Posts, Podcasts and Publications: Endings, Identity, Preservation and Negotiation

Charlotte of Close Reading Romance has written a series of posts thinking through how

any HEA is, fundamentally, an act of inferring the future from information about the past. In queer romance, though, doing so means imagining optimism from not-always-hospitable spaces. It has also sometimes meant thinking around certain concluding structures integral to the genre – cohabitation, marriage, procreation – that haven’t always been accessible to queer protagonists. So as I often do, I started wondering about the particular prose demands of writing re-imagined pasts and imagined futures. What kind of work is done by the last sentences of queer love stories, the words that place a completed narrative into the past while opening up towards imagined futures?

Here's the Introduction to the series and links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.

Jayashree Kamblé's been promoting Creating Identity: The Popular Romance Heroine’s Journey to Selfhood and Self-Presentation so there's now a video in which she discusses the book at the Asian American/Asian Research Institute: https://aaari.info/23-09-22kamble/ and there's an episode of the podcast  ShelfLove in which she discusses the book: https://shelflovepodcast.com/episodes/season-2/episode-145/heroines-creating-identity-in-romance

Over at JPRS, Jonathan A. Allan has been worrying about how to preserve romance texts for future scholars and I do think it's a big issue, especially for works which are ebook only. Eric Selinger says that if you have any answers to the questions/issues raised in Jonathan's note, please contact the journal to add a note of your own on this topic!

And here's a list of some new publications:

Ali, Kecia (2023). "The End of the World as We Know It: Climate Catastrophe in Nalini Singh's Paranormal Romance Fiction." The Journal of the Core Curriculum: An Annual Literary and Academic Anthology in the College of Arts and Sciences at Boston University 32:81-86. [The link is to a pdf of the whole volume, which means you'll have to scroll down/do a search to find the article. It's free, though!]

Bharathi, L. Divya and K. Muthuraman, K. (2023). "Nicholas Charles Sparks’s The Notebook: A Novel Of Love Or Romance?" Journal of Namibian Studies 35, special issue 1: 3749-3755. 

Horgheim, Celina (2023). From Rape to Romance: Sexual Consent Negotiation in Romantic Retellings of the Myth of Persephone. MA Degree Secondary Teacher Programme, University of Oslo.

Petrović, Janja (2023). Breaking the stereotype – romance novel today. Masters thesis, University of Zagreb.

IASPR Conference and New Publications: Climate Change, Migration, Readers, History, Libraries

The IASPR conference starts tomorrow and the schedule (with abstracts of the papers to be presented) is available for download here: https://www.iaspr.org/conferences/schedule-romance-revitalised/ . The topics for the various panels include: Booktok, Black Romance, Historical Romance, Love Studies, Paranormal Romance, Queer Romance and much more!

The conference will also see the launch of Jayashree Kamblé's new book, Creating Identity The Popular Romance Heroine's Journey to Selfhood and Self-Presentation (which you can read more about here).

In addition, this week only, the ebook version of Publishing Romance Fiction in the Philippines by Jodi McAlister, Claire Parnell  and Andrea Anne Trinidad, which was published earlier this year by Cambridge University Press, is available for free download here.

Here's a list of some other recent publications:

Ali, Kecia (2023). "The End of the World as We Know It: Climate Catastrophe in Nalini Singh's Paranormal Romance Fiction." The Journal of the Core Curriculum: An Annual Literary and Academic Anthology in the College of Arts and Sciences at Boston University 32:81-86. [At the time of adding this to the list, the 2023 volume of this journal wasn't yet available online.]

Burge, Amy (2023). "Romantic Love across Borders: Marriage Migration in Popular Romance Fiction." Contemporary Love Studies in the Arts and Humanities: What's Love Got To Do With It? Ed. Madalena Grobbelaar, Elizabeth Reid Boyd and Debra Dudek. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. 39-49. [Abstract]

Parks, Amy Noelle (2023). "The Feminist Possibilities of Heteroglossic Spaces in Contemporary Young Adult Romance Novels." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 12.

Phipps, Catherine (2023). "‘The Machine for Showing Desire’: Desert Romance Fiction and Knowing Sexual Desire." Historical Research, Creative Writing, and the Past: Methods of Knowing. Ed. Kevin A. Morrison and Pälvi Rantala. New York: Routledge. [Abstract and Excerpt]

Richey, Weston (2023). "(Loves) Me, (Loves) Me Not: Unbuilding of Selfhood in the Romance of the Present." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 12.

Veros, Vassiliki (2023). "Nobody Puts Romance Fiction in the Corner: Public Librarians in New South Wales and Their Dalliance with Romance Fiction." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 12.

Details on how to attend the IASPR Conference online 10-17 July 2020!

I'm really pleased to be able to share details of the online 2020 IASPR Conference (10-17 July)


The sign-up page and details of presentations and round-table discussions are accessed from https://iaspr2020showcase.org/

Presenters include (but are not limited to!):

Kecia Ali
Loving in the Doom Years: Nora Roberts’ Chronicles of the One

Amanda Allen
How YA Literature Emerged from the Cold War Condemnation of Popular Romance

Javaria Farooqui
Reading Anglophone Historical Popular Romances in Pakistan

Maria Isabel González Cruz
Building a Glossary of Hispanicisms in a Corpus English Romances Set in the Canaries

Jayashree Kamblé
Recoloring London: Empire and Ethnicity in Popular Romance

María Ramos-García
Transatlantic Definitions of Whiteness in Louise Bergstrom’s Gothic Romances in the Canary Islands (1971-72)

Heather Schell
Love in a White Climate: Category Romance and the Anglosphere

Angela Toscano
Big Girls Don’t Cry or Get the Guy: Representations of Fatness in Romance

Andrea Anne I. Trinidad
“Kilig to the Bones!”: Kilig as the backbone of the Filipino Romance Experience

Scholarship and thoughts on race, publishing and language

Programme for the 2020 Bowling Green conference is now available.

Our Guest of Honor for the conference will be Alyssa Cole. She is an award-winning author of historical, contemporary, and sci-fi romance. Her Civil War-set espionage romance An Extraordinary Union was the RT Reviewers’ Choice Award’s Best Book of 2017 and the American Library Association’s RUSA Best Romance for 2018, and A Princess in Theory was one of the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2018.

One of the many people who'll be presenting papers is Christine Larson who recently had an article published about her research and the RWA crisis.

Some of her already-published work also discusses publishing and racism.

• The Color of Romance (from Voices: The Shifting Contours of Communication Research.) Eds. Patricia Moy and Donald Mathesen. Peter Lang, 2019. (You might be able to download it from her website)
• Open Networks, Open Books:  Gender, precarity and solidarity in digital romance publishing. Information, Communication & Society. June, 2019. 

More coming soon: "She is currently writing a book on the 40-year history of romance writers’ professional networks." 

K. J. Charles posted about the representation of non-English languages in English-language novels. Here's an excerpt:

Italicising serves as a nudge to the reader that they’re not expected to recognise or understand a word. That act very much assumes who the reader is. If you italicise all your Spanish in a book written about Mexicans, that rather suggests you don’t expect your book to be read by Mexicans. It is othering—and in many cases that can look like saying, “Those people are different from me and you, the writer and the reader.”

And finally, still on the topic of racism some more items which can't be added to the Romance Wiki bibliography because it's not around:

Adair, Joshua G., 2020. ‘“A Battlefield All Their Own”: Selling Women’s Fictions as Fact at Plantation Museums’. Museums, Sexuality, and Gender Activism. ed. Joshua G. Adair and Amy K. Levin. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. 239-251. [Excerpt]

Ali, Kecia, 2019. “Sacrifices, Sidekicks, and Scapegoats: Black Characters and White Stories in Nora Roberts’s Romances.” Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture 4.2: 149-168:

In several of the scores of romance novels she published between the 1980s and the early 2000s, bestselling American author Nora Roberts limns whiteness by deploying black characters as sacrifices or sidekicks. In her recent novels (2016–19), villainous white characters who express racist sentiments become scapegoats, obscuring racism’s broader structural and cultural dimensions. At a time when discrimination within romance publishing and award-giving has gained attention, it is vital to explore how the genre continues to center white readers and white identities, even while explicitly condemning racism.

Literary Criticism Following its Heart, Teaching Twitter, Challenging Racism through Fiction, Archives and Reviews

Some of the papers from the Bowling Green State University's recent conference on romance are now available from them.

Eric Selinger's "Use Heart in Your (Re)Search: The Invitations of Popular Romance" suggests that the protagonists' four-step quest in Sherry Thomas’s neo-Victorian historical romance My Beautiful Enemy

offer[s] us a guide to the heartfelt thinking and learning to which many romance novels — not all, perhaps, but many -- invite us as scholars, as students, and as teachers of the genre, at least in a literary studies context 

The first step by the way, is to "Believe the Legend": "In the context of popular romance studies, believing the legend entails believing that romance novels offer something worth learning, treasures worth finding".

As discussed in "Romancelandia on Twitter: Designing a Digital Humanities Research Assignment for First-Year Writing Students" Heather M. Schell and Ann K. G. Brown have been collaborating

to develop an assignment sequence around original research on romance authors’ public social networks. The project uses Social Feed Manager and textual analysis tools to give students the opportunity to shape their own research questions and study the Twitter feed of the romance author of their choice. In-class activities will help students track down supplemental research and think through the ethical questions raised by studying individuals’ social media accounts. (from the abstract)

Elizabeth Kingston writes as an author of historical romance novels about how "History's Been Hijacked: How To Combat White Supremacy Through Popular Literature".

it is undeniable that the version of history taught by romance novels has made it far easier for white supremacist arguments to be accepted by otherwise intelligent, well - read people. To put it simply, the well is poisoned, and if you read historical romance, you are drinking from that well.

She's also posted (a very slightly shorter version of) the paper on her own website along with a follow-up piece, "Practical Advice: Expanded edition" which is exactly what its title states it is.

The Journal of Popular Romance Studies (JPRS) is going to publish on a rolling basis. The first few articles of issue 7 are now available:

"Romance Fiction in the Archives" by Kecia Ali.

Kecia describes a visit to the Ray and Pat Browne Popular Culture Library (PCL) at Bowling Green State University. They have a large and ever-expanding romance collection, so Kecia couldn't see more than a tiny proportion of her holdings. In fact, she was only looking at a small proportion of the Romance Writers of America (RWA) archives and:

I skimmed over or skipped past many tantalizing leads and materials. [...] Many projects might benefit from consulting the collection. In other cases, entire projects might be built around the archival material. This list is partial, idiosyncratic, and woefully incomplete, meant only to offer a starting point for thinking about drawing on the archives.

"Review: Heartthrobs: A History of Women and Desire, by Carol Dyhouse" by Jonathan A. Allan

"Review: Romance Fiction and American Culture: Love as the Practice of Freedom?, edited by William A. Gleason and Eric Murphy Selinger" by Victoria Kennedy

News + New Items: Thai Romance, Keepers, Disability and more

Laura Vivanco

I'm always very happy to see scholars moving into the field of romance studies, so I'm glad to be able to mention that Johanna Hoorenman "is currently working on a cultural history of Native American themed popular romance novels, tracing the roots of the subgenre to early American women's captivity narratives and James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans" (http://muse.jhu.edu/article/662582).

Ria Cheyne's written a post for Public Books about "Disability and the Romance Novel."

Kecia Ali's been at Smart Bitches Trashy Books to talk about her Human in Death: Morality and Mortality in JD Robb’s Novels.

Mary Lynne Nielsen writes at Dear Author that "the idea of some level of financial security is interwoven in romance."

Christian Peukert and Imke Reimers have found that "romance novels are more likely to be self-published than other genres [...]. The difference becomes particularly evident after 2010, as self-publishing became a successful “mainstream” distribution channel" and "After 2008 (the year after the introduction of the Kindle), there is a small increase in advances for romance novels, compared to a slight drop in advances for other genres. More pronounced, there is a sharp increase in deal sizes for romance novels after 2010 (the introduction of the iPad), whereas the deal sizes for all other categories remain almost constant." They write that:

The fact that more deals were made with future stars among the romance genre throughout the time period of our study suggests that publishers have been able to predict the future success of romance novels better than the success of non-romance books. After 2010 – concurrent with the large rise in self-publishing among romance bestsellers – the ability to predict bestsellers among romance novels increased further, with an increase in the share of future bestsellers among romance deals from about 2% to 5%.

New to the Romance Wiki academic bibliography are:

Markert, John, 2017. 

“God is Love: The Christian Romance Market.” Publishing Research Quarterly. Online First.

Christian publishers have long produced romance novels, but the production of these slim books of love have not been a significant part of their overall output. This started to change in the 1980s in response to the increased sensuality found in secular romance novels. The Christian romance has undergone even more of a resurgence at the outset of the new millennium for the same reason: secular romances have notched up the sensuality of their romances today and Christian houses have responded to their constituents who tire of the sexual slant of these secular novels. Indeed, the strength of the Christian market has not gone unnoticed by mainstream houses and numerous secular houses, notably Harlequin, are today producing Christian-themed romances. The secular Christian message is somewhat attenuated, however, which helps explain the continued popularity of those romances produced by Christian publishers. (Abstract)

Khuankaew, Sasinee, 2017. 

"Femininity and Masculinity in Twenty-First Century Thai Romantic Fictions." The Asian Conference on Literature 2017: Official Conference Proceedings. [pdf available free in full online]

This paper is a thematically chronological supplement to the work in

Khuankaew, Sasinee, 2015. 

"Femininity and masculinity in three selected twentieth-century Thai romance fictions." Ph.D thesis, Cardiff University. Abstract Pdf

Veros, Vassiliki, 2017. 

"Keepers: Marking the Value of the Books on my Shelves." Proceedings from the Document Academy 4.1, Article 4. [pdf available free in full online]

New to the Wiki: J D Robb, Katherine V. Forrest and Feminism

A short list of what's new to the Romance Wiki Bibliography:

Ali, Kecia, 2017. 

Human in Death: Morality and Mortality in J. D. Robb's Novels. Waco, Texas: Baylor UP. [I've written a response to this book on my personal blog.]

Betz, Phyllis M. 2017. 

Katherine V. Forrest: A Critical Appreciation. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. [See Chapter 2, "Diana and Lane: From Pulp to Passion" excerpt here. ]

 

Matthews, Amy T., 2016. 

'The Hopeful Romantic', Kill Your Darlings 27: 44-56. ["Is it possible to be both a romance writer and a feminist? And if so, how might the romance genre contribute to the advancement of women's rights?" (from here)]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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