Romance Roundup: Spanish romance in English, Crime fiction wins in Scotland, Romance defended

Laura Vivanco

A new, English translation of a novel by Corín Tellado has been published:

In 1962, Unesco declared her the most-read Spanish author alongside Cervantes. [...] Mario Vargas Llosa [...] has supplied the prologue to the translation.

“[Tellado] was, in all likelihood, the most significant sociocultural phenomenon in the Spanish language since the Golden Age,” writes the Peruvian-born Nobel laureate. “What might ostensibly appear to be heresy – and from a qualitative perspective it is – ceases to be so if we begin to view things in quantitative terms. Borges, García Márquez, Ortega y Gasset, any of the most original thinkers and writers in my language that you might care to mention, none of them have reached as many readers or had so great an influence on the way in which people feel, speak, love, hate, understand life and human relations, than María del Socorro Tellado López, Socorrín to her friends.”

Duncan Wheeler, associate professor of Spanish studies at the University of Leeds, was researching the cultural politics of Spain’s post-Franco transition to democracy when he noticed that her readers had been ignominiously lumped in with fans of Julio Iglesias and his ilk.

After devouring 50 of her books bought for a euro each at Madrid’s El Rastro flea market four years ago, he began to look beyond the comparisons with Cartland and consider Tellado as a chronicler of Spanish society [...] the books offer a valuable overview of an evolving Spain. Not only do they reflect the changing status of women as the tourism boom allowed them to leave home to work in hotels and other service industries, they also depict the country’s nascent celebrity culture and its fascination with all things American. (The Guardian)

The details of the translation are:

Corín Tellado, Thursdays with Leila, trans. Duncan Wheeler, intro. Diana Holmes and Duncan Wheeler, prologue Mario Vargas Llosa (Cambridge: MHRA New Translations, 2016)

More details of the cost and how to obtain the volume are available from The Modern Humanities Research Association.

I've often seen romance referred as the best-selling genre of popular fiction but presumably that's in the US/North American market. At least, at the end of November the Scottish Book Trust revealed that

crime/thriller books are the single most popular type of fiction in Scotland.

In a recent Ipsos MORI Scotland survey of 1,000 adults, just over 1 in 4 Scots (27%) who read for enjoyment said that books which fictionalise crimes, their detection, criminals and their motives topped their choice of reading or listening genres. The next most popular genre were science fiction/fantasy and biography/autobiography, both at 10%, followed by historical fiction at 9%.

While the crime genre was the most popular among readers of all ages, the second most popular genre among young readers (aged 16-34) was science fiction/fantasy (15%), while readers aged 55 and over chose historical fiction as their second preference (14%). (Scottish Book Trust)

To end on a more positive note for romance, Val Derbyshire's been busy trying to change perceptions of popular romance. She's reviewed Jenna Kernan's The Shifter's Choice (Harlequin Mills & Boon) in Revenant's special issue on werewolves. It's good to see a romance novel reviewed (and the genre defended) in an academic journal:

this is a romance where the author is asking her readers to suspend disbelief quite a lot. However, like most Mills & Boon romances, it's not as empty-headed as literary critics would have you believe. The story raises several issues of interest to contemporary society, including such matters as the selfishness of our Western consumption-driven culture in which the gulf between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots' is ever widening.

Earlier this year she was on the BBC arguing that romance is feminist and a lot more of her thoughts on that and other issues in the genre can be found in this short booklet about Harlequin Mills & Boon romances. Among the most thought-provoking parts for me was the one on "defamiliarisation":

Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky coined the term 'defamiliarisation'. He used this to describe the capacity of art to invest the familiar with strangeness and thereby enhance perception.

'Defamiliarisation' is not simply a question of perception; it is the essence of literariness. Authors who 'bare the device' in literature and expose literature's artificiality, defamiliarise its tropes and render it into 'true art'.

Mills & Boons do this repeatedly.

this is a romance where the author is asking her readers to suspend disbelief quite a lot. However, like most Mills & Boon romances, it’s not as empty-headed as literary critics would have you believe. The story raises several issues of interest to contemporary society, including such matters as the selfishness of our Western consumption-driven culture in which the gulf between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ is ever widening. - See more at: http://www.revenantjournal.com/contents/the-shifters-choice-jenna-kernan/#sthash.Uw7pzzPj.b9eMPXVX.dpuf

this is a romance where the author is asking her readers to suspend disbelief quite a lot. However, like most Mills & Boon romances, it’s not as empty-headed as literary critics would have you believe. The story raises several issues of interest to contemporary society, including such matters as the selfishness of our Western consumption-driven culture in which the gulf between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ is ever widening. - See more at: http://www.revenantjournal.com/contents/the-shifters-choice-jenna-kernan/#sthash.Uw7pzzPj.b9eMPXVX.dpuf

this is a romance where the author is asking her readers to suspend disbelief quite a lot. However, like most Mills & Boon romances, it’s not as empty-headed as literary critics would have you believe. The story raises several issues of interest to contemporary society, including such matters as the selfishness of our Western consumption-driven culture in which the gulf between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ is ever widening. - See more at: http://www.revenantjournal.com/contents/the-shifters-choice-jenna-kernan/#sthash.Uw7pzzPj.b9eMPXVX.dpuf

Events, New Items on the Romance Bibliography, Romance in the Media

Laura Vivanco

The call for papers for PopCAANZ 2017 (to be held in Wellington, New Zealand) is online, with Jodi McAlister the area chair for popular romance. The deadline for proposals is 17 March 2017 and further details can be found here.

The University of Melbourne’s Publishing and Communications program will be holding a debate on the topic “In the battle of the genres, romance will always win”. That's on the 6th of October 2016 in Melbourne (more details here).

New to the Romance Wiki:

Andreu, Alicia G., 2010. 

La construcción editorial de Corín Tellado. Vigo: Editorial Academia del Hispanismo. Excerpt

 

Bonelli, María Valentina, 2012. 

"La virgen desollada: la perdida de la virginidad en las novelas de Corín Tellado durante el franquismo", Gramma 1.4.

 

Coste, Didier, 1981. 

"Installments of the Heart: Text Delimitation in Periodical Narrative and Its Consequences." Sub-Stance10/11: 56-65.

 

de Andrade, Roberta Manuela Barros and Erotilde Honório Silva, 2010. 

"A vida em cor de rosa: o romance sentimental e a ditadura militar no Brasil", Famecos 17.2: 41-48.

 

González García, María Teresa, 1998. 

Corín Tellado: medio siglo de novela de amor, 1946-1996. Oviedo: Pentalfa Ediciones.

 

Hernández Guerrero, María José, 2016. 

"Prosumidoras de traducciones: Aproximación al fenómeno de la traducción fan de novela romántica", Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada 29.1: 88-114. Abstract

 

Oklopčić, Biljana, 2016. 

"Medieval heresy in Croatian historical romances: a case study of Marija Jurić Zagorka’s Plameni inkvizitori." Neohelicon (online first 10 August 2016). Abstract

O'Neil, Kathryn M., 2016. 

"Women's rhetoric and the romance novel genre." M.A. Thesis, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Abstract

Pöppel, Hubert, 2014. 

"Las reinas de la novela rosa en la España y Alemania: Corín Tellado y Hedwig Courths-Mahler", Lingüística y Literatura 66: 153-170.

Not new to the bibliography, but newly placed online is:

Rose, Suzanna, 1985. 

"Is Romance Dysfunctional?" International Journal of Women's Studies, 8.3: 250-265.

In the Media:

Brown, Mark, 2016. 'Mills & Boon romances are actually feminist texts, academic says: Val Derbyshire says no one should be embarrassed to read much-derided books, arguing many are literature of protest', The Guardian, Wednesday 24 August.

More coverage of Val's opinions can be found in this clip from the BBC (though I'm not sure if it's available to listeners outside the UK) and at the Daily Mail.

Stafford, Annabel, 2016. 'What's not to love about romance novels?', The Sydney Morning Herald, 27 August 2016. This discusses the academic stream at the 2016 Romance Writers of Australia conference with reference to the research being done by Jodi McAlister, Catherine Roach, Sandra Barletta and Lisa Fletcher.

Kaetrin's write-up of the conference's academic stream can be found here and Leah Ashton's is here.

Corín Tellado: Queen of the Novela Rosa

Laura Vivanco

Corín Tellado, an extremely important figure in romantic fiction written in Spanish, died this morning, aged 81. According to her obituary in El País she was

La autora, la más leída en español después de Miguel de Cervantes, ha publicado más de 4.000 novelas románticas, de las que se han vendido más de 400 millones de ejemplares, a lo largo de su vida.

[The most-read Spanish author after Miguel de Cervantes; in the course of her life she wrote more than 4,000 romantic novels, with more than 400 million copies sold in total.]

There's a "selected bibliography" of her works at Wikipedia.

Her first novel was published on the twelfth of October 1946. According to her website,

Cada una de sus novelas es el reflejo de la realidad inmediata que nos rodea, de las costumbres al uso "Recuerdo que a José Luis Garci le hacía mucha gracia que mis protagonistas tuvieran coche, que mis mujeres condujesen en una época en que en España la costumbre todavía no estaba extendida".

[Each of her novels reflects the reality of daily life, of contemporary mores: "I remember that José Luis Garci was very amused by the fact that my protagonists had cars, that my female characters drove in a period when that still wasn't common in Spain."]

Another reality of the time in which she began her career was censorship:

"Cultural censorship played a vital role in Franco's regime. It was perhaps the most effective element of the dictatorship, without which Franco would not have been able to control Spanish society" (Itziar, 1999:54). Franco's aim was to preserve his regime's ideology and isolate Spanish culture from foreign influences. In order to achieve that, his censorship had to be concerted and it was thus carried out by three departments: the Book Censorship section, the Cinema and Theater Department and the Information and Censorship section.

All three departments were responsible for banning every artistic work that posed a threat to the regime's ideology. Sexual morality, politics, religion and the use of language were the main sensitive issues with regard to censorship. As far as books were concerned, not only was pre-publication censorship by the government established, but works were also subjected to self-censorship by the author or translator and editorial censorship by publishers. (Keratsa)

Romantic fiction, by its very nature, tends to tell stories which touch on issues of sexual morality, and the dictatorship promoted it for this reason:

The promotion of the novela rosa, or romance novel, in the Spain of the Generalísimo was intended to expose Spaniards to a particular moral attitude that would further distance them from the sexual liberalism tolerated in some democratic nations. [...] The romantic stories of authors such as Trini de Figueroa, María Teresa Sese, María Adela Durango, María Teresa Largo, José Marzo, and Carlos Santander, to name but a few, were viewed by the Franco regime as a way to promote a Catholic vision of love. (Faura, Godsland and Moody 47)

Under Franco "moral censorship policed profanity, obscenity, and eroticism, demanding 'buenas costumbres' ('proper behavior') in public and print" (Pérez 628). Tellado acknowledged that censorship had shaped her writing:

"Recuerdo una novela en que dejé al protagonista ciego. El editor me la devolvió con una carta en la que pedía: "¡opéralo!". Y lo operé, claro. En cuanto a mi estilo, fue la censura quien lo perfiló. Algunas novelas venían con tantos subrayados que apenas quedaba letra en negro. Me enseñaron a insinuar, a sugerir más que a mostrar".

["I remember writing a novel in which I left the hero blind. My editor sent it back to me with a letter in which he asked: "Operate on him!" And I did operate, of course. As far as my style is concerned, it was honed by censorship. Some novels came back with so much underlining there was barely a letter left black. They taught me to insinuate things, to suggest more than show."] (from her website)

As Faura, Godsland and Moody note, despite the censorship that was in place,

some writers were able to write novels which contained comments made by their characters alongside ambiguous events that evidence a disparity between what was actually articulated and what was implied. We suggest that the rosa fiction of Corín Tellado best exemplifies this tendency.
Corín Tellado is foremost among novela rosa writers of the twentieth century. (50)

She continued working right to the end, having just finished her last novel on Wednesday (according to the obituary in El Mundo).

Her novels have been analysed in a number of works, including:

• Álvarez, Blanca. Corín Tellado. Madrid: Grupo Libro 88, 1991.
• Carmona González, Angeles. Corín Tellado: el erotismo rosa. Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 2002.
• Erhart, Virginia. “Amor, Ideología y Enmascaramiento en Corín Tellado.” Imperialismo y Medios Masivos de Comunicación. Casa de las Americas 77 (1973): 93-101.
• Erhart, Virginia. "Amor y consumo en las novelas de Corin Tellado." Cuadernos de Comunicación 2.17 (1976): 16-21.
• Faura, Salvador, Shelley Godsland, and Nickianne Moody. "The Romance Novel, or, the Generalisimo's Control of the Popular Imagination." Reading the Popular in Contemporary Spanish Texts. Newark, DE: U of Delaware P., 2004. 46-58.
• Mabee, Norma Augusta. La novela rosa de Corín Tellado: Desorden, conflicto y escape de la ectopia. Dissertation Abstracts International 54.4 (1993): 1357A-1357A.
• Mendez Jose Luis. "The Novels of Corin Tellado." Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 5 (1986):31-40.

-----

• Anonymous. "Fallece la escritora Corín Tellado." El Mundo, 11 April 2009.
• Cuartas, Javier. "La escritora Corín Tellado muere en Gijón a los 82 años." El País, 11 April 2009.
• Faura, Salvador, Shelley Godsland, and Nickianne Moody. "The Romance Novel, or, the Generalisimo's Control of the Popular Imagination." Reading the Popular in Contemporary Spanish Texts. Newark, DE: U of Delaware P., 2004. 46-58.
• Keratsa, Antonia. "Translation and Censorship in European Environments." Translation and Politics 9.3 (2005).
• Pérez, Janet. "Prose in Franco Spain." The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature. Ed. David T. Gies. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 628-642.

A longer obituary in El País (also in Spanish) can be found here.