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).

Misc: Who Reads Romance (in the US) and Does Popular Culture Shape National Identity

Laura Vivanco

Thanks to various people on Twitter for news that,

According to Nielsen’s Romance Book Buyer Report, romance book buyers are getting younger—with an average age of 42, down from 44 in 2013. This makes the genre's average age similar to the age for fiction overall. In addition, 44% of these readers are aged 18-44 [...].

Romance book buyers are still more likely to be female than buyers of fiction overall, but with more attention than ever directed to the genre—especially given all the media coverage of Fifty Shades of Grey—more men are coming into the fold. In first-quarter 2014, men accounted for 15% of romance books purchased, compared with 12% in 2013.

These demographic changes aside, the general profile of romance fans in the U.S. remains fairly steady. Nielsen data shows that romance book buyers are more likely to be from the South and Mid-West regions, tend to be retired and identify as Christian.

More details here.

I saw a call for papers which is probably not looking for submissions from literary critics but which asked some questions I found interesting:

The existence and fundamental importance of nations, national identities, or national boundaries is rarely questioned. Yet, the scholarly literature on nationalism has shown that national communities are socially constructed, that national identities are fluid, and that national boundaries are constantly contested. Clearly, maintaining nations requires a great deal of collective effort. How is it that this effort is rendered invisible? How have nations come to be seen as natural? Why do individuals buy into the idea of national identity?

In order to fully answer these questions, we need to examine the links between nationalism and popular culture. Movies, TV series, popular music, sport, video games, comics and other elements of everyday culture are intimately involved in the production (and contestation) of nationhood. Showtime’s hit series Homeland, for example, closely reflects American values and sensibilities.

I've been working on a book about politics and US romance which, I hope, shows that there are some distinctively US elements to a lot of US romances. That, and Juliet Flesch's book about Australian romance, suggest that romance can work to reinforce national cultural norms and ideas about what it means to be a member of that nation. Jack Elliott's research demonstrates that some significant differences can be detected in authors' word choices:

the North American region has its own distinctive characteristics. [...] Some of these don’t have much bearing on theme or ideas—the use of “toward” rather than “towards,” for example, or the frequent use of the word “gotten”—but look at the striking preoccupation with time in the North American novels! “Forever” and “anymore” are both words favored by North Americans—although the more workaday “afterwards” is not (that’s a European word).

In addition, I wonder if there's an extent to which romance has tended to strengthen national boundaries by reinforcing stereotypes about stereotyped "Others": loyal kilt-wearing Scots, hot-blooded Greek tycoons, vengeful Italian aristocrats, proud Spaniards and domineering sheikhs from a variety of entirely imaginary nations.

PhD Students at Work

Laura Vivanco

I'm always keen to hear/read about forthcoming research on romance so I thought I'd mention some work that Jodi McAlister and Jack Elliott have been doing on some of the nuts and bolts of popular romance fiction.

Jodi, who's studying at McQuarie University, has been interviewed by Smart Bitch Sarah:

What I really want to do is work out how virginity functions as a narrative trope in romance, and how this is changed over time. You know those people that pull apart cars for fun to see how they work? I'm like that, but for stories. I guess I'm a narrative mechanic: I love pulling stories to bits to understand how/why/whether they work. I want to work out what function virginity serves as a literary device - how it drives plot, how it drives character, and why it pops up so often in romance in particular. To do this, I'm tracing the history of the virgin heroine in the romance plot - I take a bit of a tour through medieval romance, then through the rise of the novel and its shadowy twin the pornographic novel - before coming back to the modern romance. I'm really interested in what happened once virginity loss scenes started to be regularly represented on the page instead of behind closed doors, something that really kicks off once The Flame and the Flower ( A | BN | K | S | ARe | iB ) is published in the early 1970s. I'm looking at virginity loss scenes and comparing to them to autobiographical stories about virginity loss and seeing how they matched up, as well as trying to tie them back to a historical framework.

Jodi's also written a post for the Popular Romance Project about how Fifty Shades of Grey combines elements from the popular romance with some from "its shadowy twin, the pornographic novel":

it can be argued Anastasia and Christian’s happily-ever-after, if we think of this to mean “enduring long term commitment to each other,” occurs at the beginning of Fifty Shades Darker. And yet the series continues, with a growing emphasis on sex scenes. It would seem that the romance plot is co-opted into the pornographic structure—Christian and Anastasia’s relationship is used to engender the repetitive climaxes on which pornography relies. The romance plot is used to create what Steven Marcus calls pornotopia: a world in social institutions and textual events are used merely to create sex. 

Jack Elliott is studying at the University of Newcastle, Australia and he's also written for the Popular Romance Project. He's been taking a very close look at differences in the language used by European (mostly UK), Antipodean and North American romance authors and has come up with findings such as this: "North American writers prefer 'near' rather than 'close.'" and

look at the striking preoccupation with time in the North American novels! “Forever” and “anymore” are both words favored by North Americans—although the more workaday “afterwards” is not (that’s a European word).

Earlier this year he had a post up about changes in the titles of Harlequin/Mills & Boon romances.
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• Elliott, Jack. "Around the World." The Popular Romance Project. 4 October 2012.
• -----. "Making Sense of Mills & Boon." Love2Read. 13 April 2012.
• McAlister, Jodi. "Fifty Shades of Genre." The Popular Romance Project. 8 November 2012.
• Wendell, Sarah. "Virgins in Romance: An Interview with Jodi McAlister." Smart Bitches Trashy Books. 12 November 2012.

The image, "Power House Mechanic," came from Wikimedia Commons and is in the public domain because it was created in 1920/1921 by Lewis Hine.