A volume titled Travel and Colonialism in 21st Century Romantic Historical Fiction: Exotic Journeys, Reparative Histories? (kind of 2024/2025 publication date, given what's available online versus in print) is out from Routledge. The Introduction is open access and although most of the chapters are about romantic rather than romance fiction, the second chapter is definitely about romance. It's by Sarah F. Ficke: "Falling in Love Outside of the Law: Piracy, Race, and Freedom in Caribbean Historical Romance." That looks in particular at Captured (2009) by Beverly Jenkins and What the Parrot Saw (2019) by Darlene Marshall but Sarah Ficke's said that it "covers a bit about pirate romances by Julie Garwood and Johanna Lindsey as well."
Another chapter, by Hsu-Ming Teo and Astrid Schwegler-Castañer, examines Dinah Jefferies' bestselling novels, The Tea Planter's Wife (2015) and Before the Rains (2017) and I'm not really sure if everyone would classify them as romance, but they did seem more romance-inclined than the texts studied in the other chapters (with the exception of Ficke's).
---
The first romance pulp—or “love pulp,” as they are sometimes called—to hit the market was Love Story Magazine, which debuted in May of 1921 (or, at least, it is dated “May 1921”; when it actually hit the newsstands remains something of a debate).
Datta, Sreepurna (2025)
"'A
holiday that could be whatever anyone wanted it to be': The Indian
American Holiday Season in Sonya Lalli's A Holly Jolly Diwali".
Under the Mistletoe: Essays on Holiday Romance in Popular Culture. Ed. Liz W. Faber. McFarland. [Excerpt here.]
Farooqui, Javaria (2024). "Buildings, books, and memories: Analysing the culture of reading anglophone romance in Pakistan."
Journal of Postcolonial Writing. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2024.2433024
Videos are now freely available of some of the events from last year's Popular Romance Fiction: The Literature of Hope conference, held at Yale University.
Johnson, Jacqueline E. (2024)
"Lusting out loud: racialized aurality, podcast intimacy, and the uses of thirst".Communication, Culture and Critique. Online First.[Excerpt and details here. As I mentioned over on BlueSky, the focus on "the expansive middle" reminded me of Athena Bellas and Jodi McAlister 's (non-paywalled) recent article on audio erotica. So I wondered if such a focus might have something to do with an audio experience? And/or a difference between
what readers/listeners seek from erotica vs. romance fiction? Jodi suggested it could be to do with the length of time available and that the episodes could be thought of as 'a little slice of life from what An Goris calls the "post-HEA"'.]
Spencer, L. (2024). '“Walk like a chameleon”: Reflecting on my teaching journey at a South African university'. Educare, (1), 192–215. https://doi.org/10.24834/educare.2024.1.1093 [Dr Lynda Gichanda Spencer, Associate Professor and Chair of the
Department of Literary Studies in English at Rhodes University, discussed her teaching of African romance fiction as part of a panel
at the IASPR 2020 conference. There are a couple of paragraphs about
her 2019 third-year elective course titled Global Chick-Lit or
Trans-Global Literature? Re-reading Contemporary Women’s Fiction in this online paper, discussing how she asked students to compare Harlequin Mills & Boon romances with romances by African publishers.]
new editions of Heyer with the antisemitism removed. I'm not honestly
sure how I feel about that. She *was* antisemitic and racist, and if it
is going to be done, there should absolutely be an afterword saying it
was done.
I feel the same. The author of the New York Times article, the appropriately named Alexandra Alter, states that:
When Heyer’s American publisher,
Sourcebooks, decided to release new editions of her romances this year,
they had to strike a precarious balance. Leaving the original scene
could repel some readers. But changing it risked provoking a backlash
from fans and scholars who see posthumous revisions as a form of
literary reputation laundering, or censorship.
After
a lengthy back and forth with the Heyer estate, Sourcebooks made small
but significant changes to “The Grand Sophy.” In the new version, the
moneylender’s name has been changed to Grimpstone. References to his
Jewish identity and appearance have been deleted, along with other
negative generalizations about Jews.
Acknowledgment
of the changes appears on the copyright page, which says “this edition
has been edited from the original with permission of the Georgette Heyer
Estate.”
Originally, Sourcebooks had brought in Mary Bly/Eloisa James to write introductions to all the new editions but "After the estate declined to include Bly’s explanation of the changes in an afterword, she quit the project."
The acknowledgment which will be included is, presumably, in small print and rather easy to miss, which is what makes this solution problematic to me from an academic perspective (which as our subtitle states, is what Teach Me Tonight's all about). While the publication of a text which includes such changes may in itself be of interest to future scholars of Heyer for what it implies about Heyer's ongoing status in the genre and the attitude of the Heyer estate, and may also be of wider interest because of what it might tell us about the economic calculations made by this publisher, and their assessments of the preferences/attitudes of twenty-first century readers, none of these questions will arise in the minds of scholars who use this edition of the text while unaware that it has been changed. And, obviously, a scholar's close reading of the text, and their assessment of Heyer and her oeuvre, will undoubtedly be flawed if they base their analysis on this text without being aware of its altered status.
In a comment attached to the New York Times article a reader called "emmel" observed that:
There was a major incident this past summer when romance readers
discovered that Lisa Kleypas updated about 50% of her beloved Secrets of
a Summer Night to meet "today's" standards versus those of 2004, when
the book was published. Readers were horrified that major elements had
been changed (which many perceived to be detrimental to understanding
the hero's actions) with no notification in the 2021 edition. (This was
discovered in a group read when the readers couldn't understand one
another's reactions until they deduced the editions had fundamental
differences.) So notifications and explanations are vital; you can't
just say it's been "updated."
By the way, if any regular readers of Teach Me Tonight would like an invite code to BlueSky, I have a couple available. Let me know via the contact form on my website: https://www.vivanco.me.uk/contact/contact !
Olkusz, Ksenia
(2021).
"Stripping The Vampire. Erotic Imaginations and Sexual Fantasies In Paranormal Romances (A Study Of Selected Examples)." Manifestations of Male Image in the World's Cultures. Ed. Renata Iwicka, Kraków:
Jagiellonian University Press. 137-156. [Details can be found here. Although it was published in 2021, the electronic version from Cambridge University Press only became available in October 2023. An open access version written in Polish was published in 2015 and details about that can be found here.]
van Hattum, Fatima Y. (2023).
"Orientalist Public Pedagogy: Visual Representation of Muslims in Pop Culture and Desert Romance Novels."
Thesis from the University of New Mexico. It's embargoed until 2025. https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/educ_llss_etds/148
.@dramyburge and I are in the very early stages of some work on the history and development of British romance fiction, and as you can see, we have a lot of very interesting ground to cover... https://t.co/X7IPjCKNSZ
The International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR)
is seeking a Secretary to join our Executive Committee. This is a
volunteer position, with a two-year term.
They're also looking for a Film and Television Editor, Journal for Popular Romance Studies. Details about that can be found here (and the deadline's 30 July).
If you're not already signed up to IASPR's quarterly newletter, I'd encourage you to do that here (where you can also see the newsletter's archive). This quarter's newsletter includes a link to PCA Romance Area 2022 Abstract Booklet which I don't think was available online during the event and an interview with the new IASPR President (congratulations Jayashree and I look forward to seeing your ideas come to fruition!)
Balteskard, Susanna
(2022).
Feminism in Romance: How the romance genre has(n't) changed since the 1950s.
Bachelor thesis,
Norwegian University of Science and Technology. [Abstract only.]
Buttrick, Nicholas
Westgate, Erin C.
Oishi, Shigehiro
(2022).
"Reading Literary Fiction Is Associated With a More Complex Worldview." Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Online First. [A preprint version is available for free online - see the links in the romance scholarship database entry I've linked to]
Namysłowska, Karolina
(2022).
Romance novels in translation: Focus on defining features of selected texts translated from English into Polish.
Masters thesis,
Jagiellonian University. [Abstract]
Also, since I was sent a free copy of New Frontiers in Popular Romance: Essays on the Genre in the 21st Century, I've been able to update the entries in the Romance Scholarship Database about it to include quotes that give a flavour of each essay.
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
Duke University's course on romance, UNSUITABLE (with an associated blog and events) has announced that its 2022 season begins
on Friday, January 21st [...] with author Deborah Fletcher Mello who will talk with us
about What Characterizes a Romance Novel? Negotiating Industry Norms and
Expectations.
All are welcome! Preregister here. UNSUITABLE events are free and open to the public.
That's via Zoom.
On February 26th, also online, there will be a
Black Romance Master Class. Sponsored by the Center for Black Diaspora.
The aim of this master class is to offer a pedagogical and scholarly
approach to reading and teaching Black Romance fiction, specificially,
historical Black romance novels. What this class will offer is a model,
using Indigo as the class text, for teaching the literariness of novel,
its continuity with the history of the romance genre, and the importance
of reassessing the teaching of and writing about Black romance, and the
romance genre in general. What the course will offer Black romance
readers, scholars, and teachers is a critical approach easily adapted to
anti-racist pedagogy and scholarly writing about romance.
The class is being led by Dr Margo Hendricks and you can register here.
On the topic of Black romance, I was interested to see that Harlequin have now produced a page to spotlight their romances by Black authors (most seem to be "Black romance," though some may not be, due to having one or more non-Black protagonist): https://www.harlequin.com/shop/pages/black-romance-stories.html They seem to be appearing in a wide range of lines: Special Edition, Presents, Desire, Intrigue, Romantic Suspense, Medical Romance, Romance, Heartwarming, Historical and ebook-only imprints.
Dr Sam Hirst has released a round-table conversation with KJ Charles,
Rose Lerner, Cat Sebastian and
Olivia Waite which was part of a recent conference on Heyer:
Dr. Sam Hirst, of Romancing the Gothic, is organising a conference and looking for submissions:
Cover of The Black Moth
1921 saw the publication of a 19-year-old Georgette Heyer’s first novel The Black Moth. This tale of romantic highwayman, demonic rakes, abduction, ravishing beauties, betrayal and deceit set in the 18th century began a career which spanned over 50 years. [...] Her legacy is not, of course, without its problems – the world she
created has its limitations, its prejudices and its biases. This one-day
online conference on 20th November 2021, will seek to explore Heyer’s work and her legacy with a spirit both of celebration and of critical enquiry.
We will be joined on the day by Keynote Speaker Jennifer Kloester, author of Georgette Heyer: Biography of a Best-Seller (2011) and Georgette Heyer’s Regency World (2010).
We will also be joined by a panel of authors for a roundtable on ‘Queer
Reimaginings of Georgette Heyer’. We will be joined for this panel by
Rose Lerner, Zen Cho, Cat Sebastian, K J Charles and Olivia Waite all of
whom write within a Regency setting including communities largely
absent or vilified in Heyer’s work, including queer communities, people
of colour, the working class and Jewish people. This roundtable will
look at both the influence of Heyer and at the idea of moving beyond the
‘Heyer World’ to explore different aspects of Regency England through
more or less fantastical settings!
We are looking for papers to be included on 3-person panels
throughout the day. We accept panel submissions or individual papers. We
strongly encourage work which engages in interdisciplinary study. The
aim of the conference is to explore aspects of Heyer’s work encapsulated
in or hinted at by her first novel The Black Moth.
There are two types of paper that we are looking for.
There will be regular panels of 3 x 20-minute papers.
There
will also be a session of ‘Lightening talks’ lasting ten minutes.
Lightening talks allow for a shorter exploration of a limited aspect of
the novels, a more personal enquiry or the presentation of an
experimental idea!
The closing date for submissions is 31st May 2021. More details here (and also here).
Sam has added on Twitter that "Everyone is welcome to participate - academics and non-academics alike. [...]
We want to create a diverse and welcoming space for everyone. We are queer friendly and want to include perspectives from all over the world. [...]
Regency spaces can sometimes be unfriendly to people of colour, queer people and people of different faiths. We are dedicated to making sure that that's not the case. Welcome one, welcome all."
Romancing the Gothic has a code of conduct and "there is a small honorarium for each speaker because we believe in valuing people's work and time in concrete ways."
Edited by Samantha J. Rayner and Kim Wilkins, and published by UCL Press, Georgette Heyer, History and Historical Fiction was published today. It's available free for download at
1. ‘Where History says little, Fiction may say much’
(Anna Barbauld): the historical novel in women’s hands in the
mid-twentieth century - Kathryn Sutherland
2. The not so silly ass: Freddy Standen, his fictional contemporaries and alternative masculinity - Geraldine Perriam
3. Judith Taverner as dandy-in-training in Georgette Heyer’s Regency Buck - Laura George
4. Pride and prejudice: metafiction and the value of historical romance in Georgette Heyer - Kim Sherwood
5. Loving and giving: realism, emotional hypocrisy, and generosity in A Civil Contract - Jennifer Clement
6. Georgette Heyer and redefining the Gothic romance - Holly Hirst
7. Heyer . . . in Space! The Influence of Georgette Heyer on science fiction - Kathleen Jennings
8. All’s Well That Ends Well: Shakespearean Echoes in Heyer’s Regency novels - Lisa Hopkins
9. Georgette Heyer, Wellington’s Army and the First World War - Vanda Wilcox
10. Georgette Heyer and the language of the historical novel - Tom Zille
11. A reluctant movie? The Reluctant Widow on screen - Lucie Bea Dutton
12. Georgette Heyer – guilty pleasures - Amy Street
13. Data science: Georgette Heyer’s historical novels and her readers - Helen Davidge
Amy adds that "As before, the RomanceWiki is open source and collaborative, so all contributors and contributions are welcome."
===
A Georgette Heyer "Un-Conference" – February 25th 2021
2021 sees the centenary of the publication of Georgette Heyer’s first novel, The Black Moth, whose legacy UCL Press is recognising through the February 25th publication of a series of essays – Georgette Heyer, History and Historical Fiction edited by Dr Samantha Rayner and Professor Kim Wilkins.
All that information and more can be found here. Tickets cost £10 but Dr. Samantha Rayner tweeted "Please quote heyerfan when booking for free tickets!"
[Edited to add: a query was raised on Twitter with regards to how to do this and the answer is that the place to enter the code is:
on the first page, after you have clicked on 'tickets'. Above 'Georgette Heyer: An Unconference - 25 Feb 2021' you see the words 'enter promo code', click on that, and enter 'heyerfan'
===
From Feminism to Orientalism: a Panel of Current Romance Research
On 26 February Pauline Suwanban (Birkbeck, University of London) and Ali Williams (University of Brighton) will be chatting online about their research.
To help spread awareness of what colleagues are researching, at a time when people can only do this online, I'll post the titles of papers, including a link to the abstracts.
I probably shouldn't have let this post grow for so long as it's rather long now.
Abdullah-Poulos, Layla, 2016.
“Muslim Love American Style: Islamic-American Hybrid Culture and
Native-Born American Black Muslim Romance.” MA thesis, SUNY Empire State
College, 2016. Excerpt
“Manners, Money, and Marriage: Austen, Heyer, and the Literary Genealogy of the Regency Romance”. After Austen: Reinventions, Rewritings, Revisitings. Ed. Lisa Hopkins. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 81-101. [This focuses on the "social and sexual precarity" of female characters, in particular in Heyer's Regency Buck.]
Glennemeier, Jaelyn, 2018.
“And he was an Arab!:” Imperial Femininity and Pleasure in E. M. Hull's 1919 Desert Romance, The Sheik', Honors thesis, University of Kansas. Abstract and link to pdf [Bonnie Loshbaugh reports that this contains details of "a 1922 interview with [E. M.] Hull in Nash’s and Pall Mall Magazine, and implies that it includes a photograph of Hull in front of her home." With the centenary of the publication of The Sheik coming up, it might be nice if someone could put this online.]
Gunne, Sorcha.
‘Gender, Genre and Modernity: Popular Romance Fiction in Ireland’, Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction, Ed. L Harte. Oxford: Oxford University Press [in press]. [I've added this to the section about chick lit, because that's what the content mostly seems to discuss.]
Hopkins, Lisa, 2018.
"Georgette Heyer: What Austen Left Out". After Austen: Reinventions, Rewritings, Revisitings.
Ed. Lisa Hopkins. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 61-79.
[This chapter looks in detail at military metaphors/language used by
Heyer, as well as her allusions to Austen.]
"Making the Modern Girl: Fantasy, Consumption, and Desire in Romance Weeklies of the 1920s". Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918-1939: The Interwar Period. Ed. Catherine Clay, Maria DiCenzo, Barbara Green, and Fiona Hackney. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Sewell Matter, Laura, 2007.
“Pursuing the Great Bad Novelist”, The Georgia Review 61.3 (2007): 444-459.
"Queering Settler Romance: The Reparative Eugenic Landscape in Nora Strange's Kenyan Novels", Archiving Settler Colonialism: Culture, Space and Race.
Ed. Yu-ting Huang and Rebecca Weaver-Hightower. Abingdon: Routledge,
2019. 190-204 ??. ["Williams reads Nora Strange’s interwar romance
novels as they archive settler preoccupation with white sexuality in a
settled space. In Strange’s novels, a repressed and declining Britain
needs the “Edenic paradise” of Kenya to let loose British sexual
vitality. The Kenyan environment tests would-be parents for their moral
and physical fitness in producing good settler children and awakens
healthy heterosexual desires to ready parents for reproductive duty."]
"Agency, Gender, Nationalism, and the Romantic Imaginary in Pakistan", Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing. Ed. Aroosa Kanwal and Saiyma Aslam. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. 225-235. Abstract
Arnold-Forster, Agnes and Alison Moulds.
"Medical women in popular fiction", The BMJ Opinion, September 26, 2018. [Includes details about Mona Maclean, Medical Student (1892), a medical romance written by one of the earliest "registered female practitioners"]
Drakulić-Ilić, Slavenka. 1984.
“Zašto žene vole bajke?” [“Why do women like fairy tales?”], Smrtni grijesi feminizma. Ogledi u mudologiji [Mortal Sins of Feminism. Essays on Testicology]. Zagreb: Znanje, 1984. 33-45. The article was first published on the pages of Start, no. 299. 3 July 1980. [Details from Lóránd Zsófia's dissertation, "“Learning a Feminist Language”: The Intellectual History of Feminism in Yugoslavia in the 1970s and 1980s",
Central European University, Budapest, Hungary, 2014, in which it is
stated that "In the essay “Why do women like fairy tales?” Drakulić
argues that despite their simplicity, trivial romance novels mean an
escape from the everyday reality of state socialism." (208-209) and
"examines the popularity of trivial romances (in Serbo-Croatian: herz-roman)
available at the newsstands and also published in women’s magazines as a
series. She sees “erotic” men’s magazines as a counterpart to the cheap
romantic stories, as both started to flourish on the market as a result
of the “sexual revolution” [...] and both use traditional and
stereotypical images of women, which do not exclude, but complement each
other (36). It shows both the double-faced nature of the sexual
revolution and the consistency in the logic of patriarchy. Drakulić
describes the basic plot of the romance novels and how they present
clichés of femininity and masculinity, romantic love and happy marriage
(35). Despite their triviality, Drakulić emphasises their social
relevance: only one title, Život [Life] was sold in
3.600.000 copies in 1978 (34). There is a demand for the genre, what
cannot be left out of consideration, even if there was not domestic,
Yugoslav production of these, those available were mostly imported from
Western, English-speaking countries. Besides the presentation of
traditional gender roles, a regular objection against the trivial
romances is their low literary quality: the media should inform and
educate, and one’s free time should be used creatively [...]. Drakulić
analyses an unpublished survey by the publisher Vjesnik on the readers’
habits and remarks of reading trivial romances. All in all, the
conclusion is that the majority of the readers are overburdened women
who do not have either time or strength to read anything more complexly
written, whereas they do notice the poor literary quality of the novels.
These readers, adds Drakulić, lack real relationships and love –
exactly the dream, the “fairy tale” offered by these booklets. Drakulić
claims that simply “by abolishing and stigmatising this kind of a press,
we do not abolish the demand/need” of women in Yugoslavia (44)."
(232-33)]
Paige, Lori A., 2018.
The Gothic Romance Wave: A Critical History of the Mass Market Novels, 1960-1993. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2018. Excerpt
Pérez-Gil, María del Mar, 2018.
"Representations of Nation and Spanish Masculinity in Popular Romance Novels: The Alpha Male as “Other”", The Journal of Men’s Studies. Online First September 23, 2018. Abstract
Suwanban, Pauline, 2018.
"From Exhalation to Transformation: The Female Body in the Orientalist Romance". Dandelion: Postgraduate Arts Journal & Research Network 9.1 Abstract and link to pdf
The main aim of ERIH has
been from its very beginnings to enhance global visibility of
high quality research in the humanities published in academic journals
in various European languages all over Europe. The index enables
researchers to better understand and promote the national and
international importance of their research. (About)
Bea and Leah Koch, the sister duo who founded and own Los Angeles’ romance bookstore The Ripped Bodice,
have signed an overall deal with Sony Pictures Television [...]. The Koch sisters will partner with Sony to
develop romance-focused projects for television based on their unique
connection to romance readers and authors.
Abhija Ghosh (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi) on ‘Orchestrating Romance: Nineties Romance Genre, Film Song and Bollywood’
Diana Holmes (University of Leeds), on ‘Plaisirs d’amour: love and popular fiction in contemporary France’
Lucy Sheerman (independent researcher) on ‘Reader I Mirrored Him: the recasting of romance tropes in Jane Eyre fanfiction'
If that makes you want to write a paper about love, then the call for papers for "Love, etc", A conference sponsored by the “Uses of Literature” Research Project at the University of Southern Denmark, October 3-4, 2019might be of interest. The closing date for submissions is November 15 2018.
Alternatively, there are still a few days left before the closing date for submissions to the ACLA Book Lovers seminar: "Book Lovers welcomes abstracts that touch on any aspect of love". Abstracts must be received by Thursday,
September 20, 2018 at 9 a.m. EST. The American Comparative Literature Association's 2019 Annual
Meeting will take place at Georgetown University in Washington, DC,
March 7th-10th, 2019.
There's also been a call for papers for a panel on Muslim Popular Culture in Asia: Aesthetics and Politics at the German Association for Asian Studies’ (DGA)'s biannual Conference on Contemporary Asia, which will be held in April 3–5, 2019 in Würzburg, Germany. The deadline for all paper proposal submissions is October 7, 2018, 6:00pm (CET).
In August a team from the Surgery and Emotion project introduced visitors to the Science Museum to Mills & Boon romances:
One participant said it was ‘such a fun station’ and that they’d ‘learnt
a lot about Mills & Boon books’. Another commented it was ‘so fun’,
‘a good idea for an activity’, and that it encouraged her to think
about ‘the cultural impact of medical fiction’. One attendee described
it as an ‘awesome stall’, explaining that they ‘didn’t know anything
about Mills & Boon before, it’s really made me think’. Finally, one
visitor remarked that it was a ‘super enjoyable’ activity, and that
they’d ‘learnt a lot about how the novels were ahead of their time,
regarding females’ roles in a medical setting’.
Sourcebooks is releasing new editions "of 11 of Heyer’s Regency romances as part of the
Georgette Heyer Signature Collection" (Keira Soleore). The books in the "Georgette Heyer Signature Collection" include
praise from scores of bestselling authors, sharing their
love of Heyer and why she’s such a gem. Each book includes a fun
glossary of Regency slang, plus an Afterword by Heyer’s official
biographer Jennifer Kloester, with fascinating insights about what Heyer
thought about her own books and what was going on in her life at the
time she was writing them. A Reading Group Guide helps readers delve
into discussion of Heyer’s time and ours, and why the more things
change, the more they stay the same (human nature for sure!).
The IASPR 2018 conference now has its programme online but prior to that appearing there was a lot of very thorough tweeting by a number of attendees, using #iaspr18. Since Kat (@BookThingo) has really comprehensive threads, I've used the threadreaderapp to bundle her tweets together and I'm linking to them below.
Session 1 - Romancing Australia, with papers by Amy T. Matthews and Amy Mead (Flinders University), Kate Cuthbert and Jodi McAlister (Deakin University) SEE THREAD
There's more about changes affecting cover art, as discussed by Kate Cuthbert, here, from Claire Parnell via the @PopFicDoctors: Coverart and here's a podcast interview with Jodi McAlister in which she discusses her paper: Podcast. In addition, Renée Dahlia has written a blog post about the session.
Session 2 - Gender and Sexuality, with papers by Ellen Carter (University of Strasbourg), Christina Vogels (AUT New Zealand) and Andrea Anne Trinidad (Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines) SEE THREAD
Renée Dahlia's written a blog post about this session.
Here's a podcast from New Zealand Radio with Christina Vogels about her PhD thesis, titled It's a masculinity sort of thing: Young men talk about the rules of (hetero)romantic relationships.
Session 3 - Places and Spaces of Love, with papers by Kecia Ali (Boston University), Jacqueline Jones (LaGuardia CC, City University of New York) and Vassiliki Veros (University of Technology, Sydney) SEE THREAD
A similar presentation by Vassiliki Veros on "Exploring library metadata and how it can marginalise romance fiction" is up on YouTube.
Session 4 - Keynote Panel on “Romancing Popular Fiction Studies: A Theory of Genre Worlds” by Beth Driscoll (University of Melbourne), Lisa Fletcher (University of Tasmania) and Kim Wilkins (University of Queensland) SEE THREAD and, from Jodi McAlister, with more graphics: See thread
There's also a podcast recorded with the presenters in advance of this panel: Podcast
Session 5 - History and Romance, with papers by Stephanie Russo (Macquarie University), Jennifer Wallace and Francesca Pierini (Academia Sinica, Taiwan).
Kat had to miss most of this session, so the thread is by Jodi McAlister: SEE THREAD
Philippa B's summary of Stephanie Russo's paper on "Georgette Heyer’s Unruly Eighteenth Century" can be found here.
Phillipa B's summary of Pierini's presentation about "Italian timelessness" can be found here.
Jennifer Wallace writes romance as Jennifer Hallock and she's put her paper up on her website in two parts. Part one looks at how the bestsellers in historical romance are
disproportionately: (1) set in Great Britain; (2) overpopulated with
nobles; and (3) selective in their historical accuracy. Part two looks at how the aggregate impact of these chronotopes can be
harmful to our understanding of history, to the romance market as a
whole, and particularly to authors of diverse books. For links to more graphics and a way to help Jennifer crowdsource historical romances which differ from the chronotope she identified, go here and scroll to the end of the post.
Phillipa B's summary of Jennifer Wallace's "History Ever After: Fabricated historical chronotopes in romance genre fictions" can be found here.
Session 6 - Power and Patriarchy, with papers by Heather Schell (George Washington University), Nattie Golubov (Centro de Investigaciones sobre América del Norte, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), Therese Dryden (University of Newcastle) and Jayashree Kamblé (LaGuardia CC, City University of New York) SEE THREAD
Philippa B's post about Heather Schell's "The Soft Power of Popular Romance" can be found here.
Philippa B's post about Nattie Golubov's "Dangerous loves endangered: nationalism, violence and territoralization in US paramilitary romance fiction" is here.
Philippa B's summary of Therese Dryden/Michelle Douglas's "The Single Mother and the Law: Romance novels making room for female voices in patriarchal spaces" is here.
And details of Jayashree Kamblé's “One of the Guys? Eve Dallas as a Masculine Worker Heroine in J.D. Robb’s In Death series", also by Philippa B.
Session 7 - 19th Century Legacies, with papers by Sarah Ficke (Marymount University), Steven Gil and Lucy Sheerman SEE THREAD
See Renée Dahlia's blog post about the session.
Details here about Sarah Ficke's “House, Home, and Husband in Historical Romance Fiction", from Philippa B.
Steven Gil's "Beloved Monstrosity: Romance and Romanticism in Frankenstein" has been summarised by Philippa B.
Philippa B has summarised Lucy Sheerman's “Reader, I mirrored him: the recasting of romance tropes in Jane Eyre fanfiction" here.
Session 8 - Muslim and Middle Eastern Romance, with papers by Kathrina Daud (University of Brunei), Claire Parnell (University of Melbourne), Javaria Farooqui (University of Tasmania) and Amy Burge (University of Birmingham) SEE THREAD
See Renée Dahlia's blog post about the session.
Philippa B's posted about Kathrina Daud's "Muslims reading romance: Bruneian considerations of “Halal” and romance novels" here.
The abstract of Claire Parnell's “Reading and Writing Muslim Romance Online” and notes on the session by Philippa B can be found here.
Philippa B's post on Javaria Farooqui's “The Kitchen and Beyond: Romantic Chronotope of Pakistani Popular Fiction" is here.
Amy Burge's “Girls of Riyadh and Desperate in Dubai: Reading and writing romance in the Middle East" is summarised here by Philippa B.
Session 9 - Romancing Chinese Worlds, with papers by Fang-Mei Lin (National Taiwan Normal University), Huike Wen (Willamette University), Jin Feng (Grinnell College) and Erin S. Young (SUNY Empire State College) SEE THREAD (by Jodi McAlister)
See Renée Dahlia's blog post about the session.
The abstract of Huike Wen's “On the Way to a Better Life: Countryside themed romance in recent Chinese Television" and some additional comments from the paper are provided by Philippa B here.
Philippa B also provides these for Jin Feng's “Life Is Elsewhere: The Economy of Food and Sex in Chinese Web Romance”
and for “Romance in Chinatown: The Love Stories of Edith Maude Eaton” by Erin S. Young.
Session 10 - South/South-East Asian Romance Communities with a paper by Meghna Bohidar (University of Delhi)
Bohidar: young romantic couples are less concerned with caste and religious differences, however they still shape subjectivity e.g. through taste. #IASPR18pic.twitter.com/QrvvM5tZFt
For those who can't read the text in that photo, it contains a definition of an important term used in Bohidar's paper: "Habitus is a set of microbehaviors consisting of a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions that are unconsciously ingrained based on one's class position"
SEE THREAD and Philippa B's summary of Meghna Bohidar's “Negotiating Romantic Love in India: Family, Public Space, and Popular Cinema"
The session then moved on to Kat Mayo's interview of/conversation with Mina V. Esguerra
Session 11 - Subversions of Race, Culture and History with papers by Eric Murphy Selinger (DePaul University), Mallory Jagodzinski (Indiana University South Bend) and Johanna Hoorenman (Utrecht University) SEE THREAD and, from Jodi McAlister, A SUPPLEMENTARY THREAD
The abstract of, supplemented by notes by Philippa B on, Eric Murphy Selinger's “The Wild Heart of the Continent: Love and Place in Sherry Thomas’s Silk Road Romance Novels”
The same, but for Mallory Jagodzinski's “Love is (Color) Blind: Race, Belonging, and Nation in 21st Century Historical Romance Fiction" is here.
Again, an abstract followed by comments by Philippa B, this time on “‘You stayed’: Love, law and the reservation in Jenna Kernan’s Apache Protectors series" by Johanna Hoorenman.
Session 12 - Love in Other Worlds with papers by Donna Hanson (University of Canberra), María T. Ramos-García (South Dakota State University), Athena Bellas (University of Melbourne) and Kristin Noone (Irvine Valley College) SEE THREAD and coverage of the FINAL PAPERS in this thread by Jodi McAlister.
Philippa B's post about Donna Hanson's “Love in Outer Space: Science fiction romance
—
the ideal place to explore gender and
love” can be found here.
María T. Ramos-García's “Representations of Otherness in Paranormal Romance: Nalini Singh and J.R. Ward” is summarised by Philippa B here.
I've now come across a couple of reports on the recent Georgette Heyer conference. Sophie Weston mentions that
A terrific paper from Vanda Wilcox made
the point that, however precise Heyer’s grasp of strategic issues at
Waterloo might have been, her officers “embody World War I values and
leadership style”. At the same time Heyer’s other ranks (gorgeous Gideon
Ware’s straight-talking soldier servant, for instance) are basically
WWI Tommies in red coats, rather than Wellington’s rapists and
pillagers. Convinced me completely.
Her full report can be found here. The evening discussion session is described here by Nicola Cornick.
On 29 June, at the Gendered Emotions in History conference held at the University of Sheffield there was a paper on romance, presented by:
Agnes Arnold-Forster (QMUL) - Gender, Emotions, and Professional Identity in Twentieth Century Medical Mills and Boon Novels
The EUPOP2018 conference will be held from July 24th – 26th, 2018. One of the keynote speeches is by
Professor Petr A. Bilek (Charles University, Prague)
Distant Encounters of the Third Kind: Why Is Popular Culture Not Popular within Central European University Curricula?
The Nonesuch? Georgette Heyer and Her Historical Fiction Contemporaries
The Nonesuch? Georgette Heyer and Her Historical Fiction Contemporaries
Tuesday 19 June 2018, 9.15am - 5.30pm
The programme can be found here but in case that doesn't work and/or to preserve the details for posterity, here's a list of the papers and their authors:
Kim Sherwood (UWE Bristol) - "Pride and Prejudice: Metafiction and the
Value of Historical Romance in Georgette
Heyer"
Lisa Hopkins (Sheffield Hallam University) - "Shakespearean Echoes in Heyer’s Regency
Novels"
Laura George (Eastern Michigan University) - "‘A
little out of the way’: the dandy heroine in
Regency Buck"
Kathleen Jennings (University of Queensland) -
"Heyer... in Space! The Influence of Georgette
Heyer
on Science Fiction"
Vanda Wilcox (John Cabot University) -
"Georgette Heyer, Wellington’s army and the
First World War"
Geraldine Perriam (University
of Glasgow) -
"The Not-so-silly-ass:
Freddy Standen, his
Fictional contemporaries and Alternative Masculinity"
Tom Zille (Humboldt University)
- "Georgette Heyer and the Language of the
Historical Novel"
Deborah Longworth (University
of
Birmingham) -
"From Almack’s to Astley’s:
Regency
World-building in the work of Georgette Heyer"
Sally Moore (University of Hertfordshire)
- "Divorced, Beheaded, Died . . .
The Problem
with the Tudors in Romance Fiction"
Holly Hirst (Manchester Metropolitan
University)
- "Georgette Heyer
and Redefining the Gothic Romance"
Stacy Gillis (Newcastle University)
- "‘Ordinary People’: Austen and the Literary
Genealogy of the Regency Romance"
jay Dixon (Independent Scholar) -
"The Regency Novel under Heyer’s Influence"
Louise Allen (Independent Scholar) -
"Writing in Heyer’s Shadow"
Roundtable discussion on Teaching Popular Historical Romance in
the Literature Curriculum - Deborah Longworth, University of
Birmingham
Lucie Dutton (Birkbeck, University of
London) -
"A Reluctant Movie"
Amy Street (Independent Scholar)
- "Guilty Pleasures: Georgette Heyer"
Helen Davidge (Independent Scholar)
- "Data Science, Georgette Heyer's Historical
Novels and her Readers"
Roundtable discussion on Branding for the digital generation:
Georgette Heyer’s book jackets as
expressions of publishing contexts and fields
- Mary Ann Kernan,
City,
University of
London;
Kim Wilkins, University of
Queensland; Samantha Rayner, UCL
Plenary: Professor Kathryn Sutherland, Senior Research Fellow, St Anne's College Oxford, " 'Where history says little, fiction may say much': women writers and the historical novel"
%20Amazon.co.uk%20Fresno-Calleja%20Paloma%20Teo%20Hsu-Ming%209781032801773%20Boo%5B...%5D.png)
