Magazine and Story Paper Romances

Laura Vivanco

There is, it seems to me, a hierarchy in romances: single-titles are often considered superior to category romances and the various magazine formats (including the romance comics to which Sequential Crush is dedicated) are often entirely forgotten. I was provided with a salutary corrective recently when I bought a copy of a 1960s guide to writing romantic fiction which states that

A good serial will always make a good novel and a good romantic novel will often make a serial. The most obvious difference is in length.
Magazines obtain their serials by two methods. Either they are specially written for the market, or, more commonly, they are adapted by the editorial staff from a full-length novel. Most publishers make a point of submitting manuscripts with a feminine appeal to magazines, in order to sell the serial rights well before book publication. Financially, selling to a magazine is by far the better proposition. Serial rights can bring in two or three times as much - sometimes even more than a publisher's advance. (Britton and Collin 108). ¹

They probably weren't overstating the importance of the magazine market in that period; Joseph McAleer, who has studied the publishing history of Mills & Boon, writes that

While Mills & Boon had had a close relationship with the magazines since the 1920s, it was in the 1950s that contact intensified, and the magazines themselves become a kind of extension of the editorial department. By 1948, pre-publication serializations of Mills & Boon novels were fixtures in the top three women's magazines, which together were selling over three million copies per week: Woman, Woman's Own, and Woman's Weekly [...]. This association with the weekly magazines served more than an editorial purpose. Mills & Boon reaped extra publicity when a serial 'sold' well, encouraging readers to seek out the complete novel in the libraries, or other titles by the author. Moreover, selling serial rights - for as much as £1,000 - helped Mills & Boon's cash flow. The firm usually retained between 15 and 25 per cent of the serial fee. (97)

Magazines came in various types and Bridget Fowler has studied in detail

a representative sample of weekly family or women's magazines, selecting those of the most economical design, with the lowest prices [...]. Where possible, the period analysed was July 1929 to July 1930 [...]. Not only was this a time of industrial restructuring and financial collapse, but it was also the last era before the birth of the modern, glossy, mass-circulation women's magazine in 1932. Stories had a much more central place in the older type of magazine and were often the sole diet of fiction for their readers. The affectionate niche they acquired in the lives of their reading-public was attested by many of my respondents with working-class roots, who recalled their mothers snatching brief interludes from heavy domestic labour to enjoy the little luxury of Silver Star or the People's Friend. (51)²

Billie Melman has focused in particular on "The Lancashire romance and the love story set in the Empire" (144) in British story papers of the 1920s. The "mill-girl story had emerged in the 1890s. Its heyday overlapped the decade between the end of the First World War and the Wall Street Crash; its decline and fall coincided with the Great Depression" (121). Indeed, "The Great Depression, which finally ruined the Lancashire cotton industry, also gave the Lancashire romance its coup-de-grâce" (133). This sub-genre does

include some stories of romantic rivalry between a mill-hand and a toff, fighting for the heart and hand of a mill girl. Usually it is the honest, industrious Lancastrian who wins. On the whole, the concept of marriage as a bond that benefits economically or socially one or both of the parties is alien to the spirit of the Lancashire romance. Matrimony is not an economic partnership, or a sanctioned sexual relationship, but a lifelong friendship between two adolescents, an extension of the 'matiness' of the mill. (128)

In sharp contrast to the mill-girl stories, yet existing alongside them, was a type of story whose "brand-mark was nationalism. Its symbol was the Empire. Its main characteristic was the blurring of social differences and the effacement of class consciousness" (134). Melman suggests that "The flowering of a genre that celebrated an imaginary society in which females were scarce and males plentiful may be seen as a response to the anxieties caused by the imbalance between the sexes" (136-37) in the aftermath of the First World War. There

are two patterns of romance. In the first, the emigrant story proper, an Englishwoman, newly arrived from the 'Old Country', finds a mate, a home and purposeful life in the unpopulated wilderness of a British dominion or colony. In the second pattern, the heroine, born of British parents in the 'New Country', is pursued and won by an Englishman. In both these patterns the main emphasis is upon the national and racial identity of the protagonists. The characters must be white and Anglo-Saxon. Their affiliation to race replaces other allegiances - to class, to the community, to occupation and even to gender. (137)

The story papers in which these stories appeared

were printed, on the newsprint pulp paper from which they derived their somewhat derogatory epithet, in a two- or four-column layout. The typical story paper was a weekly [...]. Its potential readers were unmarried manual workers, shop assistants, domestic servants and office workers. Married women in their early and mid twenties formed a distinct group for which a host of periodicals more domestic in outlook than the publications for adolescents catered.

The main component of the pulp weekly was fiction. The relation between the role of magazine fiction and the social status of the magazine-reading public has been noticed. The space given to fiction was in inverse proportion to the class of readers. The 'higher' this class, the smaller the story component. (113)

In addition, "The serial story was peculiar to working-class periodicals. [...] Middle-class publications, on the other hand, had a distinct preference for shorter fiction" (114).

William Gleason takes the study of magazine romances back even further in time, and across the Atlantic, in issue 2.1 of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies. He states that:

The mass marketing of modern romance fiction in North America began not with the emergence of Harlequin Books in the 1950s but during the dime novel and story paper boom of the 1860s and 1870s. Seeking to capitalize on the longstanding appeal of love stories, which had been appearing alongside other popular genres in the weekly family story papers since the mid-nineteenth century, many of the most influential “cheap” U.S. publishing houses—including Beadle and Adams, Street and Smith, George P. Munro, and Norman Munro—began to experiment with more distinctly marked romance series aimed primarily or exclusively at women readers. Several of these series were quite successful, others wildly so. Beadle and Adams’s Waverley Library, for example, which offered both classic fiction and popular romance novels, produced a total of 353 issues between 1879 and 1886 (Johannsen 304, 314). Street and Smith’s Bertha Clay Library, launched in 1900, ran (along with its successor, the New Bertha M. Clay Library) for more than thirty years (Carr 81). And from the mid-1880s through the 1930s popular publishers fought over exclusive rights to publish and republish the works of prolific American romance novelist Laura Jean Libbey, both as stand-alone volumes in various “library” series and as serialized novels in weekly story papers (Masteller 205). These late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century publishing successes laid the groundwork for the mass marketing of popular romance with which we are familiar today.

As for me, I've been dipping into the digitized, online editions of Australian Women's Weekly from 1933 to 1982. Joan Elman's A New Car and a Lady (18 Feb. 1939) features a heroine who drives cars for a living (she works for a car show-room); the first thing she says is "Oh, but this had been a day of days! Three demonstrations since ten o'clock. Careers for women? Ugh!" (5). The anti-heroine from this story is not totally dissimilar, at least initially, to the heroine of This Frail Flower (21 August 1943) who, before the war, was "lovely and loveable, spoiled, useless" (5). She, however, finds a new purpose in life, and her old love, in a factory doing war-work. In Paul Horgan's National Honeymoon (16 Sept. 1950) the heroine manipulates her new groom into appearing with her on a national radio programme which gives prizes to newly-weds in return for them sharing their love story with the nation. Roberta May reveals that she used to work "as a secretary [...] I wanted to keep on, but Gus wouldn't let me" because, as he says, "I can support both of us" (10). Roberta gave up her job rather than lose Gus, but much as the job would have enabled her to "help with payments on the house" (20), their appearance on the show will allow her to have a room in that house refurbished. After the show, however, Roberta is "sorry with all her heart for what they had given away that day [...] their very own love story" (22). Gus tells her that they can get back "the important part of it" by returning all the prizes; "I'll buy what we need, and if we can't afford it yet we'll wait till we can" (22). Yet again, the implication seems to be (a) a man should "support" the couple on his own, without his wife's assistance, and (b) when a wife puts herself into the public arena (as opposed to staying safely at home) she runs the risk of damaging her marriage. The contrast between these last two stories seems to reflect the changing attitudes towards women's work:

At the end of the war, the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor asked women workers about their future work plans [...] most women wanted to keep their present jobs. Immediately after the war, the percentage of women who worked fell as factories converted to peacetime production and refused to rehire women. In the next few years, the service sector expanded and the number of women in the workforce—especially older married women—increased significantly, despite the dominant ideology of woman as homemaker and mother. The types of jobs available to these women, however, were once again limited to those traditionally deemed “women’s work.”(History Matters)

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1The authors of this guide, Anne Britton and Marion Collin, had "both been fiction editors of women's magazines" (dustjacket) so they clearly write from experience when they warn authors of full-length novels that:

If your manuscript is bought as a serial do not be surprised by what happens to it. You may have written about sixty-five thousand words. The fiction staff will have no qualms about cutting it to thirty thousand words if it suits them better that way. You have sold the story and unless you want to kill your market you will be wise not to complain about its new length or its new title, or even to hint that they have cut out your most brilliant passages! The staff who cut are experienced, and it is their job to know what makes a successful serial. (117-18)

I can't help but feel that there are some parallels here with the process of translation and cutting documented by Eva Hemmungs Wirtén, which led her to ask "Is this not a new book? And where is the writer in all of this?" ("They Seek").

2 The romance stories themselves are described by Fowler as featuring "plots in which women are shown to be as capable of achieving production targets and intellectual attainments as men. However, in every case the working woman is reintegrated into the domestic world after marriage" (60).

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• Britton, Anne and Marion Collin. The New Writers' Guide: Romantic Fiction. London: T. V. Boardman, 1960.
• Fowler, Bridget. The Alienated Reader: Women and Romantic Literature in the Twentieth Century. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.
• Gleason, William. “Belles, Beaux, and Paratexts: American Story Papers and the Project of Romance.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 2.1 (2011).
• McAleer, Joseph. Passion's Fortune: The Story of Mills & Boon. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999
• Melman, Billie. Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties: Flappers and Nymphs. London: Macmillan, 1988.
  
• Wirtén, Eva Hemmung. " 'They Seek It Here, They Seek It There, They Seek It Everywhere': Looking for the "Global" Book" Canadian Journal of Communication 23.2 (1998).

The covers above, from The Australian Women's Weekly, are for 25 Feb. 1939,19 June 1943 and 14 Oct. 1950. Thumbnails of all the covers can be viewed via a "visual timeline."

Characters Who Reflect Our Values?

Laura Vivanco

Kate Hewitt left an interesting comment in response to my last post:

the bottom line seems, to me, to be that we want the characters in our fiction to reflect our own values and when they don't we find it frustrating or disappointing [...] every author is going to bring his or her own value system to his/her books, whether intentional or not. It's up to the reader to decide if he/she can accept the morals/values of the book he/she is reading and then enjoy it as fiction.

Her comment raises so many questions about the values of romance readers, romance authors and of the genre itself, that I decided it was time to create a new space in which to discuss them.

The Romance Genre

According to Pamela Regis, every romance includes some degree of judgement about the society which forms the background to the lovers' struggle:

Near the beginning of the novel, the society that the heroine and hero will confront in their courtship is defined for the reader. This society is in some way flawed; it may be incomplete, superannuated, or corrupt. It always oppresses the hero and heroine. (31)

Although the societies depicted in romances vary, one thing which does not is the high value placed on romantic love. According to the Romance Writers of America, it is essential for a romance to have

An Emotionally-Satisfying and Optimistic Ending: In a romance, the lovers who risk and struggle for each other and their relationship are rewarded with emotional justice and unconditional love.

What, though, does "emotional justice" mean? Some romance protagonists are "rewarded with [...] unconditional love" even though they have behaved towards other people in ways that they themselves later acknowledge to have been unjust.

Romance Authors

Kate, in her initial comment, states that "every author is going to bring his or her own value system to his/her books, whether intentional or not" and Jo Beverley has written that "An honest writer must include her own philosophies in her work" (33). Readers should, however, be careful before making assumptions about authors' values. After all, characters may express opinions which are not shared by the author. In addition, Leslie Wainger's advice to romance authors raises the possibility that some romance authors are writing with their readers' (real or imagined) values in mind:

basic expectations that every romance reader shares and that you, as an author, implicitly promise to fulfill are simple and leave you a lot of room for creativity:
A sympathetic heroine: The heroine is the key to every romance. The reader’s sense of identification with the heroine draws the reader into the book and keeps her reading. Your heroine needs to be sympathetic – strong without being hard, vulnerable without being weak, intelligent, ethical, interesting, capable (but not perfect), beautiful (but not unreal) – in short, a surrogate for your reader as she wants to see herself. [...]
A strong, irresistible hero: Both your heroine and your reader need to fall in love with the hero. He has to be strong without being overbearing (or borderline abusive), yet vulnerable enough to need the heroine; as intelligent, ethical, and capable as she is; fascinating; and, of course, good-looking (and good in bed, even if the reader never sees his skills). (19, emphasis added)

Wainger's advice does seem somewhat problematic. Readers' relationship with heroines may be rather more varied than Wainger seems to be suggesting here and she doesn't define what "ethical" behaviour actually is. I wonder if she realised that there isn't a single standard of "ethical" behaviour and decided it would be far too difficult to try to define a single standard which would be acceptable to all readers.

Romance Readers

Bridget Fowler has observed that

most readers do not confuse the genre with realism. Moreover, the development of the romance suggests its readers are not passive. Its paradises change, along with women's new material experiences and their greater exposure to the arenas of modernity. Such readers are still active and critical thinkers who repudiate writers too removed from their own image of society. [...] I have shown that in Scotland certain writers are repudiated. For example, the link between Barbara Cartland's world-view and that of Thatcherism is both transparent to popular readers and the cause of Cartland's low reputation. The world of the dominant class she depicts is either seen as too alien to their experience or as the source of the poverty and social problems that harass them. (174)

Readers, then, distinguish between fiction and reality. We know that the societies depicted in romances are not real and it seems to me that many romance readers tolerate a great deal which does not "reflect our own values." One reason for this may be the distance between fiction and reality. Another may be that romances tend to be written in a way which "draws the reader into the book" and encourages the reader to sympathise with the characters. Readers may also feel that the emotional benefits they derive from elements such as a high level of conflict, sexual tension and an "Emotionally-Satisfying and Optimistic Ending" are sufficient to outweigh the discomfort felt when characters don't "reflect our own values." Or we may in fact read partly in order to encounter new perspectives, and different values.

Robin, responding to Kate, says that while she

cannot speak for other readers, [...] I definitely am not looking for characters to reflect my own values. In fact, I often love most those characters whose values are very different from my own. Discussing SEP's Ain't She Sweet with people this past week always brings this up for me, because Sugar Beth is a character I could not relate to *personally* but loved and rooted for and wanted to see her happy. In fact, SEP is one of those authors whose books alternately delight and horrify me, but whose skills as a storyteller and writer can take me places I might not otherwise want to go. And what a delightful experience it is to be taken to those new places, even when they're not places I'd ever want to go in real life.

Clearly, though, some readers do have "hot buttons" which will stop them reading a book, and some of those "hot button" issues may relate to "values."

So, do you want the characters in romance novels to reflect your values? How often do they reflect your values? How much deviation from your values are you willing to tolerate? And what aspects of a novel are likely to increase your tolerance for characters who don't share your values?

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• Beverley, Jo. "An Honorable Profession: The Romance Writer and Her Characters." North American Romance Writers. Ed. Kay Mussell and Johanna Tuñón. Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow P., 1999. 32-36.
  
• Fowler, Bridget. The Alienated Reader: Women and Romantic Literature in the Twentieth Century. Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.
• Regis, Pamela. A Natural History of the Romance Novel. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P., 2003.
• Wainger, Leslie. Writing a Romance Novel for Dummies. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004.

"The Marx and Engels" of Romance Scholarship

Laura Vivanco

On the eve of the RWA conference Joanne Rendell, writing at The Huffington Post, takes a look at "a growing shift in the way the ivory tower sees romance" and the "fascinating relationship which is evolving between professors studying romance novels and the romance world itself."

In the course of this article she describes Eric Selinger and Sarah Frantz as "the Marx and Engels" of romance scholarship. It did strike me that that particular description might be more fittingly applied to any two of

• Bridget Fowler (author of The Alienated Reader: Women and Popular Romantic Literature in the Twentieth Century (1991)) who believes that

  we have seen the use [...] of commercialised forms of popular literature and television, which women consume in large numbers, to break down an autonomous anti capitalist high culture.There was an elitist high culture which was very critical of aspects of capitalism, and I think the turn to privileging women's form of expression, like the romance, may have quite often removed that critical edge culturally. Because these were forms that adjusted themselves to the market and didn't question it. Didn't take issue with the commercialisation of life in general. [...] I don't want to say that there are not valuable elements of popular women's' literature. I think they have distinctive, moral and political understanding of how people should live their lives which is important. That is a cultural achievement. We were right to say at a certain stage that it is not just high culture that should be preserved. There are elements from popular culture that are important and need saving. But we are in danger of shifting into a market based aesthetic which is a populist one.

• Jan Cohn, author of Romance and the Erotics of Property: Mass-Market Fiction for Women (1988) in which she explores how "popular romance tells the story of how the heroine gains access to money - to power - in patriarchal society" (3).

• Peter Darbyshire, who, in his "Romancing the World: Harlequin Romances, the Capitalist Dream, and the Conquest of Europe and Asia" (2000) concludes that

  Harlequin’s success in Europe and Asia is associated not with any particular interest in America itself, but it is instead associated with the ideology of capitalism that America represents and which Harlequin romances embody. For European and Asian readers, these books are capitalist fantasies as much as they are romantic fantasies and, as such, their appeal to the readers of emerging capitalist markets is obvious

• Jayashree Kamble, who in her doctoral thesis (2008), has suggested that "the very texts that appear to glamorize global capitalism, justify war, and align themselves with heteronormative fantasy contain reservations about these ideologies."

Rendell, though, doesn't seem to have meant the "Marx and Engels" description of Selinger and Frantz to suggest anything about the politics or subject-matter of their work. Rather, she's looking at important personalities in this rapidly growing area of scholarship.

Inevitably there are omissions, and a reader may receive the impression that positive scholarship on the genre emerged rather more recently than it actually did. Without wishing to in any way minimise the huge contributions of Sarah, Eric, Pamela Regis and others mentioned in Rendell's article, or the importance of the RWA's academic grant program, also mentioned there, it should be noted that just as socialism's history began long before the emergence of Marx and Engels so, as Eric observed in a comment attached to a recent post I wrote about the history of romance scholarship, "This is a field that has been going on, in one form or another, for at least forty years; the more we keep that history in mind, the better off our new work will be."

Despite all those caveats, I think we can agree that the Marx and Engels of romance have started an online revolution in romance scholarship, initially via the listserv but more recently via the IASPR website (if you haven't seen them already, please do go and take a look at the new forums) and the forthcoming online Journal of Popular Romance (which is now accepting submissions).

The photo of "Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx and his wife Jenny, and their children Laura and Eleanor" came from Wikimedia Commons.

Harlequin Presents: Capitalism and Competition

Laura Vivanco

It seems as though Harlequin Presents must be selling very well, because there are plans to increase the rate of publication from 8 to 12 per month in the US. Harlequin is therefore holding a competition to find new authors for the line (details here).¹

What particularly interested me were a couple of the descriptions of the line which were given in Tessa Shapcott (Executive Editor, Harlequin Presents)'s "Tips on Writing for the International Market":

The successful writer will be able to tell a story that contains universal emotional truths [...] What are universal emotional truths? You need to think of the emotions that bind all of us together, for example, love, death, birth, renewal, trust, betrayal, happiness, jealousy, lust, hurt, loss, loyalty…

And remember, too, that basically every person the world over aspires to the same things: unconditional love, family, material affluence, safety, success, justice, truth, strength, contentment, passion and tenderness…

Kalman Applbaum, in his article "Crossing Borders: Globalization as Myth and Charter in American Transnational Consumer Marketing", observes that

North American transnational corporation (TNC) managers and their experts have been particularly avid consumers of globalization literature since the media prophet Marshall McLuhan (1995) augured the First Coming of the "global village." For these business people, globalization represents opportunities of boundless proportions. (258)

and

Despite TNC marketers' avowal to operate with sensitivity to local cultural conditions when considering how to adapt product offerings and promotions locally, my research suggests the reverse. Marketers operate within a consumption-led universalizing paradigm. They believe in innate universal psychological tendencies that transcend local culture. (260)

He gives as an example Harlequin's "foray into Poland" (265) during which the company sought "not just to reeducate a segment of Polish consumers about romance novels, but to influence the entire cultural framework for thinking about love, beauty, and romantic relationships" (265):

The firm aimed to standardize Polish taste by influencing the cultural environment surrounding the product Harlequin expected to succeed at being the experts on love in Poland because they believe that love and romance—and for that matter the means of "escape into" these—must have a single, objective, universal, global expression. It was only temporarily, under repressive communism, that this global essence had been distorted. Polish teenagers could now, with the help of bar-coded paperbacks, be liberated to the global truth of romantic love. (266)

The idea that "basically every person the world over aspires to the same things" is, it seems to me, incorrect. Certainly we can all agree that every person the world over has certain basic needs (e.g. for food, water, shelter), but, particularly when it comes to more abstract desires such as "love," "success," and "justice," it seems difficult to ignore the very different ways in which culture affects the expression of such desires. And if we think of the past as "a foreign country: they do things differently there" (Hartley), then we've pretty much circled back to the debate about historical accuracy in romance. Most readers would accept that "success" for a Roman of the patrician class during the Republic would not have had exactly the same meaning as for a medieval nun, an English aristocrat living in the first decade of the nineteenth century, a viking, a samurai, or any number of individuals from different genders, historical periods, social classes and geographical locations.

The other description in the "Tips on Writing" for the Harlequin Presents line that interested me was as follows:

The successful writer [...] will be able to create an international setting that is aspirational for readers everywhere, and that beckons them to venture beyond their own small personal worlds. [...] Remember the values that underpin the Presents series – such as, wealth, luxury, sophistication, escapism and a good dollop of passion.

It was at this point that I began to wonder if perhaps, when I last discussed her work, I hadn't given enough space to Bridget Fowler's commentary on the relationship between the romance genre and capitalism. Fowler writes of the "domestic romances of the 1840s" that often

the romance was located in the world of urban capitalist class relations. Yet however severe its critique of elitism, however much it softened the practices of a market economy with an appeal to charity or ‘caring capitalism’, opposition to the desire for social reconstruction championed by the new working class was its secret centre. One effect of popular romance is precisely to make the institutions of capitalism – urban or agrarian – seem inevitable, so that the aspirations growing out of the early Utopians’ social theory seem to be profoundly incompatible with common sense. (17)

Her description seems equally applicable to a Harlequin Presents line which is "aspirational" and underpinned by the "values" of wealth and luxury. I'm reminded too of Peter Darbyshire's analysis of what it is that makes Harlequin romances, in the words of Tessa Shapcott, "globally appealing." According to Darbyshire, "Harlequin’s success in the Eurasian sphere is actually a result of the romances’ success infulfilling an ideological fantasy for their readers, one that has more to do with the benefits of successful capitalism than it does with America itself" and

The inextricability of the Harlequin romance from the ideology of democracy and capitalism was perhaps made most clear when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Within hours of the borders between East Germany and West Germany being opened, Harlequin employees were handing out free books at the border crossings, eventually giving out 720,000 Harlequin romances. For many citizens of the former communist nation, then, their first encounter with democracy was literally in the form of Harlequin romances. Brian Hickey even seemed to recognize the ideological content of his company’s romances in a 1991 speech to shareholders, when he called the books “propaganda” (Grescoe 254). This association of Harlequin with democracy and capitalism set the stage for a pattern that repeated itself in other former Eastern Bloc nations, such as Poland. When Harlequin expanded there, for instance, the company took over an entire television channel for eight hours on Valentine’s Day (now popularly known as Harlequin Day in Poland).

The competition's deadline for submissions is, appropriately enough, Valentine's Day 2008. Darbyshire also states that

it is this narrative of capitalist success which is ultimately responsible for the success of Harlequin romances in Europe and Asia. The novels are fantasies of the ability to transcend economic class, a world where women enjoy working in privileged positions in the economic system of capitalism and men are the masters of this system, the power figures who take care of those less wealthy than themselves. Lack of money is never a problem in the world of Harlequin romances, and romance itself is inseparable from an abundance of wealth and possessions. The appeal of such fantasies to readers living in emerging capitalist markets like Poland and Russia is obvious.

Equally obviously, one shouldn't forget the appeal of a "good dollop of passion", and my favourite Harlequin Presents also have a "good dollop" of humour, but I do wonder if it's the fact that, more than any other line, the Harlequin Presents are "narrative[s] of capitalist success", that has made this line Harlequin's "most popular series" (The Book Standard, 2006). And, in the spirit of Monty Python's "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life," if Darbyshire is right that "what is perhaps most threatening to Harlequin’s long-term success in these markets is not the limitations of an emerging capitalist system but the economic strength of a healthy capitalist state," then perhaps Harlequin can feel confident in the face of any possible global economic recession.

• Applbaum, Kalman. "Crossing Borders: Globalization as Myth and Charter in American Transnational Consumer Marketing." American Ethnologist 27.2 (2000): 257-82.
• Darbyshire, Peter. "Romancing the World: Harlequin Romances, the Capitalist Dream, and the Conquest of Europe and Asia." Studies in Popular Culture 23.1 (2000). 28 Nov. 2007 <http://www.pcasacas.org/SPC/spcissues/23.1/darbyshire.htm>.
• Fowler, Bridget. The Alienated Reader: Women and Popular Romantic Literature in the Twentieth Century. Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.

1 The competition is actually for authors who aspire to write for one of 2 lines (though there is no distinction made between them in the US): Harlequin Presents [North America] are sold as two lines in the UK and Australia: Mills & Boon Modern Romance™/Modern Heat [United Kingdom] and M&B Sexy/Sexy Sensation [Australia and New Zealand]. The Modern Heat line actually has a very different tone from the Modern/Presents line. The ones I've read seemed to me to be less like Presents/Modern and more like a more sexually explicit version of the Harlequin Mills & Boon Romance line (and plenty of HM&B Romance line authors have been trying their hands at writing Modern Heats).

The Pleasurable Purgatory of Pulp

Laura Vivanco

The illustration is a detail from Domenico di Michelino's painting of Dante and the Three Kingdoms, from Wikipedia. Like Dante observing the souls trudging round and round the terraces of Purgatory, Scott McCracken, author of Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction, finds some redeeming value in the various types of pulp fiction, even if, like the souls, the readers must endure repetition as "one [novel] is consumed after another" (98). When pulp is described in these terms, I can't help but wonder if the critics hope that one day the readers will finally ascend to a better class of literature or at very least, like Dante, only visit it occasionally. The idea that "popular fiction" is something to be read while one is in a state of transition (like the souls in Purgatory, but, given the admitted pleasures of reading popular fiction, in considerably less pain) is suggested in McCracken's introduction, in which he reveals that

Some of my happiest experiences reading popular fiction have been on trains. There is something about the combination of being trapped yet going somewhere that is particularly conducive to the pleasures of pulp. While the popular narrative also traps in its predictability, despite, or maybe because of, that predictability, there is more scope for an escape into fantasy. (1)

However, Bridget Fowler, author of The Alienated Reader: Women and Popular Romantic Literature in the Twentieth Century, were she not writing from a decidedly secular perspective, would almost certainly condemn romance readers to one of the lower circles of Hell. Here's her categorisation of the women readers she interviewed (the numbering is not in order of her personal preference, since she has high regard for the "radical canon of popular literature", yet it is clear that "formulaic romantic fiction" is bottom of her list literally and in terms of her judgement of its merits):

1.Legitimate taste.
2.Middlebrow taste.
3.Radical canon of popular literature.
4.Non-formulaic, or less formulaic, uncanonised women’s fiction: the ‘Cookson’ group.
5.Formulaic romantic fiction (120)

We learn from Fowler that "Pleasure in legitimate works is most often linked to disdain for romantic fiction and the expression of a sense of pollution by it" (123). There were exceptions, however, for

legitimate culture does not automatically bestow a visceral intolerance towards contemporary romantic fiction. A minority who had acquired a disposition favourable to ‘serious fiction’ occasionally read a Mills and Boon novel. They confessed these private, behind-the-scenes departures from legitimate taste as I imagine Kinsey’s respondents must have yielded up their perversions for scientific scrutiny, fully aware of the pejorative connotations of such consumption in the perspective of the intelligentsia. (124)

It seems that such lapses of taste can be forgiven, but only if the reader is penitent enough. And yet, neither McCracken nor Fowler have managed to explain to my satisfaction what it is that distinguishes the perversions of pulp, particularly romance, from the legitimate pleasures of "good" literature. Fowler's main objection to romance would appear to be ideological since she argues that "in the arena of romantic fiction, literature may anaesthetise its readers’ perceptions by dependence on stereotypes, dominant ideas and regressive myths" (158) and her "conclusion is that the formulaic fiction partly locks these women into collusion with dominant ideas – economic, patriarchal and racist – or, less strongly, it increases their lack of systematised resistance to them" (173). According to McCracken

all theorists of mass culture agree that popular culture cannot be understood in terms of individual texts. Instead those texts must be read and interpreted in relation to the totality of production, distribution and consumption that organises the conditions of their reception. (24-25)

And yet if popular fiction must be read and interpreted in relation to the system of publishing which produces them since "Contemporary popular fiction is the product of a huge entertainment industry" (1), and if it is also the case that "the small-scale production of 'literary' novels is subsidised by popular fiction" (22), must not all novels be seen as products of the same "industry"? Is it really possible to read the "literary" novels without taking into account their place within "that totality of production, distribution and consumption that organises the conditions of their reception"?¹

McCracken also suggests that popular fiction, and specifically the romance genre, is different because of the way it is read:

The serial reading of formula romances, where one is consumed after another, means that it is unrealistic to treat each as separate. Rather, they should be read as one long saga, where the happy ending is constantly rejected for a new, unhappy beginning. Each new beginning then reactivates the search for an explanation of the marginalised feminine position in contemporary society. (98)

But why is romance being singled out as being particularly repetitive, as being a genre in which the works are pretty much identical? Could someone not attempt the "serial reading" of "literary" novels? We, as romance readers, know that all romances are not the same, and I'd argue that surveys such as AAR's latest "Top 100 Romances" poll prove it. Romance readers don't simply "consume" one novel after another as though they were all part of "one long saga". We can pick out favourites (and many of us keep and re-read them). Romance readers also go through reading slumps, times when we can't find enough romances which meet our current reading needs. Furthermore, all romance readers don't simply "consume" one romance after another, since many readers of romance also read widely in other genres.

• Fowler, Bridget. The Alienated Reader: Women and Popular Romantic Literature in the Twentieth Century. Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.
• McCracken, Scott. Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1998.

1 According to recent figures from "the Business of Consumer Publishing 2006, the net revenue from retail sources in the U.S. accounted for $6.31 billion in 2006. Romance sales accounted for $1.37 billion or 21% of the overall sales."