CFP (on Sarah J. Maas), and lots of new publications (emotions, vasectomies, comics, deposit libraries, aro-ace romance, dance history)

The Journal of Popular Romance Studies has put out a call for papers for a

Special Issue: Sarah J. Maas

Millions of adolescent and adult readers alike have been drawn to Sarah J. Maas’s YA fantasy-romance series for their representations of empowered, embattled young women, their immersive fantasy worlds, and especially their romance narratives. From the Throne of Glass  (2012-18) and A Court of Thorns and Roses (2015-21) books to Crescent City (2020-24), her current series-in-progress, Maas has become wildly popular for the complex romantic and sexual relationships she portrays. The Journal of Popular Romance Studies (JPRS) seeks articles for a special issue focused on Maas’s fiction. These articles may focus on any of Maas’s works and may take a variety of disciplinary approaches.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

• Intersections of romance and politics, including connections between sexual agency and political agency in Maas’s fiction
• How Maas’s work engages with feminism and/or postfeminism
• Portrayals of or discourses on assault, trauma, and/or PTSD in Maas’s fiction and romance as trauma narrative
• Maas’s adaptation of fairy tales in her romance narratives
• Representations of sex and sexuality in Maas’s work
• Portrayals of gender in Maas’s work
• Maas’s engagement with traditional romance-genre tropes
• Renderings of adolescence and adult-youth power dynamics in romantic pairings and other relationships in Maas’s fiction
• Maas’s portrayal of LGBTQ+ or queer romantic relationships
• Class structures/dynamics and how they shape romance in Maas’s work

More details about this can be found here.

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Eirini Arvanitaki's Emotionality: Heterosexual Love and Emotional Development in Popular Romance was published by Routledge in May 2024. It

focuses on the projections of romantic love and its progression in a selection of popular romance novels and identifies an innovation within the genre’s formula and structure. Taking into account Giddens’s notion of ‘confluent’ love, this book argues that two forms of love exist within these texts: romantic and confluent love. The analysis of these love variants suggests that a continuum emerges which signifies the complexity but also the formation and progressive nature of the protagonists’ love relationships. This continuum is divided into three stages: the pre-personal, semi-personal and personal. The first phase connotes the introduction of the protagonists and describes the sexual attraction they experience for each other. The second phase refers to the initiation of the sexual interaction of the heroine and hero without any emotional involvement. The third and final phase begins when emotions such as jealousy, shame/guilt, anger, and self-sacrifice are awakened and acknowledged.

Allan, Jonathan A. (2024) '“Condoms Break. Birth Control Fails.” Heroes in the Procreative Realm and Jessica Scott’s “Anything for You”'. Journal of Popular Romance Studies 13.

Cho, H., Adkins, D., da Silva Santos, D., Long, A.K. (2024). "Platform, Visuals, and Sound: Webtoon’s Immersive Romance Reading Engagement." In: Sserwanga, I., et al. Wisdom, Well-Being, Win-Win. iConference 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14597. Springer, Cham. [More details here.]

Deane, Katie (2024). Romance Self-Publishing and UK Legal Deposit. British Library Research Repository.

Lienhard, Alissa (2024). "“I’ll Call it Platonic Magic”: Queer Joy, Metafiction, and Aro-Ace Autofictional Selves in Alice Oseman’s Loveless." In Progress: A Graduate Journal of North American Studies 2.1:59-72.

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And finally, although this is not a publication about romance, Sonia Gollance, advertising her new book  It Could Lead to Dancing: Mixed-Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity, has written a post about some of what you could expect to find if there were more historical romances written about Jewish protagonists. https://jwa.org/blog/scandalous-dance-scenes-romance-plots-and-jewish-literary-modernity

 

New (and one forthcoming) publications: Comics, Masculinities, Love, Readers, Happiness, Heyer and more

The Observer published an article about British romance comics of the 1950s and 60s, with mention of a forthcoming publication on the topic: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/may/29/mirabelle-valentine-and-serenade-the-forgotten-teen-romance-comics-that-defined-an-era 

Here are the new publications:

Eirini Arvanitaki's Masculinities in Post-Millennial Popular Romance (New York: Routledge) was published in mid May.

Belk, Jaime (2022). Save Our Love. Creative Writing Masters Thesis, Liberty University.

Fekete, Maleah (2022). "Confluent Love and the Evolution of Ideal Intimacy: Romance Reading in 1980 and 2016." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 11.

Gehrmann, Susanne (2022). "Varieties of Romance in Contemporary Popular Togolese Literature." Routledge Handbook of African Popular Culture, ed. Grace A. Musila. Routledge: London. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003080855-4

Golubov, Nattie (2022). "La promesa de felicidad: la novela rosa y el placer de la lectura afectiva." El placer de la lectura: cuerpos, afectos, textos. Ed. Nattie Golubov. Ciudad de México. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. 65-94.

Hernandez, Carmen E. (2022) Romance and Revolution. Master of Arts dissertation, Texas State University.

Jan, Jariah Mohd and Diana Abu Ujum (2022). "Negotiating Conflicts amongst Muslim Female Characters in Malay Romance Novels: A Narratological Perspective." Muslim Women’s Writing from across South and Southeast Asia. Ed. Feroza Jussawalla, Doaa Omran. Routledge. New York. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003248064-22

O'Brien, Lee (2022). "Telling Gaps and Domestic Tyranny: Georgette Heyer’s Regency Romances." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 11.

New to the Romance Wiki Bibliography: Feminism, Love, Heyer and Orientalism

Laura Vivanco

Arvanitaki, Eirini, 2017. 

"Postmillennial femininities in the popular romance novel." Journal of Gender Studies. Published online: 28 Aug 2017. Abstract

McAlister, Jodi, and Hsu-Ming Teo, 2017. 

"Love in Australian Romance Novels." The Popular Culture of Romantic Love in Australia. Ed. Hsu-Ming Teo. North Melbourne, VIC: Australian Scholarly Publishing, pp.194-222.

McLeod, Dion, 2017. 

"'Try-error-try-it': Love, loss, and the subversion(?) of the heteronormative romance story in Will Grayson, Will Grayson." Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature 25.1: 73-94. Abstract

And in the section of the Romance Wiki bibliography for items in languages other than English:

Bianchi, Diana, 2017. 

"I gentiluomini si prendono per la gola: cibo e identità nei romanzi di Georgette Heyer". Lingua, Traduzione, Letteratura 1: 75-89. [Diana wrote to me to notify me of the publication of this article and her translation of the title is: "The way to a gentleman's heart is through his stomach: food and identity in Georgette Heyer's novels."]

林芳玫/Lin, Fang-mei. 

"性別化東方主義：女性沙漠羅曼史的重層東方想像/Gendering Orientalism: Women's Desert Romance and the Multiplicity of Oriental Imagination." Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese, vol. 13, no. 1-2, 2016, pp. 174-200. [There is an abstract in English, even though the paper is not.]

New to the Wiki: "Vocabulary Decay", Medievalism and Julie Garwood, Feminism

Laura Vivanco

This time I thought I'd also include the items I didn't add to the bibliography so you can see the kinds of things I don't include. In the cases below, I omitted some interesting items because they either didn't deal with romance fiction at length or because they weren't secondary academic works.

First, though, are the items I did include:

 

Arvanitaki, Eirini, 2015. 

"Gender in Recent Romance Novels: A Third Wave Feminist Mills and Boon Love Affair?", in Re/Presenting Gender and Love, ed. Dikmen Yakalı Çamoğlu (Interdisciplinary Net). Index of the book

 

Diamond, Geneva, 2015. 

"Medievalism and the Courtship Plot in Julie Garwood's Popular Romance Novels", in The Middle Ages in Popular Culture: Medievalism and Genre, ed. Helen Young (Amhurst, NY: Cambria). Excerpt

Elliott, Jack, 2014. 

'Vocabulary Decay in Category Romance'. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Online, December 2014. [Abstract]

Writers of a best-selling category romance imprint share a common tendency to decrease their deployment of unique words over the span of their novels—a phenomenon of ‘vocabulary decay’. This tendency cannot be found in the novels of Jane Austen, suggesting this drop is not intrinsic to the romance genre itself, and is unlikely to have any true narrative purpose. A study of Charles Dickens shows that vocabulary decay extends beyond the romance genre. Closer examination reveals vocabulary decay is a result of progressive amounts of linguistic chunking—due to author fatigue or a desire to produce a more readable narrative. 

Elliott, Jack, 2015. 

'Whole Genre Sequencing', Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Online, August 2015. [Abstract]

[Taking as its corpus] all electronically available Harlequin Presents novels—some 1,400 from 1999 to 2013—this article demonstrates that the genre’s fundamental architecture is a choir of authorial voices, that its evolution is dominated by sudden shifts due to financial pressures on the publisher, and that the order in which elements appear—the plot—is largely fixed.

[Edited to add: I've written at a bit more length about Jack Elliott's articles over at my personal blog.]

In the romance scholarship section we also have (not so comprehensive) chick lit and rom-com bibliographies. New to the chick-lit list is:

Ferris, Suzanne. 

"Working Girls: The Precariat of Chick Lit", in Cupcakes, Pinterest and Ladyporn: Feminized Popular Culture in the Early Twenty-First Century, ed. Elana Levine (University of Illinois, 2015): 177-???.

I also came across a short piece of fiction which tells the tale of a romance writer's rise and fall. Since it's fiction I haven't added it to any of the bibliographies, but it may be of interest/irritation to some of you:

Stamm, Kim (1987) "Confessions of a Romance Novelist," Manuscripts: Vol. 56: Iss. 2, Article 12.

I've also omitted Craig Williams's "Roman Homosexuality in Historical Fiction, from Robert Graves to Steven Saylor", in Ancient Rome and the Construction of Modern Homosexual Identities, ed. Jennifer Ingleheart (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015): 176-???. That's because it doesn't have a lot to say about romance fiction (at least, not as far as I could tell from the excerpt), but there is a little, starting on page 190 and (from page 192) focusing on Fae Sutherland and Marguerite Labbe's The Gladiator's Master (2011).

Gender and Love Conference: Demisexual Protagonists and Feminism

3rd Global Conference

Friday 13th September – Sunday 15th September 2013
Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

The conference puts the draft papers online, so I've included links to some of them below. More details about the conference can be found here. Session 7 includes:

"First Love, Last Love, True Love: Heroines, Heroes, and the Gendered Representation of Love in the Romance Novel" by Jodi McAlister, Macquarie University

Jodi McAlister argues that

the concept of ‘compulsory demisexuality’ [...] permeates the world of the romance. Someone who is demisexual experiences sexual attraction only to those with whom they share an emotional connection. When this intersects with the idea of One True Love, a world is shaped where sex and love are inextricably linked. I will explore how this is differently gendered in the romance novel. Often, the heroine is already demisexual, the linking of sex and love coded as something explicitly feminine. Conversely, heroes become demisexual, unable to desire another woman once he has formed an emotional connection with the heroine. This highlights a sharp gendered divide in the portrayal of true love. For women, there is an emphasis on the importance of first love. For men, this emphasis is on last love.

She notes that

As sex scenes became more prevalent, heroines increasingly found themselves overpowered by their desire, their bodies triumphing over their minds. Their desire creates a kind of slippage in the paradigm of compulsory demisexuality. For true love to prevail – for mind and body to be united – their desire must be recuperated into the paradigm. They must form an emotional bond with the man they have slept with, the hero, proving their desire to be prophetic: a sort of metaphysical sign that the man they desire is their one true love.

The paper focuses on Harlequin Mills & Boons, as does

"A Third Wave Feminist Mills & Boon Love Affair? Gender in Recent Romance Novels" by Eirini Arvanitaki, Department of English, University of Hull

While I welcome Eirini Arvanitaki's positive approach towards recent HM&B romances, I was a bit worried by the lack of mention of differences between HM&B lines because these can have a significant impact on some of the issues under discussion (at least, I found it to be the case, as outlined in my "Feminism and Early Twenty-First Century Harlequin Mills & Boon Romances"). I also wonder how deep her knowledge is of earlier HM&Bs. It's easy enough to write:

In the past, the majority of the novels illustrated the hero as an heir of an influential and wealthy family and the heroine as a woman who belonged to a lower social class. [...] Additionally, in the past the hero’s wealth was a product of family or blood line

However, I think you could go back quite a few decades and find plenty of heroes who are professionals (e.g. doctors, airline pilots, businessmen) who have earned their own money and are not from particularly "influential and wealthy families." I have a feeling that jay Dixon's and Joseph McAleer's books on Mills & Boon would have been of assistance in adding nuance to the argument. In fact, there's a striking lack of romance scholarship in the paper's bibliography. Perhaps the academic bibliography at the Romance Wiki would be of assistance.

[Edited to add: the draft paper has since been altered and I've updated the link so that it takes the reader to the later draft]