service draws to a close everyone is invited to take away a Mills and Boon book as a reminder of the evening’s theme" (21).

Bonkbusters: Call for Australian Readers to Interview

Jodi McAlister is asking "do you (or your mum, or your aunt, or their friends, or anyone) want to help @dramyburge and I with some research on 1970s/80s romance?"

Did you ever read "bonkbusters"? Dr Jodi McAlister (Deakin University) and Dr Amy Burge (University of Birmingham) are conducting a research project on the “bonkbuster” the kinds of books published by Jilly Cooper, Jackie Collins, Shirley Conran, and similar authors in the 1970s/80s. If you live in Australia and you read these books, we’d love to talk to you in one of our focus groups! We value the knowledge readers have, and believe it is important to preserve and take seriously. If you’re interested in participating, please email Dr Jodi McAlister at jodi.mcalister@deakin.edu.au for more information. This study has received Deakin University ethics approval HAE-22-100

The thread on Twitter adds that this is their

official callout for focus group participants, which will take place in November/December 2022 (one in Melbourne, one on Zoom). If you know someone who fits the bill, please forward it along!

Were you ever a voracious reader of authors like Jilly Cooper, Jackie Collins, or Shirley Conran? If this sounds like you, we’d love you to help us with some research!

Dr Jodi McAlister (Deakin University) and Dr Amy Burge (University of Birmingham) are conducting a research project on the “bonkbuster”, a very popular genre of romantic fiction in the 1970s and 1980s. Think Riders. Think Rock Star. Think Lace. 

If you’re Australian and you read these books, we’d love to talk to you in one of our focus groups! We value the knowledge readers have, and believe it is important to preserve and take seriously. 

If you’re interested in participating, please comment here or send me a DM so I can send you more information. 

Research Opportunity: PhD Funding for Research on Mills & Boon (in partnership with them and the University of Birmingham)

For those not on Twitter, who or are but missed it:

Would you like to do a *funded* PhD on romance fiction with me @EDACS_UoB & @MillsandBoon? I'm delighted our Collaborative Doctoral Award secured funding from @ahrcpress. Applications open on Monday, for UK & international students: https://t.co/MHns9C4Iy7 Contact me w/ queries!

— Dr Amy Burge (@dramyburge) October 15, 2021

Here are more details, from the description of the research project (available here):

This project will explore how the UK’s biggest publisher of popular romance fiction, Mills & Boon, engages with its readers. Undertaking archival research and interviews, the project’s focus is specifically on readers in the Midlands and readers from diverse backgrounds who have historically not read Mills & Boon’s fiction.

Founded in 1908, Mills & Boon sells a novel in the UK every ten seconds. Mills & Boon has a long history of engagement with its readers and is particularly interested in researching the relationship between readers and the publisher. In 2016, the publisher’s Consumer Insights team conducted an in-depth piece of market research which looked at perceptions of the brand amongst readers and non-readers in the UK through qualitative, quantitative and ethnographic lenses. This report indicated that there were particular communities of active romance readers who did not routinely engage with Mills & Boon. This CDA project continues the research work of the 2016 report to explore why some romance readers (primarily younger readers, readers of LGBT+ romance, and BIPOC readers) do not engage with Mills & Boon, and how the publisher might reach these communities of readers.

Mills & Boon’s close relationship with readers is arguably unique in British publishing, yet the specific strategies, intricacies and histories of this engagement have yet to be explored in-depth. Despite huge sales, academia has been slow to recognise the cultural impact of genre fiction and its industrial practices. This project is also timely. In 2020, Black Lives Matter protests around the world led many organisations – including publishers – to reflect on their approach to representation and diversity. Reaching diverse audiences matters; this project’s focus on readers in the Midlands, a diverse region with high reader engagement with Mills & Boon, allows for new regionally-specific findings to emerge as well as comparison against the national picture.

Permanent Post for Dr Amy Burge

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

— Amy Burge (@dramyburge) 27 June 2018

Food for Thought: Romance Readers More Moral, a Philosophical Romance and more

Laura Vivanco

According to some new research on popular fiction

the more Romance [...] authors participants recognized, the fewer morally dubious [...] scenarios they believed permissible [...]. In fact, once Moral Purity concerns - a measure of the importance people place on purity or sanctity when making moral decisions - was controlled for, Romance was the only variable besides Science Fiction that was clearly related to Moral judgment.(22)

The authors do note that "the correlational nature of this study limits any causal inference: it could [...] be the case that when it comes to choosing novels, people pick stories that will enforce their existing beliefs and desires" (23) but perhaps

reading romance novels, in which clearly identified heroes and heroines achieve an "optimistic, emotionally satisfying" ending [...], may encourage readers to view the world in black and white terms. That romance novels tend to end with a "happily ever after" may be particularly relevant given prior research showing a relationship between fiction exposure and Just World beliefs. (24)

The paper by Jessica E. Black, Stephanie C. Capps and Jennifer L. Barnes can be found here. Please note, though that this is a pre-print version and the final version of "Fiction, Genre Exposure, and Moral Reality" may differ a little from the version in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts.

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Sydney E. Thorp, an Honours Philosophy student at Hamline University, has written their honours project in the form of a romance novella, complete with a central love story and happy ending. The protagonists do briefly discuss popular romance fiction, too: Eva, our philosopher heroine, comments

"You want another example of how women and romantic love are easily dismissed?" Ava asked, frustrated. "Two words: romance novels. Even though the romance novel industry is an enormous, billion-dollar-a-year industry, almost entirely dominated by women - female authors, editors, publishers, et cetera - no one takes romance novels seriously as a genre of fiction. And why? Most likely, because it is connected with women." (15)

 The story

follows two people as they try to determine what romantic love is, and why it was a neglected or minimized philosophical object for centuries. As the characters converse, they develop the concept of philosophy described above, discuss the place of women, passion, and reason in philosophy, and determine – to the extent they are able – that romantic love is something people do, rather than a feeling or state of being, and is based on an unjustifiable attraction to another person and Aristotle's concept of friendship, specifically philia.

The idea of romantic love being a practice, rather than an emotion or a state of being, seems to be uncommon in philosophical work on the topic. It seems just as rare, especially historically, to think of romantic love as being between equals, who mutually care for each other and commit equally to the relationship.

You can read the abstract and download the whole of Entangled: Romantic Love and Philosophy as a pdf from here.

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Still on the topic of love, Olivia Waite argues that, in romance novels, love isn't "a prize you earn for doing everything correctly" but, rather, "It would be far more accurate to say not that romance novel characters are looking to get love, but that love is looking to get them" and that, in terms of the plot and what the characters are hoping to achieve, "The real villain of any romance novel is love itself."

[Photo by Wolfgang Moroder and taken from Wikimedia Commons. It is not in the public domain.]


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What's food for love? Food! At least according to Jennifer Crusie, who argues that:

1) "The kind of food makes a difference because it characterizes the people eating it."

2) "food doesn’t just build romances, it builds all relationships."

3) "The person who controls the table, controls the interaction."

4) "food also says a lot about place."
 
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In the context of "place," another reminder that the next IASPR conference is all about place:

Space, place, and romantic love are intimately entwined. Popular culture depicts particular locations and environments as “romantic”; romantic fantasies can be “escapist” or involve the “boy / girl / beloved next door”; and romantic relationships play out in a complex mix of physical and virtual settings.

and

We’ve pushed the due date for IASPR conference proposals back by two weeks, to September 15, 2017. The conference will be in beautiful Sydney, Australia, just a 15 minute walk from the Opera House and the Harbor Bridge; it runs from June 27-29, 2018. The full CFP is here. Please feel free to repost and distribute it!

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Still on academic matters Amy Burge has written about the status of the "independent scholar" and I've been thinking about some gaps in the history of popular romance.

Romance News Roundup: PhD opportunity, conference report, disability project, diversity at risk, new publications

There's a PhD opportunity at the University of Tasmania:

Popular Fiction in the Twenty-First Century

This scholarship provides $26,682pa (2017 rate) living allowance for 3 years, with a possible 6 month extension.

Popular fiction is the most significant growth area in trade publishing in the twenty-first century. This project is premised on the view that popular or genre fiction is a sector of the publishing industry, a social and cultural formation, and a body of texts. It will offer new insights into contemporary literary culture through systematic investigation of the contemporary significance of one or more popular genres (crime, thrillers, romance, or fantasy) in the twenty-first century. By employing a mixed methodology combining discourse and textual analysis, quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis, and/or creative writing, Popular Fiction in the 21st Century aims to contribute to the increasingly urgent demand for conceptual and methodological frameworks for studying genre fiction.

More details here.

If you don't follow the Pink Heart Society blog, you might want to take a look at Amy Burge's report on the 2017 PCA/ACA conference. Ria Cheyne's there too, introducing her Disability and Romance Project, which recently gained funding from the RWA.

Unfortunately there's bad news as well as good in the romance world and

Romance Writers of America is saddened by the news that Harlequin will be ending publication of five of their series lines in 2018.

According to an announcement RWA received, the following lines will close: Harlequin Western (June 2018), Harlequin Superromance (June 2018), Love Inspired Historical (June 2018), Harlequin Nocturne (December 2018), and Kimani Romance (December 2018).

More details here. As pointed out by Kay Taylor Rea,

this news is a huge blow to the romance community for a very big reason: Harlequin is closing Kimani Romance.

Why is this a big deal? The vast majority of Harlequin titles penned by black women are published as Kimani titles. The Kimani Romance line is described as stories featuring ‘sophisticated, soulful and sensual African-American and multicultural heroes and heroines who develop fulfilling relationships as they lead lives full of drama, glamour and passion.’ These titles cover a number of subgenres, so hopefully Harlequin will make a concerted effort to integrate existing series and current authors into other lines. 

I’ll be keeping an eye out for official word from Harlequin and will certainly be watching how the Kimani authors are treated. This could be a huge setback for diversity in romance.

More details here.

And, finally, the latest publications to be added to the Romance Wiki:

Gardner, Jeanne. 2011. 

"'True-To-Life': Romance Comics and Teen-Age Desire, 1947-1954." Forum for World Literature Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, Apr. 2011, pp. 118-128. 

Kamble, Jayashree, 2017. 

"From Barbarized to Disneyfied: Viewing 1990s New York City Through Eve Dallas, J.D. Robb’s Futuristic Homicide Detective." Forum for Interamerican Research 10.1 (May 2017): 72-86.[Available free and in full online.]

 

Zhou, Yanyan, Bryant Paul and Ryland Sherman, 2017. 

"Still a Hetero-Gendered World: A Content Analysis of Gender Stereotypes and Romantic Ideals in Chinese Boy Love Stories." Sex Roles. Abstract

New Issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies

Eric Selinger writes:

Now that we've switched to a rolling publication format in JPRS, new pieces will appear both individually and in thematic or "special issue" groups. Today, we begin rolling out Volume 6 of the journal with a new Special Issue on Critical Love Studies, edited by Amy Burge and Michael Gratzke. The table of contents is below, and you can find the whole issue here: http://jprstudies.org/issues/volume-6. 

Enjoy! And spread the word!

E

• Special Issue: Critical Love Studies (Editors’ Introduction)
  by Amy Burge and Michael Gratzke
• Love is what people say it is: Performativity and Narrativity in Critical Love Studies
  by Michael Gratzke
• Loving over Skype: Tactile Viewing, Emotional Atmospheres and Video Calling
  by Yvonne Clarke-Salt
• Feminist Researcher Wishes to Meet Romantic Subject: The “Case” of Mrs. F.
  by Susan Ostrov Weisser
• Love and its Contradictions: Feminist Women’s Resistance Strategies in their Love Narratives
  by Nagore García Fernández
• Love, Limb-Loosener: Encounters in Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah
  by Jennifer Leetsch
• The boys’ love phenomenon: A literature review
  by Ágnes Zsila and Zsolt Demetrovics
• PLOTS: an art installation
  by Angelika Böck
• Review: Representing Difference in the Medieval and Modern Orientalist Romance, by Amy Burge
• Review: Women and Erotic Fiction. Critical Essays on Genres, Markets and Readers, edited by Kristen Phillips

New to the Wiki: Virginity, the Hymen, Desire, Bodies, Blackness and Disability

Laura Vivanco

Burge, Amy, 2016. 

"‘I Will Cut Myself and Smear Blood on the Sheet’: Testing

Virginity in Medieval and Modern Orientalist Romance." Virgin Envy: The Cultural Insignificance of the Hymen. Ed. Jonathan A. Allan, Cristina Santos, and Adriana Spahr. London: Zed. 17-44.

Amy Burge's " 'I Will Cut Myself and Smear Blood on the Sheet': Testing Virginity in Medieval and Modern Orientalist Romance," focuses on representations of the virginity test. Burge explores six sheikh popular romance novels, all featuring virgin heroines. She positions these texts alongside two popular English medieval romances, Bevis of Hampton (c. 1300) and Floris and Blancheflur (c. 1250). She analyzes the persistent reference in all of these texts to the virginity test used to prove women's virginity. Pointing out that these tests are easily manipulated, thereby highlighting their unreliability, Burge reminds us that the sole purpose of testing female virginity is to secure male ownership of women in a heteronormatively gendered society. (6)

Hirdman, Anja, 2016. 

"Speaking through the flesh: Affective encounters, gazes and desire in Harlequin romances," MedieKultur: Journal of media and communication research 32.61: 42-57. [PDF available for free]

Drawing from the cross-disciplinary field of affect theory, the article examines the writing of desire in Harlequin romances through the delineation of gendered encounters. Against the backdrop of earlier feminist critiques of romance fiction, it argues that Harlequin’s intense focus on corporeal sensations and gazes encompasses a looking relationship that differs significantly from the visual mediation of gender and desire. With its use of an extended literary transvestism, a double narrator perspective, and the appropriation of a female gaze, Harlequin offers readers an affective imaginary space in which the significance of the gendered body is re-made, re-versed, and the male body is stripped of its unique position.

McAlister, Jodi, 2016. 

"Between Pleasure and Pain: The Textual Politics of the Hymen." Virgin Envy: The Cultural Insignificance of the Hymen. Ed. Jonathan A. Allan, Cristina Santos, and Adriana Spahr. London: Zed. 45-64.

In [...] "Between Pleasure and Pain: The Textual Politics of the Hymen," Jodi McAlister explores the history of the representation of the hymen in Western literature romances. Her analysis ranges from the thirteenth century, with Le roman de la rose; to the seventeenth century, with the ballad A Remedy for Green Sickness (1682) and A Dialogue between a Married Woman and a Maid (1655); through to experts from "Sub-Umbra, or Sport among the She-Noodles" and "Lady Pokingham, or They All Do It" from Pearl (a magazine published in 1879-80); and up to examples taken from the twentieth century and twenty-first century, using Beyond Heaving Bosoms and recent autobiographical stories of virginity loss. By examining blood, pain, and (im)perforability - common motifs associated with the hymen - in all of these texts across such a vast array of periods, McAlister reveals the discourse over the female body across time. In doing so, she discovers that the perception of virginity loss (the rupture of the hymen) brings about a profound transformative change in women; it is the journey toward adulthood, sexual maturity, and pleasure. More so, from the earliest to the latest of these romances, McAlister argues that the role of women has greatly improved: the transformative change moves from being that imposed externally by the man to that becoming internal to the woman. Finally, and tellingly, McAlister's analysis, by moving from early literary texts to current autobiographical stories (a point of friction in her chapter between literary texts and real lives), shows that in the latter texts the hymen is less concrete: the broken hymen does not and cannot fulfill the expectation of the transformative changes long promised by our cultural imaginary. (6-7)

Schalk, Sami, 2016. 

"Happily Ever After for Whom? Blackness and Disability in Romance Narratives." Journal of Popular Culture 49.6: 1241–1260. Excerpt

In the United States, people with disabilities are often represented as nonsexual, having either no desire or capacity for sexual interactions. This stereotype is supported by the lack of mainstream representation and by the historical denial and punishment of the sexualities of people with disabilities through eugenics, forced sterilization, institutionalization, exclusion from sex education, and more [...]. In contrast, the sexuality of black people has been abundantly represented as a problem that needs to be controlled. Black feminists argue that sexuality and gender are always already racialized, and sexual-racial stereotypes, like the Jezebel, dominate contemporary cultural representations of black women. While the sexualities of black people have been more often represented than the sexualities of disabled people, these representations have typically been oppressive nonetheless.

Positive, perhaps even liberatory, scripts of black and disabled people's sexualities are largely nonexistent, especially in mainstream culture. As a result, writers of popular fiction have sought to depict black and disabled people's experiences in the popular romance genre. (1241)

Links: Me in Sheffield, New Work, Conference Reminder

Laura Vivanco

Last weekend I went to Sheffield to be part of a panel discussing "Why Read Harlequin Mills & Boon Romances?" with senior editor Flo Nicoll, romance authors Heidi Rice and Susan Stephens and fellow academics Amy Burge, Val Derbyshire and Fiona Martinez. I've written up a post about the event here and Fiona's observations are here.

New to the Romance Wiki Bibliography:

Gates, Sarah, 2016. 

"Feminism, NASCAR and the Italian billionaire's secret baby: Defending the romance genre." Voiceworks 103 (Autumn): 95-101.

Sarah's a romance author and her website's here. Abstract:

Romance novels are widely considered frivolous, trashy and vacuous. They aren't reviewed in mainstream publications like the New York Times Book Review, nominated for literary awards, or well represented at literary festivals. They have been called 'mummy porn'. When I tell people that I write romance, I get raised eyebrows and the topic is quickly shifted - like I've confessed to something embarrassing or shameful. Because when you admit to reading romance, the most common question is 'How can you read that crap?'

Conference Reminder:

Jodi McAlister writes:

The call for papers deadline for PCA in San Diego in April next year is fast approaching! Heather and I would love to continue Eric's work and make this a really awesome, vibrant, interesting gathering of scholars, so please make sure you get those abstracts/panel proposals/etc in before October 1. http://pcaaca.org/romance/

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).

News Roundup: CFP, items added to the Romance Wiki and more

Laura Vivanco

I haven't posted links for a while so this is a very, very long post. It covers a lot of areas, including items I've added to the Romance Wiki and calls for papers.

Romance readings:

Amy Burge will be at the Edinburgh Fringe (16 August) leading a session about romance writing.

Ali Williams has launched the CatRom Project, "an exploration of the way in which category romances address and engages with social issues. Its primary objective is to create a collection of analysis of individual novels, as well as interviews with authors and editors within the genre on the subject of issues within category romance."

Evangeline Holland has posted a paper on "Pistols and Petticoats: How Women Write the West", which is a reading of Western focused on Jezebel by Katherine Sutcliffe (1997), Fair Is the Rose by Meagan McKinney (1993), and Fall From Grace by Megan Chance (1997). She finds that

In the Western romance, as presented by female writers for a primarily female audience, the frontier myth is strong, particularly Turner’s thesis that the West was “‘free land’ into which the pioneers moved [and] was available for the taking, and that American progress began with a regenerative retreat to the primitive, followed by a recapitulation of the stages of civilization.” (White) All three novels end in some degree on a farm, with little interrogation as to how it is be acquired, but with the implication that it—domesticity through landownership and homesteading—is necessary for a believable romantic ending.

Romance Documentary update:

"LOVE BETWEEN THE COVERS was selected as the #1 choice of all 2015 videos by the American Library Association's Booklist Review".

Calls for Papers:

• Black Love: A Symposium The 80th Anniversary of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. University of Kansas, September 14-16, 2017. The organisers "invite scholars, writers, and artists to reflect upon Black Love—its history, its reiterations, and its futurity—at a symposium to be held at the University of Kansas" and the "Symposium presentations may cover, but are not limited to, the following topics" of which the first is "Romance novels". More details here.
• Lesbian Lives Conference 2017: Lesbian Love/s. University of Brighton, UK, 24-25 February 2017. Dr Olu Jenzen (University of Brighton) specially forwarded details of the conference to romance scholars so it's clear that our participation would be welcome. More details here.
• The Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love, 12-15 April 2017, at the Westin Hotel in Seattle. Panel session for SPSL, to be held as part of the group meeting program of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association. Papers on any topic related to the philosophy of sex and love are welcome. More details here.

Jo Beverley (in memoriam):

News of Jo Beverley's death on 23 May was met with great sadness by members of the romance community, including the Romance Writers of America, her colleagues and readers at the Word Wenches blog, and individual authors such as Lynne Connolly.

Academic articles:

Morton, Leith, 2016. 

"The reinvention of romance: The rewriting, reception and censorship of 'ninjobon' in modern Japan." Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia 47: 85-115. Abstract

Radick, Caryn, 2016. 

"Romance Writers’ Use of Archives." Archivaria, the Journal of the Association of Canadian Archivists 81: 45-73. Abstract

Tanner, David, 2016. 

“Literary Success and Popular Romantic Fiction: Ethel M. Dell, a Case Study.” The Book World: Selling and Distributing British Literature, 1900-1940. Ed. Nicola Wilson. Leiden: Brill, 2016. 83-94. Excerpt

Thierauf, Doreen, 2016. 

“Forever After: Desire in the 21st-Century Romance Blockbuster.” Journal of Popular Culture 49.3: 604-26. Excerpt. [As I've mentioned before, I don't tend to add items about Fifty and Twilight to the Romance Wiki. They're kind of a phenomenon in their own right, though obviously they do have a romance at their centres. This article really disappointed me because it only looks at Twilight, Fifty Shades and a Pride and Prejudice fan fic but nonetheless draws sweeping conclusions about popular romance fiction, such as "Romance’s generic requirement that the hero should be volatile in his affections and sexually intimidating is brought to its logical conclusion in these series" (618). This is not a "generic requirement" of romance: the author would have done better to limit their conclusions to Twilight and Fifty.]

Dissertation/thesis:

Morrissey, Katherine, "Romance Networks: Aspiration & Desire in Today’s Digital Culture" (2016). Theses and Dissertations. Paper 1179. University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

In the media:

Lee, Jenny, 2016. 'Ballymena Mills & Boone author on the world of romance', The Irish News, 13 June 2016. [About Lynne Graham, whose 100th Mills & Boon was published this year] 

Mumford, Tracy, 2016. 'Who is reading romance novels?', MPR News, 13 June 2016. [Nielson statistics on romance readers in 2014/15] 

Thurston, Robert W., 2016. 'Ordinary People Learn History from Teachers, Movies, and This', History News Network, 12 June 2016. [About the historical content in historical romances]