Links: Medical Romance, Fifty Shades, Viking Bondage and L. M. Montgomery

Laura Vivanco

Jessica, of Read React Review, presented a paper about medical romance novels at the PCA/ACA conference and she's summarised it on her blog. She argues that

it’s possible to view commercial fiction as actually participating, however indirectly, in bioethical conversation. [...]

The Penhally Bay series was written in the first decade of the 21st century, a time when organized medicine was having a lot of internal debates about what “professionalism” means. [...] The professionalism project emphasizes old fashioned values of altruism, compassion, and integrity. It focuses on individuals, and on maintaining continuity with a perceived tradition of medical professionalism dating back 200 years. Medical sociologists, identifying a number of competing accounts of medical professionalism, identify this as “nostalgic professionalism”. [...] I think that the Penhally Bay series presents a version of medical professionalism closely aligned with nostalgic professionalism in several ways.

The full post can be found here.

Eva Illouz has a new book out soon: Hard-Core Romance: "Fifty Shades of Grey," Best-Sellers, and Society will be published in May by the University of Chicago Press. In it, Illouz

delves into its remarkable appeal, seeking to understand the intense reading pleasure it provides and how that resonates with the structure of relationships between men and women today. Fifty Shades, Illouz argues, is a gothic romance adapted to modern times in which sexuality is both a source of division between men and women and a site to orchestrate their reconciliation. As for the novels’ notorious depictions of bondage, discipline, and sadomasochism, Illouz shows that these are as much a cultural fantasy as a sexual one, serving as a guide to a happier romantic life. The Fifty Shades trilogy merges romantic fantasy with self-help guide—two of the most popular genres for female readers.

Madison Prall, a student at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne has created a conference poster which

compares a contemporary historical romance novel series published between 2001 and 2004 by Karen Marie Moning with an older historical romance novel series published between 1980 and 1994 by Joanna Lindsey, in order to assess changing values regarding idealized romantic relationships between men and women.

Madison notes that "All three female protagonists in the Lindsey novels are enslaved by their future husbands, and Kristen and Erika are even forced to wear chains by their romantic partners." Madison finds "disturbing [...] the implication that rape and domination are elements of romantic relationships that romance novel readers think are acceptable or even desirable."

Given the recent success of Fifty Shades I can't help but wonder, though, if "Johanna Lindsey's portrayal of the bondage and domination of her female protagonists by the male protagonists" was an earlier way of writing "hard-core romance" at a time when explicit BDSM would not have been so acceptable. In other words, was it intended to be read more as a "Viking rape scene" than as a suggestion that rape could be romantic or acceptable in real life?

There's been a lot of discussion of the "romance canon" recently. It looks as though some people might be lobbying for the inclusion of L. M. Montgomery (or maybe they'd rather she stayed out of the romance canon and was accepted into the literary canon). The reissue of a book about her works may be of particular interest to romance scholars working on romances for younger audiences given that Montgomery's best known for her series about Anne of Green Gables but she did write some works for adults, including The Blue Castle:

When it originally appeared, Elizabeth Rollins Epperly’s The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass was one of the first challenges to the idea that L.M. Montgomery’s books were unworthy of serious study. Examining all of Montgomery’s fiction, Epperly argues that Montgomery was much more than a master of the romance genre and that, through her use of literary allusions, repetitions, irony, and comic inversions, she deftly manipulated the normal conventions of romance novels. Focusing on Montgomery’s memorable heroines, from Anne Shirley to Emily Byrd Starr, Valancy Stirling, and Pat Gardiner, Epperly demonstrates that Montgomery deserves a place in the literary canon.

Quick Quotes: Autonomy and Agency

Laura Vivanco

Over at Read React Review, Jessica has been posting about the concepts of autonomy and agency which she's teaching in her course on feminist philosophy. She notes that one way of defining "autonomy" would be to think of it as being “realized by the right sort of reflective self-understanding or internal coherence along with an absence of undue coercion or manipulation by others.” Later, she adds that

it is conceptually impossible for there to be autonomy without agency. Agency is the bare capacity to act. It’s not a normative conception. A brainwashed person is still an agent, for example. I think in romanceland and everyday speech, “agency” means something more along the lines of autonomy, but that’s not how I use the terms [...]. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the conflation of agency and autonomy in romanceland is predictable given the general reluctance to look beyond individual psychology to structural, social conditions of choice and action.

Thinking about whether autonomy can only exist in the "absence of undue coercion or manipulation by others," and whether this is an issue which is shied away from due to a "general reluctance to look beyond individual psychology to structural, social conditions of choice and action" reminded me of the following quote from Rose Lerner's In for a Penny. Penelope, the heroine, is the daughter of a successful brewer who's recently married an almost-bankrupt aristocrat. Her encounters with the impoverished workers on her husband's estate make her "look beyond individual psychology to structural, social conditions of choice and action":

Penelope had always believed that if you put your mind to it, worked hard, and didn't whine, there was no reason you shouldn't solve nearly any problem. She was beginning to realize that she had never had such huge, hopeless problems as this woman. (106)

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Lerner, Rose. In for a Penny (New York: Dorchester, 2010).

Review of a Review of EIKAL

Sarah S. G. Frantz

Back when I had time on my hands (ha!), I briefly flirted with starting a blog reviewing chick flicks and romcoms. I like my movies the way I like my books: smart, interesting, sexy, and with an HEA. I was tired of reading between the lines of professional reviews excoriating romcoms and chick flicks for not being Weighty and Meaningful, trying to figure out if I’d like the movie. I was sick to death of movie reviewers expecting these movies to be something they weren’t, something they had no intention of being, something that would defeat their very purpose and goals as chick flicks and romcoms. This kind of reviewing always seemed to be more about the reviewer and their insecurities about genre than the film itself. And that has always felt to me deeply unfair and frustratingly dismissive of a whole genre of creative expression that often does have weight and meaning to viewers who enjoy it.

And thus we come to Jessica Miller’s review of Sarah Wendell’s Everything I Know About Love, I Learned from Romance Novels (henceforth: EIKAL). EIKAL, according to Miller, is “boosterism” at its worst – incoherent, badly formatted, lacking distance from its subject, unhip, uncool, fawning even. What the romance genre needs, Miller argues, is sustained academic analysis about its literary merit, not heartwarming (even cloying) stories about what readers have learned from it.

I disagree and do so on a number of levels. Although I (obviously, I hope) believe that romance needs sustained academic exploration, I think that what EIKAL does is a necessary good. I also think Miller is expecting EIKAL to be what it never had any intention of being, what it doesn’t want to be, what – in fact – it has no business being (something, in my opinion, that Wendell understands, although that’s not really relevant to a review of the book itself). And in failing to meet and critique the book on its own terms, the review came across as ironically and unintentionally derisive toward the genre and its readers.

Four paragraphs in, Miller provides three paragraphs of background about SBTB and Wendell’s career as a romance-positive media pundit. Miller strongly implies that Wendell and Tan “scored” a book contract for their first book, Beyond Heaving Bosoms (henceforth BHB), because they destroyed the career of (plagiarizing) romance author Cassie Edwards. As I said in my comments at the review site, the facts are wrong: although BHB was published in April 2009, almost 18 months after the posts in January 2008 about Edwards’ plagiarism, the publishing world being as slow as it is, Wendell and Tan “scored” their book contract in 2007 and were deep in the process of writing BHB when they broke the Edwards story. And while Miller responded to me at the site that “Luckily, nothing hangs on the timeline, as far as I can see. I was trying to give the OLM reader a general sense of the Wendell’s history, not making a judgment in any way about that history,” I think, in fact, that the judgmental – even personally pointed – tone (Tan departs for “greener pastures,” implying, for instance, that Wendell’s career as a “man titty media pundit” is something she has to settle for, is the best she can get) colors the rest of the review. The tone of these paragraphs cradles and contextualizes the rest of the review, almost implying that the review hinges on an incorrect view about Wendell’s history and success more than it rests on the merits of the book itself.

However, Miller follows this highly questionable history with a fairly brilliant summary of the goals and aims of EIKAL:

The premise of Everything I Know is clear from its title: romance novels offer life lessons, especially about love and relationships. The critics who assume romance novels feature gorgeous, perfect people “meeting cute” and slipping effortlessly into a happily ever after are wrong: romance novels tell the stories of flawed people who struggle and face the same challenges as any average reader. Reading romance novels has a positive impact on readers’ lives, teaching them about everything from effective communication and mutual respect to being happy with themselves and enjoying sex. And to the extent that romance novels do contain fantasy sex, perfect love, and the kind of triumphant overcoming of impossible odds that makes for a compelling narrative, romance readers, aware that it’s fantasy, can still be inspired, comforted, or moved in ways that make them better, wiser people. Everything I Know takes the romance genre and its readers seriously, insisting that the genre’s central concerns—especially romantic love, sex, and relationships—are vital human interests that are often unfairly trivialized owing to their association with femininity. Wendell’s claims are substantiated by an abundance of reader testimony, author interviews, and some industry-sponsored research. While Wendell undoubtedly chose the responses that best supported her own hypothesis, Everything I Know offers romance readers a unique platform for sharing the impact these novels have had on their lives.

Yes, this is exactly what EIKAL is, which is why what comes before and after in Miller’s review is so problematic.

I will not comment here on Miller’s claims about EIKAL’s size, formatting, repetitiveness, or audience confusion. I don’t disagree with a lot of what Miller says in this section – EIKAL is not, in fact, even close to perfect – and I appreciate the frankness of her critique here.

I do, however, disagree with Miller’s turn to scrutinize Wendell’s “specific claims” about “reader engagement” and with her subsequent critiques of the book on those grounds.

First of all, Miller seems to imply that Wendell’s contributing readers/authors must be uncritical readers, because how they “manage to glean the good stuff from the bad” amounts to an utter mystery. But then, in the next paragraph, Miller claims that readers have a “diversity of . . . engagement with the genre” that Wendell ignores. It seems contradictory to claim, on the one hand, that readers are so uncritical and morally naive that they’ll be led astray by immoral representations in the novels they read, and then, on the other, condemn Wendell for not recognizing or for deliberately ignoring the nuances of her contributors’ experiences. And this contradiction goes to what I think is the fundamental problem in Miller’s review, which is that the book is being judged against Miller’s personal standards of feminism and literary value, rather than whatever standards the book establishes for itself (and if these are contradictory, then that is another, more pertinent, level of critique to be pursued).

In an apparent attempt to question Wendell’s over-generalizations and simplifications of her contributors’ experiences, Miller next turns to discuss her experience of reading Wendell’s book “as a feminist.” (My reference to Wendell and not EIKAL is intentional here, since Miller often refers to Wendell when critiquing the book, another aspect of the review I find troubling.) In the process, though, she (re)creates a fairly standard Second Wave feminist critique of the romance genre. More often than not, the review comes across to me as a debate between Miller’s feminism and what Miller (sometimes rather condescendingly) perceives Wendell’s feminism to be. This is particularly apparent, for example, at the point where Miller feels “dismay” at the anecdote by the reader who comes home from work and reads 30 minutes of Harlequin before preparing dinner. While Miller notes (echoing Radway almost perfectly) that such an anecdote begs the question of the second shift, she does not consider the possibility that the woman is a single mother, or that for any number of reasons there is no partner with whom the second shift labor can be shared. Moreover, the shifts in the review back and forth between a critique of the reader anecdotes and a critique of Wendell as author further confuse Miller’s analysis and forefront the judgments she is making as personal rather than critically embedded in the terms of the text itself.

Miller then calls for an entirely different evaluation of the romance genre: “It’s time to stop evaluating romance novels in terms of their putative effects on (women) readers, and to pay more attention to their literary merit and ability to provide pure pleasure.” I’m very unclear what Miller means by “pure pleasure.” Why is “pure pleasure” (whatever it is) better (as it obviously must be) than the pleasure that Wendell’s contributors say time and again that they received from romance novels?

More pertinent, however, to my own work and to most valid literary criticism of the romance genre is the combative dichotomy Miller constructs between reader response and literary merit as valid ways to examine the genre. Modern literary criticism is not, in fact, in the business of determining literary merit. Whether that’s a good thing or not is another question with much spilled ink to its name, but that’s just not what we as literary critics do anymore. I can say just as much about a novel that I think is truly bad from the standpoint of literary merit and “pure pleasure” as I can say about one that I think is brilliant (in fact, I spent a whole chapter of my dissertation doing precisely that). Literary criticism is not about picking the good novels from the bad. It’s about analyzing cultural phenomena. From that perspective, EIKAL is more valuable precisely as evidence of reader response to the genre than any list of the 100 Best Romances. Which is not necessarily to say that EIKAL is successful in what it sets out to do; the problem is discerning that initial aim (or aims) and evaluating the book on those terms, something that lies at the heart of both literary criticism and reviewing from an academic perspective.

Academically, for instance, I use BHB as evidence of the “received wisdom” of the deeply-knowledgeable romance reader, the “superfan,” if you will. Which is to say, when Wendell and Tan conflate Woodiwiss’ The Flame and the Flower and Rosemary Rogers’ Sweet Savage Love as pretty much the same book, I use that as evidence in my own discussion of these blockbuster historical romances that this is how twenty-first century romance readers in general see these two books and the disparate genres they spawned, despite their significant differences from each other. I do not expect BHB or EIKAL to be anything other than what they claim to be, what they try to be, and what, I argue, they succeed in being. I do not expect BHB to be a vigorously researched academic critique of the romance genre. Nor do I expect EIKAL to be a rigorous scientific survey of a representative sample of readers. I expect them both to be what they claim they are: BHB is an exploration of the genre that defends the genre for what it does right and lovingly brings it to task for what it screws up, while EIKAL is a loving exploration of reader interaction with the genre that provides readers with both a voice and the arguments to defend their reading habits. Miller may disagree with my assessment of EIKAL’s success in achieving its aims, but I wish she had done it on the book’s own terms, so that any debate about the review could be based on the book itself and not an external standard of academic worthiness.

The difference between applying literary criticism to the genre or to EIKAL is important and generally ignored in Miller’s review. That Miller is writing the review from an academic perspective might account for some of this disconnect, although I don’t think it accounts for all of it. Some is, I think, a product of a conflation of literary critique of the genre from within the genre, and critique of a work that is more about readers than the genre itself.

I think, in fact, that there’s a disconnect between EIKAL’s aims as a proudly fond exploration of reader response, and Miller’s entirely laudable desire to have genuine deep critique of the genre. Wendell is not attempting in EIKAL to analyze the genre, nor does she have any pretentions to being able to perform literary criticism. Wendell is focused on demonstrating that her contributors (romance readers and authors) are intelligent, conscious consumers of the genre they (we) all love so much. She is also attempting to provide readers with a validation of their own reading choices and to provide non-readers with something to think about (hence, as Miller rightly points out, its confusing tone shifts at times). EIKAL might not, as Miller points out, change any minds, but it gives readers a voice to relate the (pure?) pleasure they find in the romance genre. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Miller’s review, on the contrary, suggests that there is, indeed, something wrong with that. This is not only a provocative implication, but also a different question from what the book is and whether or not it succeeds in being what it claims to be.

ETA Full Disclosure: I'm quoted two or three times in EIKAL. I responded to Wendell's SBTB posts asking for input and she quoted me from there, not from a personal interview. I am, however, also friendly with Wendell and occasionally share meals with her. But then I've also shared meals with Miller.

Everything I Know About Love: Too Much and Too Little

Jonathan A. Allan

There has been a great deal of discussion taking place about Jessica Miller’s review of Everything I Know About Love I Learned from Romance Novels. The review provoked many interesting questions, responses, and queries. I don’t want to engage specifically with the review, but to offer another perspective on EIKAL.

Roland Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse writes: “Everyone will understand that X has ‘huge problems’ with his sexuality; but no one will be interested in those Y may have with his sentimentality: love is obscene precisely in that it puts the sentimental in place of the sexual.”

I’m guilty of sentimental reading and writing, and I find these sentimental or affective responses to reading and writing to be particularly interesting. Indeed, this is what makes romance reading so interesting – romance novels thrive on the sentimental (and sometimes the sexual). But, I don’t think we should treat these “sentimental” moments without criticism.

For instance, in Miller’s review, one of the most interesting lines from my perspective was: “I haven’t said much about the specific lessons Wendell finds in he romance genre. This is because, as a romance reader and therefore a member of her target audience, I’m too embarrassed.” I love this moment in the review, not because I agree with it, but because the reader is “too embarrassed.” Not just embarrassed, but excessively so. Barthes writes: “To try to write about love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive (by the limitless expansion of the ego, by emotive submersion) and impoverished (by the codes of which love diminishes and levels it)."

The romance is excessive precisely because it is about love. Love is excessive. But Barthes is not alone. Richard Terdiman writes, “people love being in love, and when they are they talk and write about it with an expansive intensity.” Adam Phillips writes that falling in love is “traditionally overwhelming, [an] excessive experience.” To fall in love and to fall out of love (or worse, to be thrown out of love, to be rejected and rendered abject) are excessive experiences and we tell these stories so as to come to terms with them.

Why, for instance, if we know that love is dangerous, can cause harm, shatter, and perhaps ultimately destroy us, do we continue to desire, long for, dream of, and write about love? Just consider the excessive story of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, in which the hero tells his reader: “without doubt, the only thing that makes Man’s life on earth essential and necessary is love.” All of our love stories and romance novels talk about the possibility of love, loving, and being loved. I admit that this reading of love is hopelessly romantic. Romance novels provide readers with ways of imagining love and loss, the muck of language, things being too much and too little. These are stories that need to be told, need to be listened to, need to be read because they are so essential to the human experience. The desire to read about love and tell love stories is a way of coming to terms – a search for lost terms – with a love that cannot and will not be excessive enough.

For some readers of EIKAL, I imagine there is a recognition of not being alone in their love of romance, for others, I imagine they are “embarrassed.” I think varying reactions are testament to the complexity of romance. Readers, like the romance novels they read, are not a monolithic group.

EIKAL puts on full display the wonderful, luscious, beautiful, problematic, heart-breaking excessiveness of romance. Readers of romance, critics of romances, and scholars of love are, I think, coming to terms with, trying to capture, and falling in love with love and its excesses. Perhaps an all too optimistic vision of Everything I Know About Love, but to quote my favourite writer, Marcel Proust, “if a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all of the time.”

Thinking about Learning about Love

Laura Vivanco

In Everything I Know About Love I Learned from Romance Novels, Sarah Wendell argues that

Inside those stories is everything you need to have a happy, loving relationship. [...] And what better way to learn about relationships and how they start, fracture, and become stronger once repaired, than to read about those relationships in many, many permutations and variations? (4-5)

In her review of EIKALILFRN Jessica Miller, a romance reader and a philosopher who teaches at the University of Maine, suggests that there's something rather problematic about Wendell's line of argument:

Though Wendell is writing a “gift book,” not a work of theory or literary criticism, her specific claims deserve some scrutiny, particularly around the issue of reader engagement, which is central to her arguments on the genre’s behalf. How, for instance, do romance readers manage to glean the good stuff but not the bad? [...] Wendell relies on reader testimonials for her claim that romance readers learn the real lessons, but merely enjoy the fantasy, but then what do we do about readers who testify that romance has harmed them [...]? To her credit, Wendell includes a few comments from readers who claim they learned what not to expect by reading romance [...]

But if savvy readers come to the genre ready and able to suss out what’s just fantasy, what’s worth emulating, and what not to do, then romance novels aren’t actually teaching these readers anything new. Wendell herself admits that the lessons romance teaches are “things you likely learned as a child when you were taught how to treat other people.” In that case, it would be more accurate to say that romance novels reflect or deepen moral beliefs readers already hold. This makes sense—but then it follows that if a reader holds pernicious or delusional moral beliefs (however we define those), given the sheer size of the genre, she can probably find some reinforcing of those bad moral beliefs in romance novels, too.

Miller argues that

It’s time to stop evaluating romance novels in terms of their putative effects on (women) readers, and to pay more attention to their literary merit and ability to provide pure pleasure.

So I'll conclude with a reminder that the 2012 conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance takes as its subject "The Pleasures of Romance" and "asks one large question: What is the place of pleasure in popular romance?" The closing date for "proposals for individual papers, full panels, roundtables, interviews, or innovative presentations for peer-review consideration" is 1 May 2012.

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• Miller, Jessica. "A Fine Romance." Open Letters Monthly. 1 Feb. 2012.
• Wendell, Sarah. Everything I Know About Love I Learned from Romance Novels. Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks Casablanca, 2011.

More Romance in the New Millennium

Laura Vivanco

Continuing on from the tweeted summary of the keynote speech given to the McDaniel College Popular Romance in the New Millennium conference, and Jonathan's discussion of the ideas contained in his paper, here are some links about the conference. I suspect many of you will have read some or all of them already, but I wanted to provide them for those who haven't, and to create an archive of links.

There's a description posted on the McDaniel College website of a pre-conference talk given by Lisa Dale (author of Slow Dancing on Price’s Pier) and of a workshop run by Amy Burge. Jessica, of Read React Review, summarises Amy's presentation (in which she discussed this and a previous workshop) and also gives a summary of the presentation by Glinda Hall. Amy's own reflections on her McDaniel workshop can be found at her personal blog.

Jessica has also written a summary of Eloisa James's keynote speech.

Smart Bitch Sarah's summary of the entire conference makes particular mention of Mary Bly/Eloisa James's keynote address, Glinda Hall's "discussion of what including romance in courses does to the classroom community," An Goris's plenary address on the works of Nora Roberts, Samantha Sabalis's "Lacanian analysis of Courtney Milan’s Proof by Seduction and Unveiled," and Maryan Wherry's "feminist literary critical examination of the sex in romance."

Jessica has a fairly full discussion of her own paper: she

presented on authorship with a colleague. We have project going that traces a Romantic conception of authorship in women’s writing about authorship from the Minerva Press era (late 18th-early 19th century) through today’s popular romances.

Angela Toscano's paper on "The Liturgy of Cliché: Ritual Speech and Genre Convention in Popular Romance" is up here. The throbbing core of her argument is that:

It is an oft repeated criticism of popular romance that the genre is formulaic. The cliché use of language is indicative of this formula; it seems to expose the romance as the very “mass–produced fantasies for women” that Tania Modleski accused them of being. But let us assume that authors know what they are doing. That they are using cliché not because they are unable or unwilling to come up with better metaphors, more original similes, but rather because the cliché is doing something within the text that another phrase may fail to do.

Toscano proposes that "repetition is only problematic if one takes the view that to repeat oneself or to repeat someone else is to fail to properly use language. It presumes that originality is the highest form of narrative. That to say what has never been said and to say it in way that has never been said before is the supreme expression of language." She suggests that repetition, in certain areas of life, can in fact be considered a sign of success because there are "actions that need, want, and are desired to be done again. They are the appetites: sex, sleep, food, love. Love is not final. It is never done. The fulfillment of love, like sex, like food, is in its repetition" and she argues that "Story, like sex, incites the desire for more stories." In addition, she considers that in romance cliché can be considered

liturgical. It is a type of magical speech, as in the language of the Christian mass which transforms the substance of the wafer into the body of Jesus Christ. In the mass this is not metaphor but an actual substantive and physical change. In the world of the narrative, the cliché comprises a series of speeches that, like the mass, become the means by which a substantive transformation occurs in the persons and the bodies of the hero and heroine.

To fill some of the gaps, I'm also including some of the tweets from the conference (these may have been very slightly edited, to remove typos or fill out more obscure abbreviations). They were written by Smart Bitch Sarah Wendell (in purple), Jessica from Read React Review (in blue), and Sarah Frantz (in black). Since both Jessica and Sarah Frantz were giving papers, this impeded their ability to report on some of the panels, so even with these tweets to fill the gaps, not all the papers are covered.

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Third panelist is Jung Choi at Program for General Ed at Harvard titled "On Teaching the Romance Novel." Choi, quoting Derrida: "The center is not the center." Change one word, change center, relationship between center and margin. What is marginalized will come to center - for example, romance studied at Harvard. Behind images of emotional coldness, intellectuality, there have been constant image of love at Harvard: Love Story, Legally Blonde Inside ivory towers/ivy walls, Choi believes has been steady fascination with sex and romance. Choi did same assignment she gave students: shop for romance at Harvard bookstore. "Where are the Harlequin novels displayed?" Horrified reaction. "We don't carry trade books." Clerk couldn't say "Harlequin." "Romance has power to threaten what is a center." Quote from Northanger Abbey from Choi: "seems a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist." "Let us be united and let us celebrate."

jung choi, from harvard, on teaching the romance novel, is next. choi wondered whether she should attend this con, because she teaches the romance, not popular romance. choi starts with derrida quote, the center is not the center. choi's point is that the center we consider stable may be shaken up. relation bt center and margin is fluid. choi's romance course is dominated by women students. all female writers and topics such as marriage may explain that. for choi, issue is not just topics or gender, but location at margins, that prevents more male students from taking romance course. choi notes increase of students' interest in and desire to read strong female characters in romance course. choi assigns students to go out and find mass market romances in the community. look at display, marketing, etc. students are assigned to do an in depth study of one romance novel. part of the assignment is to read the romance in a public place and note reactions of peers. in 2008 choi went to harvard book store to ask for a harlequin novel. salesperson was dumbstruck. unable to repeat word "harlequin", clerk said, "we dont carry trade books." which is false. choi, "the happiest delineations of the varieties of human nature are celebrated in romance."

Up now is Jayashree Kamble on teaching literary canon alongside romance. For ex: Governess Novel: Jayne Eyre, Midnight Angel @lisakleypas, Turn of the Screw, Maybe This Time, Jennifer Crusie. Kamble encouraged students to use subjects that apply to their lives, i.e. using 1st person shooter Halo to discuss 1st person POV. "Eat Pray Love: appallingly bad movie, amazing in its exoticization of Italians, Indians and Indonesians." I have syllabi here. Section on "Love & communication" has Austen P&P, Flowers/Storm - Kinsale, Your Wicked Ways, Naked in Death. Secondary texts include Love Actually, Lady Hawke, Episode of Bones. Naked in Death included bc Eve Dallas has real problems with communication & emotional idioms. Kamble has students cite other students' papers, partly to teach citation, plagiarism, and what academic peer review is like.

j kamble shares syllabi. ex. the governess novel. incl j eyre, turn of screw, mistress mellyn, midnite angel, maybe this time j kamble's course on the exotic: wuthering, heart darkness, heart of fire, heart of the seas, seduce me at sunrise. kamble also uses variety of 2ndary texts in media theory, criticism. ex. levine's highbrow/lowbrow, belsey's a future for criticism

Now: Bill Gleason, “Teaching Romance in the Popular American Literature Survey” from Princeton U. Gleason: early version of course did not include romance fiction, but thought it did. Current version: A LOT of romance fiction. Course begins with Wigglesworth's Day of Doom (1662) as examination of books that were popular and some that still are, thru 20thC. Romance: Bet Me (2004) Students pick last book of the reading list, they decide. Nominate text, then class votes. Two years ago: Harry Potter, Sorcerer's Stone. Then Gossip Girl. Course is set up in "genres" and what that means: Seduction, Adventure, Mystery, Romance. Course focuses on the idea that the historical context of what is popular and WHEN it is popular is crucial to study. In 1993, Gleason thought was inc romance b/c he had GONE WITH THE WIND on the syllabus, w/ Krentz's DANGEROUS MEN. Offers covers to camouflage Bet Me: Cover for Beowulf, The History of Otero and Crowley Counties Colorado for embarrassed students. Comprehensive final exam, progression of class texts "makes romance fiction seem part of continuum, not outlier." Course presently is 2/3rds female, 1/3 male. One thing Gleason can't do is real sense of breadth and range of romance fiction. Students have asked for course just on romance fic.

bill gleason of princeton says in 1993 he taught GWTW thinking it was romance. gleason says he teaches bet me by jenny crusie. this is a topics in am lit course at princeton. Many Princeton students deeply embarrassed to read romance novels. Offer them camouflage book covers: Tarzan, Beowulf. ...gleason says having romance arrive at end means he can start talking about romance on first day of class. gleason emphasizes romance themes in earlier texts like last of mohicans. gleason tries to help students see romance as part of a continuum, not an outlier. 

"Sneaking it in at the End: Introducing Popular Romance into the Small College Classroom” by Antonia Losano, who was unable to come. Eric Selinger is reading paper for scholar in absentia. Small colleges can be troubling for instructors because required courses take up time of small faculty, not room for flexibility. Lack of flexibility can marginalize romance, for example, because requirements for established canon classes for major students. Losano: Every time I tried to sneak a romance in at the end, it was a pedagogical failure. Students disliked inclusion of P&P and Frederica. "Frederica" has no redeeming values, said one student in eval. Course included Pamela and Welcome to Temptation. Students liked Pamela, didn't like Temptation. Losano was baffled. Losano presented Roberts' The Search as contemporary fiction featuring dogs for dogs in literature course. Was accepted w/o problems. Didn't reveal it was a "romance" so it was discussed without rejection. Losano asks: in what framing methods can we introduce romances into our courses? Concl: most successful method Middlebury College is hide romance completely in courses by not saying it's romance.

Now Selinger talking about his own experience teaching romance fiction at DePaul. Has done so for years. @angoris pointed out that Selinger's syllabi of romance text lacked, among other things, Carpathians and tycoons. Selinger had student who refused to buy romances because they were so embarrassing Selinger assigned her to think about that refusal. "What are you a sucker for?" These novels will teach you that. Students have written to say romances have taught them to leave bad relationships, challenge professors who dismiss romance. Selinger says one prof at DePaul would query on 1st day which students had read @harlequinbooks, then say they should be ashamed. Selinger: "He doesn't do that anymore."

EricSelinger says two rewards of teaching romance fiction are 1. they illuminate complexities of both emotional and textual desire and, says @EricSelinger, this turns student into readers, into scholars. second, romance teaches students about beautiful circuits and subterfuges of their own desires. 

"The wired world of romance scholarship," Kat Schroder, student in Masters of Commm in Digital Media at U of Washington. "Online communities offer what James Gee calls an 'affinity space.'" online spaces encourage active sharing of knowledge. Romance communities are comprised of blogs, bboards, podcasts, social communities. Romance author websites being used for examples: Jennifer Crusie, Eloisa James. Jenny Crusie uses her blog to solicit help for plot points, names, titles, and allow audience to have role in shaping text. Reading is an active process in which readers construct textual meaning. In Crusie example, readers construct text and meaning. James' Facebook community allows readers equal access to text and "day in life of bestselling author" with video Q&A. Online community "changes what book is, shows how elastic parameters of a book are now." Boundaries between reader author friend and fan are blurry now. [Also, I point out, definition of "Friend" is varied as well. People who come to my home, eat w me not = FB friends, online friends.] Trying to link how internet has allowed academic study of romance to flourish. I am learning that there are terms for things like how many links, directions of links. Eigenvector Centrality: influence! All of the people who are part of IASPR network on twitter: in graphic. @sarahfrantz is center.

Now I'm listening to *business* professor Chryssa Sharp talk about "using cross-cultural frameworks to examine American attitudes. Sharp is proposing that we use international management models to examine affect of emotion in romance novels. How do values contained w/in popular romance line up w/ US cultural norms? What would cross-cultural comparisons show?

A Romance Manifesto: Apocalypse and Matricide

Laura Vivanco

Pamela Regis, in one of the keynote speeches at the 2010 conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance, while "not proposing that we owe the romance novel our approval, or that our reaction to it requires a positive view of any kind," seemed to set out a manifesto for romance scholars:

• We owe it to the romance novel to make overt and to defend our conclusion that the romance is simple, if this is, in fact, our assessment.


• We owe the romance novel a good-faith effort to uncover the complexity that our discipline values so highly.


• We owe the romance novel great care in choosing our study texts—more care, not less, than we take in choosing study texts from literary fiction.


• We owe it to the romance novel to recognize that the values of its fans are not identical with the values of our discourse community.


• We owe it to the romance novel to recognize that our study texts are probably not representative of “the romance” and to stop committing the logical fallacy known as hasty generalization.


• We owe it to the romance to stay within our evidence when we state conclusions.


• We owe the romance a just consideration of its happily-ever-after or happy-for-now ending.


• We owe the popular romance a recognition of the archaeology carried in its name

Some of these points seem uncontroversial; few, I imagine, would argue in favour of hasty generalisations. Others are less so.

What really made Regis's romance manifesto inflammatory, though, was the fact that she referred to Ann Barr Snitow, Tania Modleski, Kay Mussell and Janice A. Radway as "the Four Horsewomen of the Romance Apocalypse." So what had they written which prompted this response from Regis?

The short answer is that they apparently rode into romance scholarship on horses named "porn," "addiction," "fantasy," and "patriarchy's dupes":

Ann Barr Snitow’s “Mass Market Romance: Pornography for Women is Different” has branded romance with the dismissive label of porn. Tania Modleski’s Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women asserted that reading romance is an addiction. Kay Mussell’s Fantasy and Reconciliation: Contemporary Fantasies of Women’s Romance Fiction attached the term “fantasy” to romance—“fantasy,” in her view, is a bad alternative to “reality.” Finally, Janice A. Radway in Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature has cemented in the public mind, apparently for all time, the notion that romance is patriarchy’s tool, and its readers patriarchy’s dupes.

In addition, they characterised romance novels as lacking in complexity (an attribute which is valued highly by literary critics:

Literary critics—we—all believe “that literature is complex and that to understand it requires patient unraveling, translating, decoding, interpretation, analyzing” ([Wilder] 105). [...]  Snitow calls romances “easy to read pablum” (309), Modleski calls them “rigid” (32), Mussell labels them “adolescent” (184), and Radway, “superficial” (133). Our most influential early critics, the ones who have proven to have staying power, each viewed the romance novel as simple.

Regis therefore urges current scholars to make

a good-faith effort to uncover the complexity that our discipline values so highly. A skilled literary critic can see the complexity in any apparently simple text. [...] We owe the romance novel great care in choosing our study texts—more care, not less, than we take in choosing study texts from literary fiction. In writing our criticism, we are creating not only the critical context for the study of the romance novel, we are also creating the romance novel’s canon. Surely identifying and studying the strongest romance novels will benefit the entire critical enterprise and help us avoid making claims about simplicity and other qualities that critics assign to the romance novel based on an unrepresentative set of study texts.

If it's really the case that "A skilled literary critic can see the complexity in any apparently simple text," why (if we are skilled literary critics) do we need to choose our study texts carefully? Can't we just select them at random and then use our critical talents to see their complexity?

This passage also makes me wonder whether any objective criteria exist (or could exist) which one could use to select "the strongest romance novels." One recent incident which demonstrates the difficulties inherent in making such selections arose when some romance readers tried to change Rohan Maitzen's negative opinion of romances. They presented her with some of the titles which might well be considered part of "the romance novel's canon." Her assessment of them did not, however, match those of the romance-readers:

I took the bait and borrowed Loretta Chase’s Lord of Scoundrels, apparently known to some as one of the best romance novels of all time, from the library. Well, that was a setback. I thought the novel was ridiculous! In fact, it was so much like what I had always snidely imagined romance novels to be that I wondered if it was a parody! Egad. Then I tried Georgette Heyer’s Sylvester–not a genre “romance,” exactly, but in the romance tradition. That wasn’t much more successful.

Maitzen's response to these novels caused Liz McC, one of the romance readers, to ponder the nature of the writing in many romances:

Literary fiction today, I think, still tends to the minimalist, and sometimes loses something as a result [...]. Romance readers are sensitive about purple prose, because our genre is often attacked as a leading perpetrator of it [...]. Purple prose is usually defined as too something (too flowery, too descriptive, too melodramatic). But where’s the line between enough and too much? It varies from reader to reader, and from era to era.

Regis's response to the problem of selecting the "strongest" texts is that

We owe it to the romance novel to recognize that the values of its fans are not identical with the values of our discourse community. If we decide to read and study favorites suggested by romance fans then we may find ourselves confronting prose like this passage: “Somewhere in the world, time no doubt whistled by on taut and widespread wings, but here in the English countryside it plodded slowly, painfully, as if it trod the rutted road that stretched across the moors on blistered feet.” That is the first sentence of Kathleen Woodiwiss’s The Flame and the Flower, published in 1972. The possible representativeness of this miserable sentence to the rest of Woodiwiss’s work, I leave to students of Woodiwiss. We, however, should not assume that this miserable sentence is representative of popular romance novels. It is not. Confronted with bad writing in a study text, we have two good choices—we can choose another book to work on, or we can acknowledge the bad writing and figure out a way to say something interesting—which is to say, figure out a way to invoke the complexity topos—despite the lamentable prose. Fans love books for many reasons, but their values and ours will often be at odds.

This seems to suggest that literary critics are different from "fans" and it therefore reminds me, somewhat uncomfortably, of Janice Radway's statement about how the academics' "segregation by class, occupation, and race [...] works against us" (18) in providing support for, or learning from, romance readers. There are, though, a fair number of "acafans" in the romance-reading community.

Regis's response to Woodiwiss's metaphor brings us back to Liz McC's discussion of "purple prose." Would the following qualify as purple and "miserable":

Fame, a monster surpassed in speed by none; her nimbleness lends her life, and she gains strength as she goes. At first fear keeps her low; soon she rears herself skyward, and treads on the ground, while her head is hidden among the clouds. Earth, her parent, provoked to anger against the gods, brought her forth, they say, the youngest of the family of Coeus and Enceladus-- swift of foot and untiring of wing, a portent terrible and vast--who, for every feather on her body has an ever-wakeful eye beneath, marvelous to tell, for every eye a loud tongue and mouth, and a pricked-up ear. At night she flies midway between heaven and earth, hissing through the darkness, nor ever yields her eyes to the sweets of sleep. In the daylight she sits sentinel on a high house-top, or on a lofty turret, and makes great cities afraid; as apt to cling to falsehood and wrong as to proclaim the truth.

Trying to translate it from the original Latin may have made me miserable at school but the extended metaphor itself generally wouldn't be described that way; it's a quotation from John Conington's translation of Virgil's Aeneid. Woodiwiss isn't Virgil, but is her Time, with its wings and blistered feet, really much more miserable than his Fame, with its profusion of feathers, eyes, tongues, mouths and preference for nocturnal flight?

Finally, the suggestion that we need to identify "the strongest romance novels" in order to avoid working with an "unrepresentative set of study texts" seems to me to presuppose that "the strongest romance novels" are the most representative. What if they aren't? Theodore Sturgeon's

Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, [...] was that ninety percent of SF is crud. Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. are crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other artforms. (Wikipedia)

If the same is true of romances, should we ensure that our sample texts are representative by only including 10% which are "strong"?

Regis's response is that:

We owe it to the romance novel to recognize that our study texts are probably not representative of “the romance” and to stop committing the logical fallacy known as hasty generalization. This is not to say that all claims of representativeness are wrong—but they must be proven, they must be substantiated and argued for. It is a failure of critical imagination to assume we have seen it all. A corollary: We owe it to the romance to stay within our evidence when we state conclusions. So, if we have not demonstrated that our study texts are representative, we must qualify our conclusions, and avoid talk about what “the romance novel” writ large is or does.

Also in JPRS, An Goris praises Regis's "strong and much-welcome contribution to the development of a meta-perspective on the practice of popular romance criticism" but nonetheless argues that it could be considered one of a number of instances in romance scholarship of

ritual matricide in which scholars like Radway, Modleski, and Mussel function as the figurative mothers of the field who, in order to create the possibility for the field to grow up, develop, and mature, have to be figuratively “killed”—taken away, put aside, moved beyond. This process is a natural mechanism of evolution and growth and one which on the whole has positive effects.

She seems to suggest that before committing "matricide," Regis should have stopped to recognise that not all romance scholars are literary critics. While

Regis’ approach to the study of popular romance is one which she herself characterises in A Natural History as “a traditional literary historical approach” (112) in which the primary site of interest is the text and the secondary site of interest the broader historical and socio-cultural context in which the text figures [...] Radway, who carries out an ethnographic study of romance readers, is, unlike Regis, not primarily focussed on the romance novel’s textual properties, but in the reader’s use and interpretation of this text.

Goris also criticises Regis's account for "being too ahistorical and undertheorised" before adding that "In this context I must acknowledge that, much as Pamela Regis’ theoretical position influences her meta-critical discussion, my own critique of her paper is shaped by my position as a scholar inspired by post-structuralism."

I'll finish with a link to a post by Jessica at RRR, who is not a literary critic. Did Jessica take "great care in choosing [...] study texts"? Probably not, by Regis's standards: "it took about .0008 seconds to find several Harlequin Presents that fit the bill. I chose The Italian’s Mistress, a 2005 Harlequin Presents by Melanie Milburn[e]." And what were those purposes?: " to Use a Harlequin Presents to Teach Sexual Ethics."

--------

• Goris, An. "Matricide in Romance Scholarship? Response to Pamela Regis’ Keynote Address at the Second Annual Conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 2.1 (2011).


• Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. 1984. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 1991.


• Regis, Pamela. "What Do Critics Owe the Romance? Keynote Address at the Second Annual Conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 2.1 (2011).

The first image is a cropped version of a photo taken by Frila of a "Relief im Ehrenmal" depicting the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and downloaded from Wikimedia Commons. As Regis mentions in her paper, "the original four horsemen [are] pestilence, war, famine and death." The second image is also cropped and shows part of Bernardino Mei's Orestes slaying Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. Clytemnestra was Orestes' mother. It was also downloaded from Wikimedia Commons.

Various Links

Laura Vivanco

Jessica from Read React Review will be teaching Jennifer Crusie's Bet Me as part of her Ethics and Fiction course:

I decided I wanted to do two things in this unit: (1) ask whether genre fiction is as worthy a subject of ethical criticism as literary fiction (Wayne Booth explicitly says no, and most other ethical critics implicitly reject this possibility), and (2) introduce feminist critique as a mode of ethical critique. I also wanted something fun, since pretty much everything else I assigned is a real downer. I think Bet Me is a fun book that can work in all of those ways.

Sarah Frantz was interviewed by Heidi Cullinan and mentioned that

I’ve got an academic anthology I edited coming out next year: New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction. My article in there talks about Joey Hill’s BDSM romance, Holding the Cards. I’m ALSO in the (very slow) process of writing a book called ALPHA MALE: POWER AND MASCULINITY IN AMERICAN POPULAR ROMANCE FICTION. I’ll have a chapter in there about m/m romance.

Linda Hilton has posted about her Honours thesis (from 2000) and mentions that

I was able to read one romance novel after another and see where the woman’s voice had been silenced, her power neutralized, her body appropriated, her desires perverted --- BUT, I could also see where the woman’s power and autonomy had been left intact, where she had submitted only because she had no choice and because it was the way to maintain what little autonomy was granted to her.

On a related note, DM guestblogged at Dear Author about the "Defeated Heroine." She

used to dismiss Radway and her work as elitist and blinkered, but after a recent glom of Madeline Hunter’s Regencies, and Lara Adrian’s Breed books (Adrian’s series title kinda says it all…) I started to feel uncomfortable. There seemed to be a message in these books, conscious or unconscious on the part of the authors, that supported Radway’s conclusions.

Sunita wrote a post about "Jewish stereotypes in Georgette Heyer’s novels." She notes with regards to The Grand Sophy that

The Sourcebooks version changes Heyer’s original wording from

The instinct of his race made him prefer, whenever possible, to maintain a manner of the utmost urbanity,

to

His instinct made him prefer, whenever possible, to maintain a manner of the utmost urbanity,

But editors can’t do much about the name, and they keep the stereotypical descriptors, e.g., “greasy” and “ingratiating,” not to mention the “Semitic nose.”

Apart from the importance of analysing the depiction of race in romances, this post also reminded me that one can't assume that the text of a second or subsequent edition of a romance is identical to that of the original. I don't know if Sourcebooks indicate that their edition differs from the original but I've certainly come across examples of romances in which changes have been made to a subsequent edition and there is no way a reader would know this unless she/he compared the two editions.

Given the popularity of romances about SEALs, I thought I'd mention that

WAR-Net was founded in 2010 by Kate McLoughlin and Gill Plain as a virtual and actual forum for scholars based in northern England and Scotland working on war representation. It now welcomes members from all over the UK and the rest of the world.

Next WAR-Net Meeting: 'Battle-Lines: War and Conflict in Popular Texts and Images' on 1 October 2011 at the University of Dundee.

Romance novels sell well in the Philippines:

written in street-level Tagalog, the books emerged in the early 1980s when an economic crisis forced the importers of western "chick literature" paperbacks to seek out alternatives. [...]

Romance author Maia Jose, who began writing in 1990, said the genre centred on the build-up of a romantic relationship that must end either in marriage or in a commitment.

"The book must be 128 pages long and it's a formula, so it must have a happy ending. If it doesn't have a happy ending the reader would be offended," the mother-of-three said.

The authors typically do not have any formal writing background, with housewives, students and moonlighting accountants among a mixed bag of storytellers.

Jose said she generally took between two and four weeks to write a book, while one particularly prolific writer once churned out nearly 100 in a year. (AFP, via The Independent)

Minerva Press Novels and the Modern Romance Genre

Laura Vivanco

Jessica from Read React Review recently co-presented a paper on “Re-Reading Authorial Intention and Imagination over Two Centuries: the Romantic-Era’s Minerva Press Novels and Today’s Popular Romances.” As Jessica notes, although Minerva Press novels "were not technically romances" they "definitely have elements that make them comparable to romance." If you've read Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey you'll have encountered the titles of some Minerva Press novels.

John Lane, the proprietor of the Minerva Press, was both the leading publisher of gothic fiction in England and the principal wholesaler of complete, packaged circulating libraries to new entrepreneurs. Consider the seven gothic novels on the list that Isabella Thorpe gave Catherine [in Chapter 6], for example: Mrs. Eliza Parsons's Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) and her Mysterious Warning (1796), Regina Maria Roche's Clermont (1798), Peter Teuthold's translation of Lawrence Flammenberg's Necromancer of the Black Forest (1794), Francis Lathom's Midnight Bell (1798), Eleanor Sleath's Orphan of the Rhine (1798), and Peter Will's translation of the Marquis of Grosse's Horrid Mysteries (1796). The Minerva Press issued all of them with the exception of the novel by Lathom, who later published several novels with the press. [...]
Many people opposed circulating libraries and especially their encouragement of young women in reading novels. In Northanger Abbey, Austen notes that even novelists had joined "with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust" (5:37). (Erickson 582-83)

Austen also offers a defence of novels:

Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers. And while the abilities of the nine–hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens — there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. “I am no novel–reader — I seldom look into novels — Do not imagine that I often read novels — It is really very well for a novel.” Such is the common cant. “And what are you reading, Miss — ?” “Oh! It is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best–chosen language. (Chapter 5)

Jessica and her co-presenter explored "some of the commonalities between Minerva press novels themselves, their production, their authorship, and their readership, and contemporary romance novels." You can read Jessica's summary of the talk, including the slides she used, over at her blog. My favourite quotes from the summary are:

Both Minerva Press novels and romance novels are subject to a bizarre juxtaposition, of being repetitive and boring, yet somehow at the same time, too exciting and salacious.

and

I discussed the import, from a feminist point of view, of not viewing romance novels as books. If they are not books, the 26 million women who read them regularly are not readers. This is not just constructing romance readers as passive. It is effacing them.

I'd encourage you to go and read the whole post.
----

• Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. Pemberley.com.
• Erickson, Lee. "The Economy of Novel Reading: Jane Austen and the Circulating Library." Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 30.4 (1990): 573-590.

I found the image at the Historical Romance UK blog.

Are You A Ruthless Woman?

The hero of Michelle Reid's The Italian's Future Bride (2007) makes his views clear. Tumperkin and Jessica make clear their views of him.

Growth Matters

Laura Vivanco

Jessica at Read, React, Review has been

asking why romance heroes are so well endowed. If some aspect of romance is sexual fantasy, it may seem obvious. But real women don’t seem to care too much about this sort of thing.

so then Jessica asked

But what about the heroine’s reaction to The Big Reveal? It’s often fear, nervousness, shock, or awe. Perhaps a lot of that reaction can be attributed to the fact that so many romance heroines are virgins. But think about it: why does it make sense that a penis — even a big one — should be terrifying to anyone, ever? And, besides, even experienced often heroines have the same reaction.

While I was still pondering those questions, I happened to read a post about:

the relentless pursuit of growth, measured in monetary terms, which takes no account of finite natural capital or people’s well-being. To illustrate the fundamental points: we would need three planets to allow all nations to grow equally, and despite massive GDP growth we appear to be no happier than we were thirty years ago.

I spot a some common themes here: worries about growth in the context of finite natural resources, and a threat to the happily-ever-after of the protagonists.

Before you all decide that this is a case of a poor, innocent metaphor being stretched to breaking point, I'd like to observe that a very high proportion of romance heroes are well endowed both physically and financially. Indeed, Jan Cohn has observed that

It is a commonplace of romance that the heroine will marry well, a given that the hero will be rich. [...] Romance fiction offers a fantasy of female success, specifically economic success, the aggressive nature of which it thoroughly masks under the heroine's extreme economic innocence. [...] This strategy, basic to the romance formula, attempts to disguise both the heroine's real goal and the profound association between sexual and economic power that lies at the heart of romance, as realized in the figure of the romance hero. Economic success becomes a condition of the hero of romance. It is not simply a matter of the hero's wealth as an added-on value; his wealth, his property and economic power, are basic attributes of his masculinity, a principal source of his virile attractiveness. (127)

It is, after all "a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife" (Austen 51). And if a man's "good fortune" is a "basic attribute of his masculinity," isn't it equally possible that the most obvious "basic attribute of his masculinity" might symbolise his "good fortune"? And, given the ruthless nature of both rakes and unregulated capitalism, is it really surprising that the heroine should have some concerns when she realises just how very large his "good fortune" is?

It seems something worth pondering, although (a) I'm sure there is a strong element of purely sexual fantasy in such scenes and (b) I would be extremely surprised if any of the authors of this type of scene had intended there to be any economic symbolism.

Having now lived up (or down) to the expectations of those who "believe all college professors are radical Marxists," I'll leave you with a video about the value of a PhD in English:

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• Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Ed. Tony Tanner. London: Penguin, 1985.
• Cohn, Jan. Romance and the Erotics of Property: Mass-Market Fiction for Women. Durham: Duke UP, 1988.

Jessica's Undying Success

Laura Vivanco

This Friday Jessica, of Read React Review, gave a paper on "The Undead in Bioethics and Vampire Fiction" to "an annual conference put on by the largest bioethics organization in the US." In her paper Jessica suggested that popular fiction is "fertile ground" for bioethicists. Indeed, popular fiction about vampires may be

the one place in our culture where people are reading and talking and thinking about death. About what it takes to be dead. About how we figure out who is dead. About whether there are nearly dead states that are enough like true death to count. About organ and tissue donation. Etc. [...] I used the image of Bella’s dream about being an old lover to an eternally 17 year old Edward to suggest that questions about what happily ever after means in the context of immortal love might be one way that women think about death.

I was delighted to learn that her paper was received extremely favourably:

The response from the audience was really terrific, and also from the editors of two journals in this subfield of bioethics, who approached me afterwards. I was especially gratified that one of them told me he agrees completely that we need to be working on popular fiction across the genres. A medical anthropologist asked me be an outside reader for one of her PhD students who is writing on vampire folklore and medicine, and a med school professor told me he now plans to begin his unit on death by discussing vampires. I couldn’t be more pleased with that response.

Jessica's post about her paper can be found at her blog.

Deviant Monsters

Laura Vivanco

Maria Lindgren Leavenworth has observed that vampires are

creatures traditionally associated with breaking the norms of society and often linked to forbidden or deviant sexual desires. Although the vampire may be superficially gendered, its position outside humanity makes categorisations less applicable and it is often seen as occupying a position which slides between the poles of masculinity and femininity. (443)

Jessica at Read React Review recently wrote a post in which she summarises some of the sexual deviancy in Bram Stoker's Dracula, including the

suggestion of a threesome in this book. There was this exchange [...], when Van Helsing was transfusing Lucy. He mentioned Holmwood’s notion that exchanging blood makes Lucy his bride:

Said he not that the transfusion of his blood to her veins had made her truly his bride… If so… Then this so sweet maid is a polyandrist, and me, with my poor wife dead to me, but alive by Church’s law, though no wits, all gone – even I, who am faithful husband to this now-no-wife, am bigamist.

Everyone says Dracula is a book about transgressing boundaries — geographic, gendered, sexual, bodily, material and spiritual.

According to Leavenworth, J. R. Ward's vampires, however,

represent supernatural power, sexual prowess and, paradoxically, protection of humans, but their vampirism is not used to illustrate a potentially subversive position, on the contrary, the novels represent a worldview characterised by at times ambiguous but in the end staunchly heterosexual relationships. (443)

She therefore turns to slash fiction based on Ward's novels because "in the slash analysed, homoerotic desire is at focus and the sexual ambiguity often connected to the vampire as a literary trope is to an extent reclaimed" (443). Here she finds that

Assertions and definitions playing on the notion of (at least homosexual) virginity in slash label situations as out of the ordinary, signalling that the space outside the norm is created specifically for the purposes of these encounters. (454)

While Leavenworth mentions male virginity only briefly, it is the focus of Jonathan Allan's "Theorising the Monstrous and the Virginal in Popular Romance Novels." He suggests that it is Edward's virginity which permits the heterosexual vampire hero of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels to be considered a sexually deviant vampire: "It is not Edward’s vampirism that makes him monstrous or deviant, rather it is his virginity that makes him monstrous, deviant, anomalous" (6). Allan states that

male virginity would seem to fit within the realm of “defiant deviance” precisely because it extends beyond (or perhaps before?) an acceptable limit that has been established by the socio-cultural environment. Accordingly, I would argue that the virgin male is defiantly deviant when he chooses to maintain a virginal identity. The problem, it would seem, for which we must account is why female virginity is not deemed, at least in most scenarios, monstrous while male virginity is indeed quite monstrous, deviant or anomalous. (2)

Since the Twilight novels do not explicitly state that male virginity is monstrous, Allan quotes from Eloisa James's When the Duke Returns in order to demonstrate that this is indeed an attitude prevalent in contemporary society: “the heroine, after realising that her husband - they were married when she was twelve and he has been away for a decade or so - is a virgin, remark[s]: 'I’ve married a monster!' ” (2).

Female virginity, however, is generally perceived as unremarkable in the romance genre. A male virgin, then, may perhaps seem "monstrous" or deviant because virginity is so closely associated with femininity, and he is therefore "occupying a position which slides between the poles of masculinity and femininity" (Leavenworth 443). Although the sliding in itself might be seen as the cause of the deviancy, a further complication to this discussion of the monstrous and the deviant is provided by Kathleen A. Miller's “A Little Extra Bite: Dis/Ability and Romance in Tanya Huff and Charlaine Harris’s Vampire Fiction”. Miller observes that, as

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson notes [...] Aristotle sets up a masculine “generic type” against which all physical variation appears as different, derivative, inferior, and insufficient. This establishes the Western tradition of viewing woman as a “diminished man,” one who is monstrous, and is the first step on a “path to deviance.”

The view that woman are monstrous has manifested itself in many ways down the centuries, but I wish to mention just two instances which may recall aspects of the vampire. The first example, which perhaps calls to mind parallels with the deadly contagion of vampirism, is the medieval belief that "the female organism was capable of producing poison, in other words death or illness" (Jacquart and Thomasset 75). This found expression in

the story of the Venomous Virgin, dear to writers of the thirteenth century. A king who was mistrustful of the growing powers of Alexander brought up a girl whom he fed on poison. When the girl was completely venomous, the king sent her as a present to the young Alexander. [...] The poison that this slut was capable of getting used to was the secretion of her own organism; the death that she delivered to everything that approached her was the purest, most brutal, but also sincerest expression of an interiorized fear of woman. (Jacquart and Thomasset 191-192)

The second involves the medieval medical theory of the humours. It was believed that "in order for a woman to remain fertile she had to be kept moist, and the one way that nature had provided for women to be kept moist was through sexual intercourse" (Bullough 493). Women's need to absorb moisture from men could, however, have deleterious effects on the latter:

Three of the most frequently cited dangers of inordinate sexual intercourse were loss of strength, accelerated aging, and premature death. Medical theorists, preachers, theologians and even lawyers taught that coitus weakened the body. Aquinas explained that in wartime wise commanders cast women forth from their camps so that soldiers might not spend their strength in carnal indulgence [...]. Bonaventure, the son of a physician, argued that all sexual intercourse was dangerous to health and that the sex act helped to shorten one's life. [...] In general excessive coitus was thought to deplete the body of its natural moisture while increasing the heat in the body, a condition that quickly left the body dry. (Solomon 56)

In that cultural context, "staunchly heterosexual relationships" could perhaps be considered not unlike unions with a monstrous being who would drain one of life-giving fluid, and a man's decision to remain a male virgin might therefore be celebrated rather than taken as an indication of monstrous deviance.

It seems that who, or what, is considered deviant and/or monstrous may shift and change, but fear of the dangerous Other, mixed with varying degrees of sexual fascination, persists.

Academic fascination with vampires is also persisting; here are two recent calls for papers:

Fanpires: Audience Consumption of the Modern Vampire
[...] This edited collection will examine the cultural resurgence of the vampire. It aims to provide inter-disciplinary accounts of the reception and cultural impact of contemporary representations of the vampire evident across a broad range of mediums, including literature (e.g. Evernight, The Vampire Academy), film (e.g. Twilight saga), television (e.g. The Vampire Diaries, True Blood), graphic novels (e.g. Chibi Vampire) and games (e.g. Vampire Rain). The appeal of vampire mythology and its associated folklore for modern audiences will be examined in an age characterized by the transformative possibilities of the internet with both its low barriers to artistic expression and the erosion of the boundaries between author and audience.

The deadline (undead-line?) for submissions is October 29th, 2010. More details can be found here. And

Open Graves, Open Minds: Vampires and the Undead in Modern Culture (Edited Volume and Special Journal Issue)
[...] The irony of creatures with no reflection becoming such a pervasive reflection of modern culture pleases in a dark way. Since their animation out of folk materials in the nineteenth century, by Polidori, as Varney and in Le Fanu and Stoker, vampires have been continually reborn in modern culture. They have stalked texts from Marx’s image of the leeching capitalist, through Pater’s Lady Lisa of tainted knowledge, to the multifarious incarnations in contemporary fictions in print and on screen. They have enacted a host of anxieties and desires, shifting shape as the culture they are brought to life in itself changes form. More recently, their less charismatic undead cousins, zombies, have been dug up in droves to represent various fears and crises in contemporary culture.

Essays are sought for a book-length collection on the theme of the undead—vampires and zombies—in modern culture and for a parallel special journal issue. The aim of the book is to relate the undead in literature, art, and other media to questions concerning gender, technology, consumption, and social change.

More details here.
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• Allan, Jonathan A. "Theorising the Monstrous and the Virginal in Popular Romance Novels." Draft Conference Paper for the 8th Global Conference on Monsters and the Monstrous (Sunday 19th September – Wednesday 22nd September 2010 Oriel College, Oxford).
• Bullough, Vern L. "Medieval Medical and Scientific Views of Women." Viator 4 (1973): 485-501.
  
• Jacquart, Danielle, and Claude Thomasset. Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages. Trans. Matthew Adamson. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988.
• Jessica. "Romance Roots: Dracula, by Bram Stoker (part 2)." Read React Review August 18, 2010.
• Leavenworth, Maria Lindgren. “Lover Revamped: Sexualities and Romance in the Black Dagger Brotherhood and Slash Fan Fiction.” Extrapolation 50.3 (2009): 442-462.
• Miller, Kathleen A. "A Little Extra Bite: Dis/Ability and Romance in Tanya Huff and Charlaine Harris’s Vampire Fiction." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 1.1 (2010).
  
• Solomon, Michael. The Literature of Misogyny in Medieval Spain: The Arcipreste de Talavera and the Spill. Cambridge Studies in Latin American and Iberian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.
  

The photo is of "Edward Cullen as portrayed by Robert Pattinson in the New Moon film" and is from Wikipedia.