New Publications: French Canadian Romance, Strangled Women and Dark Romance, Migration and Marriage, A Trans Romance author from 1909, Black Romance, Trauma

Love Stories Now and Then: A History of Les romans d'amour, by Marie-Pier Luneau and Jean-Philippe Warren was published in October. However, since they kindly sent me a copy so I could add more details about it to the Romance Scholarship Database, I put off mentioning it here until I'd been able to read it. It's a translation of their L’amour comme un roman. Le roman sentimental au Québec d’hier à aujourd’hui (2022). The book (in both versions)

is the first comprehensive survey of Quebec and French-Canadian romance novels. It tackles questions that everybody asks. What is “love at first sight”? How do class, national identity, religion, and race influence choice of partners? What are the rules to flirting? What are the limits to expressing one’s desires? What are people’s expectations in marriage? What is the place of sexuality and how does it differ in French and English culture in North America? (from the publisher's website)

I've added quotations from the book to the entry in the Database, and those give more information about the content of the chapters: "Repressed Love (1830-1860)"; "Sublimated Love (1860-1920)"; "Domesticated Love (1920-1940)"; "Celebrated Love (1940-1965)"; "Serial Love (1965-2000)"; "Love Despite Everything (since 2000).

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Mary, E. (2024). "Strangled Women: Popular Culture, ‘Conservative Modernity’ and Erotic Violence in Britain, c.1890–1950." Cultural and Social History, 1–19. 

This open access paper "analyses popular novels and films in early-mid twentieth-century Britain. It argues that strangled women were increasingly depicted in violent narratives of adventure and domination by a male lover". That includes E. M. Hull's The Sheik, which is one of a number of novels (mostly non-romance) that are discussed here, which is why I thought it might be of interest to readers of this blog. 

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Here's a piece in The Conversation by Magali Bigey on "dark romance" and why we shouldn't worry about its readers but we should be encouraging discussion about these novels: https://theconversation.com/reading-dark-romance-the-ambiguities-of-a-fascinating-genre-243982  

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And onto the new arrivals in the romance scholarship database:

Burge, Amy (2024). "Marriage migration, intimacy and genre in Helen Hoang’s The Bride Test (2019) and Brigitte Bautista’s You, Me, U.S. (2019)." Literature, Critique, and Empire Today.

Imperitura, Lorenzo (2024). The Forgotten Queer Utopia. Master’s thesis, The Arctic University of Norway. [Since I think the genderqueer novel discussed here (Beatrice the Sixteenth, published in 1909 and written by Irene Clyde, an author described "variously as non-binary, genderfluid, transgender, or a trans woman") sounds like a romance, I feel it's worth sharing this thesis with readers of this blog, even though Imperitura is primarily assessing the work as utopian fiction.]

Johnson, Jacqueline Elizabeth (2024). Labors of Love: Black Women, Cultural Production, and the Romance Genre. PhD thesis, University of Southern California. [Analyses work by Rebekah Weatherspoon and Katrina Jackson.]

Kindleysides, Alicia (2024). Broken Hearts: Writing The Representation of Trauma and Trauma Recovery in a Post-Trauma Romance Novel. PhD, Central Queensland University.

Abortion, Witches and New Publications (Gaming, Asexuality, Teen Sexuality)

The Fated Mates podcast posted (on Bluesky) that "Elda Minger was the first romance novelist to put condom use on the page. When we spoke to her about the choice she made, she told us about the realities of the world before Roe, when abortion was neither safe nor legal." They've put a clip of Minger's hard-hitting comments on YouTube and it's less than 4 minutes long. The novel is Elda Minger's Untamed Heart, which as far as I can tell was published by Harlequin in 1983. [If I've got that wrong, or if you know of a romance published earlier which includes condom use, please leave a comment!]

I missed this article when it was first posted, in 2023, but it's worth a read. Taking a look at witch romances set in small towns, Jenny Hamilton argues that

After reading a certain number of these books, it becomes impossible to avoid aligning the witch fear of non-witches with white fear of non-whites, particularly given the close associations between whiteness and small-town and suburban America.

And some new publications:

 

Guajardo, Ashley ML (2024). "The BookTok to Player Pipeline: TikTok and the Baldur’s Gate 3 Fandom." Abstract Proceedings of DiGRA 2024 Conference Playgrounds

 

Heynderickx, Jasmine (2024). “It really got to me [...] The movies where the main characters freaked out about being virgins at the age of sixteen”: Narrative Subversion as a Queer Strategy in Loveless. Master of Arts, Ghent University.

Medrano-González, Claudia (2024). "On the Convergence Between Femme Theory and Popular Feminine Fiction: Adolescent Girls’ (Re)territorialisation Of Fem(me)ininity Through Young Adult Erotic Romance." Journal of Femininities (published online ahead of print 2024). https://doi.org/10.1163/29501229-bja10005

New Publications: LGBTQ+ romance, dark romance, rape, publishing, folklore and coral

Items whose titles are hyperlinked are accessible freely.

Greening, Alo (2024). History, Huh: A Post-Modern Study of the Consumption of Queer Romance. Master of Arts in Women and Gender Studies, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Hernandez, Janeth (2024). Exploring Consent: An Analysis of Consent in Dark Romance and Contemporary Romance Books. Master of Arts in Writing: Book Publishing, Portland State University. 

 

Keran, Molly (2024). The Genre of Rape: Women’s Popular Literature and Contemporary Representations of Sexual Violence. PhD thesis, University of Michigan. 

Kousholt, Moa (2024). A Time, A Place, and A Person: A comparative literary analysis of Red, White & Royal Blue and One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston and how queer representation can be problematized in a classroom context. Teacher Education Programme for Upper Secondary School, Linnaeus University. 

 

Miclea, Adelina-Cerasela (2024). The Scientification of Love: A Cognitive Literary Approach to Romance Novels. PhD, Universitatea de Vest din Timișoara. [Only an index and summary is currently available online.] 

Poirel, Carole (2024). "The long tail business model in publishing: The case of Hachette's romance division in France " Business Model Innovation in Creative and Cultural Industries, Ed. Pierre Roy, Estelle Pellegrin-Boucher. Routledge. 69-88. [Abstract available from https://doi.org/10.4324/9781032714462-5 ]

Šmídová, Monika Markéta (2024). " 'Oh, my friend, those weren’t angels': Trauma, Recovery and Folklore in The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal and Spectred Isle by KJ Charles". Journal of Popular Romance Studies 13.

 

Valovirta, Elina (2024) "Love and Loss: Corals and Cultural Sustainability in Caribbean Popular Romance Novels." Arrivals and Departures: The Human Relationship with Changing Biodiversity. Ed. Otto Latva, Heta Lähdesmäki, Kirsi Sonck-Rautio and Harri Uusitalo. De Grutyer. 109-126. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111215273-006

 

CFP (on Sarah J. Maas), and lots of new publications (emotions, vasectomies, comics, deposit libraries, aro-ace romance, dance history)

The Journal of Popular Romance Studies has put out a call for papers for a

Special Issue: Sarah J. Maas

Millions of adolescent and adult readers alike have been drawn to Sarah J. Maas’s YA fantasy-romance series for their representations of empowered, embattled young women, their immersive fantasy worlds, and especially their romance narratives. From the Throne of Glass  (2012-18) and A Court of Thorns and Roses (2015-21) books to Crescent City (2020-24), her current series-in-progress, Maas has become wildly popular for the complex romantic and sexual relationships she portrays. The Journal of Popular Romance Studies (JPRS) seeks articles for a special issue focused on Maas’s fiction. These articles may focus on any of Maas’s works and may take a variety of disciplinary approaches.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

• Intersections of romance and politics, including connections between sexual agency and political agency in Maas’s fiction
• How Maas’s work engages with feminism and/or postfeminism
• Portrayals of or discourses on assault, trauma, and/or PTSD in Maas’s fiction and romance as trauma narrative
• Maas’s adaptation of fairy tales in her romance narratives
• Representations of sex and sexuality in Maas’s work
• Portrayals of gender in Maas’s work
• Maas’s engagement with traditional romance-genre tropes
• Renderings of adolescence and adult-youth power dynamics in romantic pairings and other relationships in Maas’s fiction
• Maas’s portrayal of LGBTQ+ or queer romantic relationships
• Class structures/dynamics and how they shape romance in Maas’s work

More details about this can be found here.

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Eirini Arvanitaki's Emotionality: Heterosexual Love and Emotional Development in Popular Romance was published by Routledge in May 2024. It

focuses on the projections of romantic love and its progression in a selection of popular romance novels and identifies an innovation within the genre’s formula and structure. Taking into account Giddens’s notion of ‘confluent’ love, this book argues that two forms of love exist within these texts: romantic and confluent love. The analysis of these love variants suggests that a continuum emerges which signifies the complexity but also the formation and progressive nature of the protagonists’ love relationships. This continuum is divided into three stages: the pre-personal, semi-personal and personal. The first phase connotes the introduction of the protagonists and describes the sexual attraction they experience for each other. The second phase refers to the initiation of the sexual interaction of the heroine and hero without any emotional involvement. The third and final phase begins when emotions such as jealousy, shame/guilt, anger, and self-sacrifice are awakened and acknowledged.

Allan, Jonathan A. (2024) '“Condoms Break. Birth Control Fails.” Heroes in the Procreative Realm and Jessica Scott’s “Anything for You”'. Journal of Popular Romance Studies 13.

Cho, H., Adkins, D., da Silva Santos, D., Long, A.K. (2024). "Platform, Visuals, and Sound: Webtoon’s Immersive Romance Reading Engagement." In: Sserwanga, I., et al. Wisdom, Well-Being, Win-Win. iConference 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14597. Springer, Cham. [More details here.]

Deane, Katie (2024). Romance Self-Publishing and UK Legal Deposit. British Library Research Repository.

Lienhard, Alissa (2024). "“I’ll Call it Platonic Magic”: Queer Joy, Metafiction, and Aro-Ace Autofictional Selves in Alice Oseman’s Loveless." In Progress: A Graduate Journal of North American Studies 2.1:59-72.

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And finally, although this is not a publication about romance, Sonia Gollance, advertising her new book  It Could Lead to Dancing: Mixed-Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity, has written a post about some of what you could expect to find if there were more historical romances written about Jewish protagonists. https://jwa.org/blog/scandalous-dance-scenes-romance-plots-and-jewish-literary-modernity

 

New Publications: Minotaurs and Pornography; HFNs and HEAs without marriage; Bridgerton

There are two new articles out from the Journal of Popular Romance Studies and since one of them is by me, I'm going to show immense bias and make this a very short list instead of waiting for more new publications, and I'm also going to list my article first.

Vivanco, Laura (2024). “Feeling Judged: Reflections on Pornography and Romance from a Minotaur Milking Farm.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 13.

I don't have any other scholarship in progress, which is a somewhat strange feeling. I'm still updating the Romance Scholarship Database, though, and every so often I come across items from previous years which I've missed. If you know of something that isn't in the database and which should be, please do let me know!

Kies, Bridget (2024). “Saying ‘I Don’t’: Queer Romance in the Post–Marriage Equality World.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 13.

Reese, Tracy H.Z. (2024). "Beyond the Pale: Genre, Race, and Intersectional Feminist Tensions in Bridgerton." Adapting Bridgerton: Essays on the Netflix Show in Context. Edited by Valerie Estelle Frankel. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. 9-21. [See via Google Books here.]

 

A new book (on Ethel M. Dell) and other new publications

Riding The Tosh Horse: Ethel M. Dell, A Written Life by David Tanner, published by Brown Dog Books:

The largely forgotten romantic novelist Ethel M. Dell (1881-1939) published alongside Rudyard Kipling and other literary giants but was vilified by George Orwell and P.G. Wodehouse among many. Ethel was a recluse, and actively avoided marketing herself as a personality in any way, but her formula was successful. She reached a very large audience publishing 98 titles and earning, at the height of her career, about £4M annually in today’s values. Her plots included a popular and heady mix of heterosexual, implicit same-sex relationships, sexual deviances, gratuitous violence, death and exoticised notions of Empire and masculinity. The veneer of Ethel’s plots was used to communicate her philosophies, her views on life and on her family.

Although being publishing alongside literary giants she did not receive establishment acceptance because of her style and no doubt envy of her substantial earnings. With an escapist and non-literary appeal to a lower middle class reader universe Ethel used a very successful multi-media marketing strategy with magazine serialisation, hard copy books, film, theatre and radio to reach this audience in the UK, the United States, Europe and the British colonies.

A forerunner to Mills and Boon’s success Ethel was very influential in setting the scene for mass market romantic fiction. Barbara Cartland stated that Ethel was her greatest influence.

Befeler, Paige (2022), LGBTQ(NA), Queer New Adult Fiction: The Emergence of a New Genre and Its Impact on the LGBTQIA+ Community. Thesis for Honors in Comparative Literary Studies, Wellesley College.

 

Kluger, Johanna (2024). "'On Thursdays We Shoot': Guns and Gender Binaries in Regency Romance Novels". Ladies in Arms: Women, Guns, and Feminisms in Contemporary Popular Culture. Ed. Teresa Hiergeist and Stefanie Schäfer, transcript verlag. 163-179. [The whole volume is available for free at the link given.]

 

Kluger, Johanna (2024). "Post-Trump masculinity in popular romance novels." Neohelicon. Online First. Open access.

 

Parnell, Claire (2023). "Algospeak and algo-design in platformed book publishing: Revolutionary creative tactics in digital paratext to circumvent content moderation." Paper presented at AoIR2023: The 24th Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers. Philadelphia, PA, USA: AoIR. 

 

Pérez-Fernández, Irene (2024). "Black British love matters: Asserting the transformative power of love in Bolu Babalola’s Love in Colour: Mythical Tales Around the World Retold". Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Online First. Open access.

Ripoll Fonollar, Mariana (2023). Wording deeds: the figure of the suffragette in contemporary british fiction, Universitat de les Illes Balears. [This is a thesis which is not freely available. The abstract can be found here.]

What's On: Talks (on Industry Norms, Black Romance, Heyer)

Duke University's course on romance, UNSUITABLE (with an associated blog and events) has announced that its 2022 season begins

on Friday, January 21st [...] with author Deborah Fletcher Mello who will talk with us about What Characterizes a Romance Novel? Negotiating Industry Norms and Expectations.

All are welcome! Preregister here. UNSUITABLE events are free and open to the public.

That's via Zoom.

On February 26th, also online, there will be a

Black Romance Master Class. Sponsored by the Center for Black Diaspora.

"Those Purple Hands Really Intrigues Me:" Beverly Jenkins' Indigo 

The aim of this master class is to offer a pedagogical and scholarly approach to reading and teaching Black Romance fiction, specificially, historical Black romance novels. What this class will offer is a model, using Indigo as the class text, for teaching the literariness of novel, its continuity with the history of the romance genre, and the importance of reassessing the teaching of and writing about Black romance, and the romance genre in general. What the course will offer Black romance readers, scholars, and teachers is a critical approach easily adapted to anti-racist pedagogy and scholarly writing about romance.

The class is being led by Dr Margo Hendricks and you can register here.

On the topic of Black romance, I was interested to see that Harlequin have now produced a page to spotlight their romances by Black authors (most seem to be "Black romance," though some may not be, due to having one or more non-Black protagonist): https://www.harlequin.com/shop/pages/black-romance-stories.html They seem to be appearing in a wide range of lines: Special Edition, Presents, Desire, Intrigue, Romantic Suspense, Medical Romance, Romance, Heartwarming, Historical and ebook-only imprints.

Dr Sam Hirst has released a round-table conversation with KJ Charles,  Rose Lerner, Cat Sebastian and Olivia Waite which was part of a recent conference on Heyer:

New at JPRS: Special Issue on The Sheik (and a bit about teaching romance in Sweden)

The final additions to issue 9 of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies have now gone online and are (as always) freely available to read, both on the website and in downloadable pdf.

• Love in a Cold Climate? Teaching Popular Romance at a Swedish University
  Maria Nilson and Helene Ehriander
   

[Edited to add: JPRS have just added another article to issue 9

• Venetia: Georgette Heyer’s Pastoral Romance
  Anne Lancashire

 That was added on 22 December.]

In the Special Issue on The Sheik are:

Introduction to the special issue on The Sheik
Amy Burge

The Oriental Beast: The Sheik and Fairy Tales
Pauline Suwanban

Garçon manqué: A Queer Rereading (of) The Sheik
Jessica Taylor

Olive Skin Chocolate Eyes: Echoes of The Sheik on Descriptive Patterns of the Italian Romantic Hero in Harlequin Short Contemporaries
Francesca Pierini

Let’s Not Get Carried Away by The Sheik
Laura Vivanco

The Sheik and Modernism
Ellen Turner

The Depiction of Masculinity and Nationality in The Sheik
jay Dixon

In Defence of the Perverse: Reflections on The Sheik (George Melford, 1921)
Elisabetta Girelli

On Eligible Princes: The Medieval Modernity of Sheikh Romance
Amira Jarmakani

Review essay on The Sheik
Amy Burge and Rachel Robinson

On Teaching, Not Teaching, and Teaching The Sheik
Eric Murphy Selinger

Authors on The Sheik: A conversation with Liz Fielding
Elizabeth Cole

A short set of links: romance scholarship podcasts, LGBT+ issues, and some old Mills & Boon history

A few recent developments:

• Eric's been at the Shelf Love podcast, discussing the history of romance scholarship. There's a transcript too, if you don't like listening to podcasts. There's mention of the Romance Wiki bibliography, which isn't now available but I've expanded on it at the Romance Scholarship Database. The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction is also mentioned, and the introduction to it can be found, free, here (click the "preview pdf" button).

• Jayashree has been on the same podcast, discussing "the various ways romance can be studied. She gives a brief overview of the history of the romance genre and pop culture research, why she doesn't encounter the hierarchy of taste when teaching romance, and explains who romance scholarship is for." 
  

• Queerly Chaotic M has written a document about ways in which the romance community needs to do better with regards to recognising the harms that it can cause when writing or discussing gender in exclusionary, binary ways.

• Roan Parrish has announced she "will be writing the first on-page queer romance in any of the @harlequinbooks series romance lines!"

friends, i’m so thrilled to announce that i will be writing the first on-page queer romance in any of the @harlequinbooks series romance lines!
💗❣️💗❣️💗❣️💗❣️💗 https://t.co/1g6yzSdkqz pic.twitter.com/zwnqYV0445

— The Roan Parrish October Built (@RoanParrish) October 5, 2020

That qualifier about the "series" is a reference to the fact that, as Jack Harbon pointed out, the Carina Press imprint has been publishing more diverse romances for some time.

They have queer men that write for them in a segregated imprint that pays so much less than the main romance lines, and instead of tapping one of them to be the first... Okay.

— Hope Hicks stan account (@JackHarbon) October 5, 2020

• And on the topic of Harlequin/Mills & Boon history, at the other end of the spectrum here's a thread on Twitter about a scrapbook which "seems to have been the property of early Mills & Boon novelist Louise Gerard (1878-1970), and has cuttings from her first success in 1910 to the 1920s."

Papers that would have been given: BGSU conference

The Bowling Green State University romance conference would have started yesterday. Here's Wednesday's schedule: https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/researchingromance/2020/4-22/

To help spread awareness of what colleagues are researching, at a time when people can only do this online, I'll post the titles of papers, including a link to the abstracts.

Carry Me Over the Threshold: Using Popular Romance Novels in Women’s and Gender Studies Classes to Teach Disciplinary Threshold Concepts 
Jessica Van Slooten, University of Wisconsin Green Bay

Finding a Family: The Genre World of #RomanceClass

Jodi McAlister, Deakin University, Australia
Claire Parnell, University of Melbourne
Andrea Anne Trinidad, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines

The Need for Romance Reader Studies

Mary Lynne Nielsen
Keira Soleore

Black Romance as Liberation: Beverly Jenkins' Historical Romance as Black Feminist Praxis and Historical Pedagogy

Nicole M. Jackson, Bowling Green State University

That '90s Kind of Love: Pinnacle Books and the birth of the African American romance novel

Jamee Nicole Pritchard, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

“To Be Able to Love Is Freedom”: African American Historical Romance as Neo-Slave Narrative

Qiana Whitted, University of South Carolina - Columbia

Fan Letters to Betty Cavanna: How Canonical Young Adult Literature Emerged from the Cold War Condemnation of Romance

Amanda Allen

From Pulp Tragedy to the Romance HEA: The evolution of gay pulp fiction and queer romance at Avon.

Sarah Slocum

Roar and Crash: Romance Novels of the Jazz Age and Depression Era

Jessica A. Kahan

Rare Books and Ripped Bodices: Teaching Romance as Book History

Rebecca Baumann, Indiana University - Bloomington

Romance and the Rare Book Trade

Rebecca Romney

Here's Thursday's schedule: https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/researchingromance/2020/4-23/

Appetizing Fare: a comparison of two eras in the history of Gothic literature

Malia S. Jackson

Georgette Heyer's legacy in historical romance research

Alexandra Sterling

The Problem of "Clean" Romance: Blurring the Boundaries

Lee Tobin McClain, Seton Hill University

Browsing is Hard, And Taxonomies Are Dead Sexxy

Sarah Wendell
Stefanie Hunker, BGSU

Pushing Boundaries in Romance Fiction: How Erotic Romance Became Mainstream

Anna Michelson, Northwestern University

The Cultural Significance of Indie Black Romance

Nicole Falls

Writing the Romance: Resilience and Solidarity in the Digital Economy

Christine Larson, University of Colorado Boulder

Cracked Mirrors: Mental Health Representation in Romance

Melinda Utendorf

Let’s Talk About Sex: Examining Language Choices in Contemporary Romance

Darcey Lovell, University of Rhode Island

Plus Ones: Romantic Heroines as Mathematicians and Scientists

Heather M. Schell, George Washington University

Lesbian Romance Novels and the Representation of Female U.S. Presidency

Kathleen Kollman, Bowling Green State University

Reading Alyssa Cole's "Agnes Moor's Wild Knight"

Maura Kenny, CUNY Graduate Center

The Embodied Borders of Gender, Race, and Disability in His Road Home

Trinidad Linares

Today at PopCAANZ: Vampires and Listening

Today there were the following talks given at PopCAANZ:

• No Longer in the Same Vein: the changing nature of vampires in literature and romance: Kate Carruthers
• Love and Listening: the erotics of talk in the popular romance novel: Jodi McAlister

Dr Naja Later has tweeted about the session and I reproduce her tweets below:

Kate Carruthers’ 'No Longer in the Same Vein: the changing nature of vampires in literature and romance':

Carruthers describes it as ‘quite a racy genre from the start’. Vampires are all about sex, but they’re really queer, too. Vampires make vampires through transmogrification and biting, Carruthers notes, a potentially queer trope.

Science and medicine are becoming important elements in vampire narratives. Carruthers identifies a novel emergence of vampires being created by normative birth. Vampire stories like this have an undercurrent of eugenics and ‘improving the breed’. Vampire breeding gets REALLY sticky, as heteronormativity and white supremacy become clear subtexts.

Carruthers takes a close look at the Nazi concept of ‘blood and soil’ and US white supremacist policy to contextualise how reproducing vampires problematise ‘hybridising’.

Jodi McAlister's 'Love and Listening: the erotics of talk in the popular romance novel':

In ‘Faking It,’ @JodiMcA describes how the lead characters share truths as part of their growing intimacy and eroticism. Talk becomes a thrilling part of foreplay. We go back to Jane Eyre as an example of talk as eroticism, particularly talk as a process of equality. A core argument for @JodiMcA is how, in the romance narrative, the hero must come around to the heroine’s way of loving. This also happens in the process of listening.

Outlander example: Jamie believes Clare and declares ‘there is truth between us,’ @JodiMcA describes this as an eruption, the barriers dissolving between them. Listening, trust, and respect means that intimacy can build on their passion.

Diversity and Inclusion at RWA 2018

Diversity and inclusion were important themes of this year's Romance Writers of America conference. Avon have announced the creation of "The Beverly Jenkins Diverse Voices Sponsorship [...] to encourage Own Voices writers to be more fully represented at the RWA annual conference" in coming years. Prior to the event the RWA had announced that

In continuing its commitment to increasing diversity and inclusion within the organization and the romance industry, Romance Writers of America will hold its second Diversity Summit at the 2018 RWA Conference in Denver on Friday, July 20. The Summit is a meeting that gathers high-level publishing professionals, key contacts at major retailers, members of the RWA staff and Board, and selected committee and chapter leaders who are registered for the conference. A summary of the Summit will be provided to membership by August 6, 2018.

The Diversity Summit will once again be moderated by 2016’s Librarian of the Year recipient Robin Bradford. We'll be discussing the results of a survey RWA commissioned from NPD Book focusing on the buying habits of readers across ethnicity, age, and sexual orientation, as well as revealing initiatives within RWA to promote inclusiveness within our own organization and the industry. We will be inviting publishers to share their ideas, in-house initiatives, and ways in which RWA can be a resource for them.

Key speeches given during the conference were also indicative of the depth of the Board's commitment to "increasing diversity and inclusion".

The 2018 Librarians Day Luncheon Keynote Speech from award-winning author Sonali Dev (this is an audio file) called for librarians to think about the voices which have been silenced and pledge to help them to be heard, because librarians have power when they make decisions about which books to order for their libraries.

This is really important. We hope our library and archives colleagues take the time to sit and listen and then use our enormous power to take action. https://t.co/07YqewLXPj

— Browne Pop Culture Library @ BGSU (@BGSU_PopCultLib) 26 July 2018

LIBRARIANS!!!!! This amazing speech is for you. #CollectionDevelopment librarians, this is ESPECIALLY for you. https://t.co/En8EEoPnXL

— Robin ⚾️🍹🎼📚 (@Tuphlos) 26 July 2018

From something Dev says in the speech, I think it was given after Suzanne Brockmann's Lifetime Achievement Award Speech (link to a transcript on Brockmann's website) in which Brockmann recounted how, at the very beginning of her career, she was asked by an editor to make a gay secondary character straight. She acquiesced, but vowed that in future she 'would not write books set in a world where gay people [...] were rendered invisible, [...] erased “because that’s just the way it was.”' Brockmann also referred to current US politics.

The video below is of the entire awards ceremony. The section relating to Brockmann begins at 45:35 minutes (Brockmann herself appears just after the 56 minute mark).


Lisa Lin relates that "During her speech, I saw some who did not appear to react well, and I have seen some negative reactions on social media". Lin is among the many authors who have responded online in support of Brockmann's speech. Nicki Salcedo's response includes examples of how her writing has been marginalised:

Much of the feedback on my books was related to race. There weren’t comments on plot or pacing. No issues with dialogue or themes. The feedback was:

“We don’t have an African-American imprint at this time…”

“Your manuscript might find a better home with [insert publisher of Black books in completely unrelated genre]…”

“Are your main characters Black?” [I pondered this for a long time before responding and decided to say yes. I did not get another response.]

“I find your main character completely unbelievable…” [She was Black from an affluent family]

“We don’t know where to shelve your book in the store…” [With fiction? Or maybe romance? Just a guess…Or somewhere near the Colored People’s water fountain?] [...]

and then there's this, about the different ways the same novel was treated when Salcedo

removed all references to race in the novel. I did not revise or alter my manuscript in any other substantive way. All I did was make the main character “not Black.”

In 2012, that same manuscript became a Golden Heart Finalist. I wish I could say I was surprised. But I wasn’t.

I submitted my manuscript for the final round of judging and included my characters as I intended. Black, brown, and white. At the RWA National Conference, I sat in an appointment with an editor from a Big 5 publisher. She was a final round judge for the Golden Heart Contest. “I read your manuscript,” she said. “I hated it.” This is a direct quote.

Individual contest judges who are biased would seem to be an ongoing problem. This year, for example, Alana Albertson reported that her inter-racial romance received a very low score for the ending:

Received my RITA scores. 1 "judge" gave my interracial romance, Invaluable, 2.9 out of 10, and checked no to the question
Is the resolution of the romance emotionally satisfying and optimistic? The book ends with him proposing to her. Hmm #Rita #ritassowhite pic.twitter.com/hRpzWwSzMX

— Alana Albertson (@AlanaAlbertson) 2 August 2018

The RWA Board had already made changes to the rules governing the judging of the RITAs but these will only come into force next year:

OK, this is the new RITA judging rules for next year. It contains a warning that judges can be asked to explain their scoring, and possible consequences of up to lifetime disqualification from the RITAs (and, one hopes, from judging as a PAN member also). pic.twitter.com/He36DNbqiU

— KJ Charles (@kj_charles) 2 August 2018

RWA responded swiftly to concerns about this year's judging process with the following post:

RITA scores went out to entrants last night and we have heard the concerns of those who believe their entries were subject to biased judging.  ​This year, one of the major focuses of the RWA Board has been to evaluate procedures for the RITA Contest in light of the existence of bias among some judges. This bias results in an unfair scoring of books representative of marginalized populations, and harms the integrity of the award. ​At the July board meeting, the Board passed a new policy that we hope will allow patterns of biased judging to be identified and for actions to be taken against those judges if deemed necessary. [...]

While these policies only apply to the 2019 contest and beyond, we can begin documenting judging patterns this year. If an entrant feels their submission was judged unfairly due to invidious discrimination against content, characters or authors​, we ask that the entrant reply directly to the scoring email with this information. Deputy Executive Director Carol Ritter will review the complaint and will make a record of possible biased judging. These files will be carried over each year and if a pattern is identified, action can be taken as set out in policy.

It is the Board's goal to create a RITA Contest that allows for fair and equitable judging of all entries, and we hope the changes made put us on a path to that reality.

Call For Papers: Publishing Queer/Queer Publishing

Submission Deadline: Friday 17th November 2017
Conference Date: Friday 16th March 2018

Location: University of London, Senate House Library

Senate House Library is calling for papers on queer publishing for presentation at a 1 day conference taking place at Senate House in March 2018.

The conference forms part of the events programme for the exhibition ‘Queer Between the Covers’, held at Senate House Library from January to June 2018.

The presence of queer works on twentieth century publishers’ lists tended to represent complex processes of equivocation, marked by streams of open titillation and multi-layered camouflage. Novels of queer love could be presented by mainstream firms as examining
‘social problems,’ released by pulp presses with lurid covers promising erotic excitement, printed in severely limited and expensive editions to avoid censure, or offered to the public by imprints more accustomed to gambling against censorship with works pornographic in their intent and content. This fragmented world, driven by simultaneous repression of and prurient interest in queer lifestyles, means that it is difficult to delineate a broad history of queer publishing.

This conference seeks to engender as broad a discussion as possible of the area in an English language context, and welcomes proposals from researchers in multiple disciplines. Potential topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Evading censorship
• Criminal proceedings, and the fear of them
• Histories of specific presses
• Publishing case studies of individual texts or authors
• Cloaking and camouflage – the disguised queer story
• Tensions between published scripts and dramatic performance
• Dealing with ‘underground’ presses
• Pulp novels
• Histories of queer pornography
• Classical influences, ‘Uranians’ and other cliques

We invite proposals for 20 minute papers. To submit a paper, please send abstracts of up to 250 words to shl.whatson@london.ac.uk

Details from here.

News Roundup: CFP, items added to the Romance Wiki and more

Laura Vivanco

I haven't posted links for a while so this is a very, very long post. It covers a lot of areas, including items I've added to the Romance Wiki and calls for papers.

Romance readings:

Amy Burge will be at the Edinburgh Fringe (16 August) leading a session about romance writing.

Ali Williams has launched the CatRom Project, "an exploration of the way in which category romances address and engages with social issues. Its primary objective is to create a collection of analysis of individual novels, as well as interviews with authors and editors within the genre on the subject of issues within category romance."

Evangeline Holland has posted a paper on "Pistols and Petticoats: How Women Write the West", which is a reading of Western focused on Jezebel by Katherine Sutcliffe (1997), Fair Is the Rose by Meagan McKinney (1993), and Fall From Grace by Megan Chance (1997). She finds that

In the Western romance, as presented by female writers for a primarily female audience, the frontier myth is strong, particularly Turner’s thesis that the West was “‘free land’ into which the pioneers moved [and] was available for the taking, and that American progress began with a regenerative retreat to the primitive, followed by a recapitulation of the stages of civilization.” (White) All three novels end in some degree on a farm, with little interrogation as to how it is be acquired, but with the implication that it—domesticity through landownership and homesteading—is necessary for a believable romantic ending.

Romance Documentary update:

"LOVE BETWEEN THE COVERS was selected as the #1 choice of all 2015 videos by the American Library Association's Booklist Review".

Calls for Papers:

• Black Love: A Symposium The 80th Anniversary of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. University of Kansas, September 14-16, 2017. The organisers "invite scholars, writers, and artists to reflect upon Black Love—its history, its reiterations, and its futurity—at a symposium to be held at the University of Kansas" and the "Symposium presentations may cover, but are not limited to, the following topics" of which the first is "Romance novels". More details here.
• Lesbian Lives Conference 2017: Lesbian Love/s. University of Brighton, UK, 24-25 February 2017. Dr Olu Jenzen (University of Brighton) specially forwarded details of the conference to romance scholars so it's clear that our participation would be welcome. More details here.
• The Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love, 12-15 April 2017, at the Westin Hotel in Seattle. Panel session for SPSL, to be held as part of the group meeting program of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association. Papers on any topic related to the philosophy of sex and love are welcome. More details here.

Jo Beverley (in memoriam):

News of Jo Beverley's death on 23 May was met with great sadness by members of the romance community, including the Romance Writers of America, her colleagues and readers at the Word Wenches blog, and individual authors such as Lynne Connolly.

Academic articles:

Morton, Leith, 2016. 

"The reinvention of romance: The rewriting, reception and censorship of 'ninjobon' in modern Japan." Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia 47: 85-115. Abstract

Radick, Caryn, 2016. 

"Romance Writers’ Use of Archives." Archivaria, the Journal of the Association of Canadian Archivists 81: 45-73. Abstract

Tanner, David, 2016. 

“Literary Success and Popular Romantic Fiction: Ethel M. Dell, a Case Study.” The Book World: Selling and Distributing British Literature, 1900-1940. Ed. Nicola Wilson. Leiden: Brill, 2016. 83-94. Excerpt

Thierauf, Doreen, 2016. 

“Forever After: Desire in the 21st-Century Romance Blockbuster.” Journal of Popular Culture 49.3: 604-26. Excerpt. [As I've mentioned before, I don't tend to add items about Fifty and Twilight to the Romance Wiki. They're kind of a phenomenon in their own right, though obviously they do have a romance at their centres. This article really disappointed me because it only looks at Twilight, Fifty Shades and a Pride and Prejudice fan fic but nonetheless draws sweeping conclusions about popular romance fiction, such as "Romance’s generic requirement that the hero should be volatile in his affections and sexually intimidating is brought to its logical conclusion in these series" (618). This is not a "generic requirement" of romance: the author would have done better to limit their conclusions to Twilight and Fifty.]

Dissertation/thesis:

Morrissey, Katherine, "Romance Networks: Aspiration & Desire in Today’s Digital Culture" (2016). Theses and Dissertations. Paper 1179. University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

In the media:

Lee, Jenny, 2016. 'Ballymena Mills & Boone author on the world of romance', The Irish News, 13 June 2016. [About Lynne Graham, whose 100th Mills & Boon was published this year] 

Mumford, Tracy, 2016. 'Who is reading romance novels?', MPR News, 13 June 2016. [Nielson statistics on romance readers in 2014/15] 

Thurston, Robert W., 2016. 'Ordinary People Learn History from Teachers, Movies, and This', History News Network, 12 June 2016. [About the historical content in historical romances]

20 March: Workshops in Washington

Laura Vivanco

Love That Dares

Thursday, March 20, 2014 from 1:00 PM to 7:00 PM (PDT)

The George Washington University in Washington, DC is holding a free event about diversity in popular romance which, while aimed at their students, is open to the public.

Three Workshops on Diversity in Popular Romance

1pm:   theme: GLBTQ romance

hosted by: Sarah Frantz (Riptide Publishing)

book club selection:  Blessed Isle, by Alex Beecroft

2:30:   theme: African-American popular romance

hosted by: novelist Beverly Jenkins 

book club selection: her own Deadly Sexy

4:10:  theme: People with disabilities in popular romance, with

hosted by: Emily Baldys (Zane State)

book club selection:  The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie, by J. Ashley

Reception to follow

If you want to attend any or all of these you need to book in advance via this website and Heather Schell, who's involved in organising it, says that as it's

an interactive event, [...] attendees are expected to read the assigned novel (all are available on amazon.com).  Each workshop will also include a brief writing exercise. 

Queering Popular Romance (CFP)

New Call for Papers:

Queering Popular Romance 

(September 1, 2014 Deadline)

In 1997, Kay Mussell called upon scholars of popular romance “to incorporate analysis of lesbian and gay romances into our mostly heterosexual models.” Today, closing in on two decades later, that challenge has yet to be met.  Although print and digital venues for LGBTQ romance have proliferated, meeting a growing demand for such work among readers (especially for male / male romances), and although there is a burgeoning interest in writing LGBTQ romance on the part of both LGBTQ and straight authors, queer romance fiction remains peripheral to most academic accounts of the genre.  Likewise, with a handful of exceptions, scholarship on popular romance fiction has scarcely begun to engage the theoretical paradigms that have become central to gay and lesbian studies, to queer theory, and to the study of queer love in other media (film, TV, pop music, etc.).  

The Journal of Popular Romance Studies therefore calls for papers on “Queering the Romance,” in the broadest possible sense of the phrase.

Recognizing that there are both similarities and tensions between “queer theory” and “lesbian and gay criticism,” we call not only for papers that consider the importance of identity politics to popular romance fiction—that is, papers on romance novels with LGBTQ protagonists—but also for papers which give “queer” readings of ostensibly heterosexual romances, as well as for those which are theoretically engaged with the fluid concept of “queerness,” no matter the bodies and / or sexualities of the protagonists involved.  We think here of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s famous assertion that “one of the things that ’queer’ can refer to” is “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.”

Topics to be addressed might include:

●          Continuity and Change in LGBT romance (including publishing, circulation, and readership), from gay and lesbian pulps to digital platforms

●          Rereading the Romance, Queerly: queer re-readings of older romance scholarship, of canonical romance texts, and of the text / reader relationship

●          Queering the romance genre across different media (film, television, graphic novels, video games, etc.)

●          Queering subgenres and romance conventions / tropes (virginity, sexuality, attraction, betrothal, the Happily Ever After ending)

●          Questions of Authorship / Authority / Appropriation: who writes, reads, and gets to judge LGBTQ romance, and why?

●          Intersectional texts and readings:  queerness and disability, race, ethnicity, illness, religion, etc.

●          Beyond m/m and f/f:  bringing bisexual, transgender, asexual, and other genderqueer romance into the discourse

This special issue will be guest edited by Andrea Wood and Jonathan A. Allan.  Please submit scholarly papers no more than 10,000 words, including notes and bibliography, by September 1, 2014, to An Goris, Managing Editor, at managing.editor@jprstudies.org. Submissions should be Microsoft Word documents, with citations in MLA format; please remove all identifying material (i.e. running heads with the author’s name) so that submissions can easily be sent out for anonymous peer review.  For more information on how to submit a paper, please visit http://jprstudies.org/submissions/

CFP for GLBTQ Studies at MAPACA

Laura Vivanco

Details from here:

Conference: Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association
Dates: Thursday, 11/7 thru Saturday, 11/9
Location: Atlantic City, New Jersey
Venue: Tropicana Casino and Resort
Deadline: Proposals must be received by June 14, 2013
Web Site: www.mapaca.net

The GLBTQ Studies Area of MAPACA welcomes proposals of relevance to the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer communities. Proposals are encouraged on any medium of popular or American culture. Proposals of interest for the Atlantic City 2013 conference might include:

*Queering the Internet: The GLBTQ Web
*GLBT Publishing Today
*Sports and Gay/Lesbian Visibility
*The Female Eye: Agency or Appropriation?
*The Gay Bar: Patron or Patronizing?
*GLBTQ Representation in Contemporary Popular Culture
*Where are we Now: Gay vs. Queer Sensibilities
*GLBTQ Media Coverage: From Suicides to It Gets Better
*The GLBTQ Superhero/ine?
*HIV/AIDS and Erotic Writing
*The Violet Quill writers
*Popular GLBTQ romance novels/novelists
*GLBTQ comics/graphic novels/Yaoi

However, proposals addressing any topic of GLBTQ significance in popular or American culture are welcome. Please log into the MAPACA website to submit a proposal. You can find directions at this URL: http://mapaca.net/help/conference/submitting-abstracts-conference.

You may also contact Dr. Mark John Isola via markjohn—at—alumni.tufts.edu with any questions.

Please note: Presenters may only present 1 paper at MAP/ACA; please do not submit multiple papers to multiple areas. Also, please note a sliding scale fee applies for conference registration.

Love and Romance in American Culture

Laura Vivanco

The Journal of American Culture's special issue on Love and Romance in American Culture, guest edited by Maryan Wherry, is now out. Here's a list of the articles:

Wherry, Maryan. "Introduction: Love and Romance in American Culture." Journal of American Culture 36.1 (2013): 1-5. [Excerpt]

Maryan writes that

Perhaps the most recognizable media form of romance is the popular romance novel which exploded on to the scene in the 1970s. The romance novel is so pervasive that it has its own genre with several subgenres and dominates the publishing field. Popular romance writers explore the vagaries of romance, the meaning of love and the intricacies of personal relationships, yet the genre is frequently considered to be subliterary. (2)

Although, as Maryan acknowledges, her "collection of articles is by no means comprehensive or complete. Media notably missing are popular music and love songs, radio, television, and the popular romance novel" (4), I nonetheless, think it could be of interest to romance scholars for comparative purposes.


Møllegaard, Kirsten. "Cold Love: Silence and Otherness on the Northern Frontier." Journal of American Culture 36.1 (2013): 6-15. [Excerpt]

Møllegaard contrasts Kathryn Harrison’s novel The Seal Wife with Leslie
Marmon Silko’s short story “Storyteller” and concludes that

the very absence of romantic love in “Storyteller” [...] exposes the Eurocentric fabric upon which The Seal Wife’s romantic representation with the Aleut as silent other is based. Reading these two stories back to back invites a consideration of what Rey Chow refers to as the West’s “fascination with the native, the oppressed, the savage, and all such figures” as “a desire to hold onto an unchanging certainty” about the self-other dichotomy. (13)

Has popular romance demonstrated a similar "fascination with the native," albeit the "native" has tended to be cast as the hero rather than the heroine?


Gardner, Jeanne Emerson. "She Got Her Man, But Could She Keep Him? Love and Marriage in American Romance Comics, 1947–1954." Journal of American Culture 36.1 (2013): 16–24. [Excerpt]

Jeanne Emerson Gardner has written a short article about these comics for the Popular Romance Project. Here she goes into more detail. I can see some parallels between the suspicions that exist concerning romance novels, and those expressed about romance comics:

romance comics manifested a fundamentally conservative attitude towards premarital sexual activity. This attitude was necessary in the early 1950s as a generation of adults “worried about propaganda, ‘brainwashing,’ and un-American activities” scrutinized with growing concern the “children’s fare” being marketed by comic publishers with very little regulation or oversight (Gilbert 97). [...] While romance comics’ gory contemporaries, the true crime and horror comics, attracted the most criticism, romances were scrutinized for sexual suggestiveness (Gabilliet 33). As tame as the romance comics may seem to today’s eyes, after Young Romance #1 was released, Simon reported that comic publisher Martin Goodman expressed his fear that “a love comic book for kids” would “do irreparable harm to the field” because it “borders on pornography” (Simon and Simon 125). (19)

Dunak, Karen. " 'Heed Your Creed, Fall in Love and Get Married': New Left Ideology and Romantic Relationships."  Journal of American Culture 36.1 (2013): 25–31. [Excerpt]

There's been quite a lot of discussion this week about romance and feminism. Dunak doesn't look at romance novels, but she explores another area in which the personal can be political, arguing that in the 1960s

While the politics of women’s liberation might have appeared at odds with the celebration of a wedding, and as some activists declared, at odds with marriage altogether, the belief that the personal was political allowed women to shape their relationships and their weddings—personal, but also public events—to express their political views.
As women liberationists identified the private domain as the starting point of women’s political oppression, the reclaiming of the wedding as a political site allowed feminists to celebrate their unions without betraying their political principles. (27)

Abbott, Traci B. "The Trans/Romance Dilemma in Transamerica and Other Films." Journal of American Culture 36.1 (2013): 32–41. [Excerpt]

Rainbow Romance Writers is the chapter of the RWA which "is the home of  professional authors of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender romances" but as far as I'm aware, there are far more m/m and lesbian romances than transgender ones. Perhaps that's because of the strength and nature of existing narratives about transpeople:

As porn stars and prostitutes [...] transwomen are seen as unequivocally sexual deviants who display an easily accessible—and easily dismissible—eroticism as their central defining characteristic.

In contrast to these highly sexualized images, when popular Hollywood films focus on transwomen or male cross-dressers as protagonists, they usually dismiss their eroticism through farce, allowing the mainstream audience to deflect the trans character’s romantic allure with derision and mockery.  [...]

This comedic resolution [...] resolves what some trans activists argue is the most prominent transgender scenario in popular culture: “a straight man tricked by a beautiful woman who turns out to be ‘really’ a man” (Spade and Wahng 247). Anxiety over such sexual or romantic deception appears in a variety of media, from Hollywood films [...] and television shows [...] to legal and journalistic accounts of transphobic violence which cast the usually MTF victim as a willful antagonist who, “used lies and deceptions to trick [her male attackers] into having sex” (Bettcher 44). This theme of romantic deception has been a constant in another popular forum for trans visibility, television talk shows [...]. In our transphobic and homophobic culture, in other words, romantic or sexual attraction to a transperson is, at its most benign, a comic misunderstanding, or, at its worst, an abhorrent deception that can justify murder. (34)

Hobbs, Alex. "Romancing the Crone: Hollywood's Recent Mature Love Stories." Journal of American Culture 36.1 (2013): 42–51. [Excerpt]

Romances featuring older protagonists aren't that common either, and here Hollywood would seem to be ahead of popular romance, though even there

the dual romantic lead has been rather unusual until the last decade. Of course, America is an aging society and with scientists reporting that the majority of Americans will live longer, it makes sense that Hollywood should take advantage of what is known as the gray dollar and provide films that reflect an older audience. Equally influential in this decision might be the older actors, writers, and directors working in the industry (42-43)

And yet, there are plenty of older romance readers, authors and editors, so what's holding back popular romance in this area?