Conference Programme for the 6th International IASPR Conference (23-25 June 2016)

The full conference programme is now available here. Among the papers are:

Elin Abrahamsson, Stockholm University, Sweden:
“Consuming Passions: a queer reading of the popular romance genre through the concept of masturbation”

Katherine Morrissey, Rochester Institute of Technology, New York:
“Keeping It Classy: Studying Sex and Romance”

Len Barot, Bold Strokes Books, New York:
“Diversity in Lesbian Romance Fiction: The Impact of Gender and Race on Marketing and Sales”

Heather Schell, George Washington University, DC:
“Two Nerdy History Girls: Historical Romance Novelists as Teachers of History”

Caryn Radick, Rutgers University, New Jersey:
“Writing about History and Becoming Part of the Historical Record: Romance Writers’ Use of Archives and Archival Collections Documenting Popular Romance”

Jessica Matthews, George Mason University, Virginia:
“Romance as Propaganda: White Fantasy of Indian Love in the 19^th –century ‘Civilize the American Indian’ Movement”

Javaria Farooqui, Institute of Information Technology, Lahore, Pakistan:
“‘Raging Seas and Cloudy Skies’: Macro to Meso Level Psychosemantic Movement in Stephanie Laurens’ Black Cobra Quartet”

Erin Young, SUNY Empire State College, New York:
“Love in the Last Frontier: An Analysis of Alaskan Romance Novels”

Margot Blankier, Trinity College, Dublin:
“‘The Sweetest Story Ever Told’: ‘Cinderella’ as American Dream Narrative”

Pavla Stefanska, Masavyk University, Czech Republic:
“Blurring the Lines: Irish mythology and symbolism in Nora Roberts’ The Cousin O’Dwyer’s Trilogy”

Eric Murphy Selinger, DePaul University, Chicago:
“‘Use Heart in Your Search’: Erotic Faith, the Heart Sutra, and the Allusive Art of My Beautiful Enemy”

Jayashree Kamble, Assist. Prof. of English, City University of New York:
“Epistemes and Cultural Dominants: What Popular Romance Novels’ Heroes and Heroines Tell Us About Postmodernity”

Lesley Ann Smith, Curtin, University, Australia:
“Understanding the Formula”

Maryan Wherry, Independent Scholar & Writer, Quad-Cities, Illinois:
“Love and the American Dream in Popular Romance”

Amy Burge, Edinburgh University, Scotland:
“‘Shipping magnates and oil sheikhs’: Decoding the exotic hero in ‘Harlequin Presents’ romance novels, 2000-2015”

Kecia Ali, Boston University:
“Triangulating Desire: Navigating Islamland, Arabiastan, and Romancelandia in Suzanne Brockmann’s Into the Night”

Sarah Ficke, Marymount University, Virginia:
“When Vampires Meet Clockwork: Fantasy Creatures in Steampunk Romance”

Maria-Isabel González-Cruz, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain:
“Intercultural and interlingual relations in a corpus of popular romance fiction novels”

Mallory Jagodzinski, Bowling Green State University, Ohio:
“Playing Tricks: Neoliberalism, Postfeminism, and Postraciality in Theresa Romain’s Secrets of a Scandalous Heiress”

Hsu-Ming Teo, Macquarie University, Australia:
“When a Jew loves a Nazi: Romance novels and the Holocaust”

Amira Jarmakani, San Diego State University:
“Radioactive Love: Mapping Desire from Agrabah to Abbottabad”

Jonathan Allan, Brandon University, Canada:
“What is the Ever After doing in Happily Ever After? Temporality and Futurity”

Maria Ramos-Garcia, South Dakota State University:
“Creating the Sense of an Ending in Urban Fantasy”

Romance I: Romance Across the Canon

Laura Vivanco

The PCA/ACA annual conference is very special for romance scholars but not everyone can get there (I haven't even been once). We can, though, read the abstracts of papers which will be presented in the many sessions on romance. I'll be putting them up here at Teach Me Tonight, session by session.

Romance I: Romance Across the Canon (Fairy Tale, Shakespeare, Lit Fic)

Navigating the Fantasy of Romantic Love Through Popular Romantic Adaptations of "Cinderella"

(Margot Blankier, doctoral candidate at Trinity College Dublin's School of English)

This paper, part of a larger thesis project on “Cinderella” as fairy tale and American myth, will examine contemporary popular romance fiction that announce themselves as adaptations and use “Cinderella” as their structural framework. The narrative concerns of the popular romance and the fairy tale often overlap: in her article “Guilty Pleasures: Reading Romance Novels as Reworked Fairy Tales,” Linda J. Lee observes that classical fairy tales and romance fiction are both formulaic, invoke fantasy realms, and are often dismissed as trivial entertainments. However, where fairy tales are noted for their abstract and “depthless” characters, writers of contemporary popular adaptations of “Cinderella” justify the length of their novels by according their protagonists an interiority that, according to Max Lüthi’s The European Folktale, opposes the generic expectations of the fairy tale. In this way, the writers of these texts “betray” the expectations of the classical fairy-tale heroine by emphasizing her agency and wit over her “archetypal” qualities. She meets the prince character early in the novel and experiences an intense physical desire for him, but their relationship ebbs and flows over the course of the novel. Generally, the culmination of their relationship—the “happily ever after” ending—occurs after they have been “tested,” and the prince character has proved that he “deserves” the love of the Cinderella character. Thus, while the romantic implications of Cinderella’s marriage in Charles Perrault’s original fairy tale are largely reader-generated rather than textually present—there is no mention of love between the pair—writers of popular romance develop the physical and emotional relationship between Cinderella and the prince as the most important element of the story. This paper will consider the transformative power of love as a substitute for the fantasy aspect of fairy tale, the readerly movement between in and out of the textual world as a source of pleasure, and the stepmother figure as a source of repressive social milieu and patriarchy.

Texts to be considered include, but are not limited to, Eloisa James’ A Kiss at Midnight (2010), Claire Delacroix’s The Damsel (1999), Teresa Medeiros’ Charming the Prince (1999), Katherine Kingsley’s Once Upon a Dream (1997), Mercedes Lackey’s The Fairy Godmother (2004), and a selection of titles from Harlequin’s Silhouette Romance imprint.

(EMS:  Margot Blankier was unable to attend, but we hope to hear more about her research in the future!)

Taming Shakespeare: Historical Romance Novel Adaptations of Taming of the Shrew

(Tamara Whyte, Piedmont Virginia Community College)

Despite its less romantic elements, many romance novelists allude to and adapt William Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. In my research, I have found 40 romance novels since 2000 that allude to the play. Most of these novels have little to do with Shakespeare’s text, but six recent historical romance novels attempt to rewrite elements of the taming plot for a modern audience: Sabrina Darby’s Woo’d in Haste and Wed at Leisure, Johanna Lindsey’s The Devil Who Tamed Her, Christy English’s How to Tame a Willful Wife, and Eloisa James’s Kiss Me, Annabel and The Taming of the Duke. Darby breaks her adaptation into two separate narratives. The first, Woo’d in Haste, focuses on Bianca’s perspective, vilifying Kate. But then the second, Wed at Leisure, focuses on Kate, redeeming her. Lindsey’s novel adapts the taming plot to make it more acceptable to romance readers without changing the gender dynamic in which an aggressive man attempts to change the behavior of a woman who fails to conform to societal expectations for her sex. English includes a commentary on Shakespeare’s work within her adaptation. James depicts a failed taming attempt in Kiss Me, Annabel and inverts the gender roles in The Taming of the Duke. In my paper, I will analyze these various adaptations and appropriations of The Taming of Shrew with particular emphasis on how romance authors make the taming plot more palatable for modern romance authors. 


Love and the Machine: Romance in the Victorian Industrial Novel

(Sarah Ficke, Marymount University)

My most recent paper on popular romance (presented at this year’s IASPR conference) examined the Iron Seas steampunk series by Meljean Brook to discover how these texts configure the relationship between technology and humanity. I found that the language and actions of romantic relationships were instrumental in demonstrating a positive connection between people and technology in the stories. However, this made me wonder about the 19th-century novels that provide much of the foundation for steampunk. How did they represent romance within an industrialized, mechanized context? The paper I am proposing will answer this question by analyzing the role of romance and its relationship to technology in several important industrial novels from the Victorian period, including works like Hard Times by Dickens, North and South and Mary Barton by Gaskell, and Shirley by Charlotte Brontë. I will be using digital humanities tools to uncover language patterns and points of connection across the texts, as well as examining their individual representations of romance. I hope to discover how these industrial novelists imagined technology describing, enabling, or disrupting romantic relationships. This is part of my larger project on how steampunk romances adopt and reconfigure Victorian ideas about technology for a 21st-century world.


 “Stay away from my sister”: Romance and the Asian American Male Canon

(Erin Young, SUNY Empire State College)

No abstract provided.

PCA/ACA 2012 - (6)

Laura Vivanco

Romancing Race II: The International Other

Thursday, April 12, 2012 - 3:00pm - 4:30pm

The “Noble Savage” and “Happy Darky”: Race and the American Popular Romance
Maryan Wherry - Black Hawk College

This paper examines the use race in the American popular romance. Rather than focusing on “the Black Romance,” I’m interested specifically at the presence and treatment of Blacks and American Indians as secondary characters and in subplots and how this racial tension confronts (or not) the American cultural narrative.

“He Didn’t Seem Indian”: Exploring and Analyzing the Construction of Race in Meredith Duran’s The Duke of Shadows
Mallory Jagodzinski - Bowling Green State University

Historical romance novels, as a whole, tend to be overwhelmingly white, especially those set in England.  There are few characters of color in these novels and often are not privileged to be either the hero or heroine in the central love story of the novel.  Meredith Duran’s The Duke of Shadows, however, subverts this tendency by making her hero a native of India “whose blood [is] one-quarter native” (16).  This paper explores the ways in which Duran’s English heroine encounters and experiences race under the British colonial regime in India and during the rebellion of 1857. Throughout the novel, the heroine’s views on race and what is moral are challenged by the hero and his status as an individual with double consciousness.  In this paper, I will use textual analysis to analyze Duran’s portrayals of race and colonialism in order to suggest that the way she represents colonialism demonstrates that she is interested not only in depicting the reality of colonial violence, but also in making the reader uncomfortable with hierarchical systems of reality by depicting the reality of its effects.  I will be utilizing the theories of Frantz Fanon and Lola Young, each of whom discusses the process of colonization and what it does to both to the white colonizers and the colonized individuals; Young’s work in “Imperial Culture: The Primitive, the Savage and White Civilization” will be of utmost importance to my essay as she engages with issues of history and representation.  In addition to these theorists, I will make use of works that address issues of creating racial progressives such as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s Racism Without Racists to argue that Duran constructs her heroine as a woman who becomes aware of her white privilege through the understanding of her inferior position in the colonial system due to her gender.

Protest Like an Egyptian: Tracing Erotic Investments in the Middle East through Desert Romances
Amira Jarmakani - Georgia State University

The spring 2011 Arab uprisings provoked an interesting set of engagements in the U.S., such as the placards at the Wisconsin rallies to save unions from demolition, which read “Protest like an Egyptian.”  One particular engagement, the blog “Gay Girl in Damascus,” received substantial media attention for its brazen deceitfulness – many readers had been following the story of a Syrian lesbian facing persecution by the secret police only to find out that the blogger behind the story was a heterosexual white man from Georgia (USA).  Though it may be tempting to understand these kinds of investments in the Middle East as a new phenomenon, they have been clearly prefigured by the steady rise in popularity of desert romances since 2001, and, indeed, by their longstanding position within the genre as a whole.  Particularly given the ongoing “war on terror,” how can one account for the rise in desert romances as viable fantasy narratives?  Groping toward an answer to this question, I focus on the roles of fantasy and violence in both the film Sex and the City 2 (a type of desert romance, I argue, though it lacks some of the elements) and contemporary desert romances. Through mimicry, which tends to enact a kind of violence to the other (in its desire to subsume the other) and menace, which tends to play on the fear of violence from the other, I argue that the two together underscore a potential reason for the salience of the Middle East in the contemporary context: both represent actual and phantasmatic violences that perhaps psychically or subliminally connect to the violence inherent to the process of identification.

Saving China: The Transformative Power of Whiteness in the Interracial Romance
Erin Young - SUNY Empire State College

This project examines the novels of Elizabeth Lowell (Jade Island, 1998) and Katherine Stone (Pearl Moon, 1995), both of which explore romantic relationships between a white hero and a mixed-race Asian (and white) heroine.  I argue that these interracial romances invert the conventional romance formula by featuring white heroes who domesticate their Asian heroines, and in turn, the family-owned companies they represent, thereby “modernizing” corporations that are portrayed as overtly patriarchal, regressive, and anti-capitalist.  Lowell’s and Stone’s respective narratives reveal that a racial and nationalist hierarchy is potentially (re)affirmed in the formulaic conventions of popular romance.

In their negotiations of interracial romantic relationships, both novels construct conflicts between Orientalist conceptions of “East” and “West.”  The Asian heroines have been traumatized by a particular depiction of Chinese culture and its anti-capitalist leanings.  The Chinese family and community functions as a regressive past in which individual desires and feelings are painfully oppressed, and defined roles are marked by an extreme enforcement of gender inequality.  Lowell and Stone construct “Chineseness” as something that must be rescued from itself; Jade Island and Pearl Moon are essentially narratives of progress, in which the Chinese community may offer security at the expense of freedom, but the British and/or American corporation has the ability to offer more satisfactory versions of both.  The hero, who represents the (white) British or American corporation, introduces the Chinese heroine to a “domesticated” workplace—one that is specifically racialized and nationalized—and she is transformed in the process.  The conventional (white) heroine’s gendered victory is reconfigured as a racial and national victory for the heroes of interracial romance.  These novels reveal that whiteness, despite its invisibility in the majority of romance novels, is central to the formulaic conventions of the genre.  More importantly, perhaps, they suggest that the contemporary romance alleviates particular racial and national anxieties that emerge out of a global economy.