The 2017 RWA Academic Research Grant has been awarded to:
Dr. Kate Brown, Huntington University
Dukes, Dowers, Devises, and Demesnes: The Paradoxical Place of English Law in the Historical Romance
RWA awarded funding to Dr. Kate Brown's project, which explores how English common law and constitutionalism give fundamental structure and substance to the historical romance genre.
Dr. Ria Cheyne, [Liverpool Hope] University
The Disability and Romance Project
RWA awarded funding to Dr. Ria Cheyne's project, which seeks to advance the scholarly conversation about disability and romance and will also engage with romance readers, writers and other industry professionals to encourage new conversations about romance, disability and representation.
I've only added a couple of items to the Romance Wiki bibliography recently, so I thought I'd add a few blog posts to today's post:
Anne N. Bornschein took a look at "a romance novel that deals with the history of women’s academic work—particularly in the sciences—and how it has often been erased, dismissed, or appropriated by male colleagues."
Olivia Waite observes that "writers make millions upon millions of tiny, instinctual decisions that add up to internally consistent structures" and suggests it's important to start "recognizing the partly hidden pattern[s]."
And new to the Wiki are:
- Cheyne, Ria, 2017.
- "Disability Studies Reads the Romance: Sexuality, Prejudice, and the Happily-Ever-After in the Work of Mary Balogh." Culture - Theory – Disability: Encounters between Disability Studies and Cultural Studies. Ed. Anne Waldschmidt, Hanjo Berressem and Moritz Ingwersen. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript. 201-216.
- Matthews, Amy T., 2016.
- 'Entangled: the exegetical process of a romance writer', Arts and Humanities as Higher Education December 2016.
- Dr Amy T. Matthews also writes literary fiction as "Amy T Matthews" and romance fiction as "Tess LeSue." She is hoping to bring her three personae together:
The HEA is a non-negotiable element of romance and one I want to use in my literary romance novel (it is already a staple in my historical romances). The parameters I am giving myself for the literary romance is that it must be structured around at least one romantic relationship between a man and a woman (although there may be more than one), and that it must end optimistically, with a happy ending (although not necessarily the same kind of happy ending as a traditional romance). I do not want to sidestep the inevitability of suffering. I want my characters to experience love and romance in the context of real world pressures – infidelity, mental illness, bereavement – and I want to face up to the inescapable finality of death, while still (somehow!) managing to reach that optimistic ending. This will be a point of difference between popular romance and my literary novel, and I hope it’s one I can navigate without slipping from ‘romance’ into ‘love story’.
