PCA 2008: All together now!

Sarah S. G. Frantz

Just so that they're all in one place, I'm creating this post as a summation of the PCA links:

PCA Introduction
PCA I
PCA II
PCA III
PCA IV
PCA V
PCA VI
PCA VII (not posted yet)
PCA VIII
PCA IX

It's a truly exciting time to be a scholar in this field. I cannot WAIT to see what the next five years holds for us.

PCA 2008: Romance IX

Sarah S. G. Frantz

Romance Fiction IX: Saturday, 10:00-11:30am
New Critical Approaches
Chair: Eric Selinger

"Reading Romance through a Darwinist Lens: The Sylph and Indecent Proposal" Jonathan Gross, DePaul University
Jonathan’s paper was a consideration of whether Darwinian literary analysis was a fruitful way to look at romance? Darwinian literary analysis argues that the creative process is a result of natural selection. The wife who can be sold as a commodity is a theme that is Darwinian, as is a weaker male selling a woman to a stronger one, or two men fighting over a woman and the strongest one winning. Jonathan examined Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire's novel, The Sylph and the novel version of Indecent Proposal as examples of these literary tropes, finally concluding that Darwinian analysis could not hold up to rigorous but more traditional literary as a way to explain the themes of the novels.

"Beyond the Kitsch Mirror: Chick Lit and the Culture Industry" Laura Gronewold, University of Arizona
Laura’s paper was very layered, very interesting, and very heavily theoretical in a theory I have no experience in. While I can transcribe the words and the images I received, I’m having lots of difficulty getting to the heart of what she was saying, so, again, forgive me for the inadequacy of my summary.

Laura’s aim was to establish a framework to examine chick lit through the lens of kitsch. The image of kitsch is one of counterfeit. The term Kitsch about all about taste: clunky, emotionally heavy-handed, laden with sentimentality. There is no "wink" in kitsch taste, like there is in camp. The audience does not have the taste to know better than to like Kitsch. The taste is affected by class, race, gender, etc. There is a complicated interface between aesthetic taste and subjectivity, because taste is a way to understand oneself. Sentimentality is connected culturally to the idea of "average" values. The image in the mirror is connected to everything else that's in the mirror. The heroines of chick lit come off at Kitschy—cloying and sentimental and in opposition to smart post-feminist writing. Chick lit as a whole is a cast-off, unworthy form of literature, seen as unintelligent. Bridget Jones, after all, does not commit to progressive feminism. Sophie Kinsella’s novels are very coy about sex. In The Devil Wears Prada, she never actually shows sexuality at all, except adolescent preference for cuddling, which is very kitsch.

"Romancing the Genre" An Goris, KU, Leuven, Belgium
An is aiming to combine romance and genre theory. Genre theory and study of popular romance novels do not join up, like they should. Why, one might ask, is she interested in the concept of genre? It is omni-present in popular culture. Traditional pre-20thC genre theory argues that there is an intuitive understanding of genre, that genre is located in the text and there is a system of classification that denotes differences and similarities among texts. By this light, genre is seen as stable. Modern genre theory problematizes things more than that. Genre is not located within text, but is found in interactions between text and context, between text and all the institutions that surround the text. Genre, in this light, is connected most to the use and the users of text, but we can't predict how that will work. Genre is therefore inherently dynamic and ever-changing; it may seem stable, but only "stable for now." The importance of genre theory for romance scholarship is that the concept that all genres are dynamic and constantly changing refutes the most ingrained prejudice against romances that they're all the same, all formulaic, repetitive, hence literary worthless. Also, genre theory points out methodological concerns. Genre is used as the only parameter in the studies without being fully substantiated, which is problematic.

The problem in Radway’s study: she was trying to understand how "real" women read romance and why they like it, and uses psychoanalytic theory to do so. She relies on two conflicting genre models, which prevents her from achieving her goal. She asks the Smithton readers how they use romances, which uses the concept of use, which is both constructionist and dynamic, but her formula of romance is a static conceptualization. Additionally, Radway uses structuralist textual analysis, and draws sweeping, unsubstantiated conclusions but undervalues textual variation and dynamic change. She does not "get" the romance, doesn't understand reading experience, because she underestimates the text.

On the other hand, Pamela Regis provides us with a traditional literary history of the popular romance novel. She sees it as old and stable form, with eight required elements, which is also a static conceptualization of genre, a strict definition with eight essential elements. She makes distinction between genre and formula, because the elements can be embodied in a range of ways, which allows for variation, whereas formula is static. She relies on the dynamic nature of the genre, adapted to specific the social and historical context in which the novel appears. However, first, her emphatic claims that romance is "an old and stable form" overshadow the dynamic nature of her analysis. Second, her understanding of genre is overwhelmingly textual and does not pay attention to the use to which a text is put. She imposes her own definition of romance novel on the reader. In fact, the methodological basis of study is somewhat questionable in a post-modernist context, opening her theories up to critique from more theoretical-minded colleagues.

As a whole, then, romance scholarship would methodologically benefit from being analyzed through the lens of genre theory. However, genre theory does not adequately include popular culture and needs to expand. There needs to be a development of a genre model adapted to needs of popular culture, which is what An hopes to do in her dissertation.

An’s paper was incredible. If the promise of this introduction to her dissertation topic is realized in the actual dissertation, the study of popular romance fiction will have a truly great scholar. Watching An’s development as a scholar and the development of her ideas is truly a privilege.

"Nothing but Good Times Ahead? Romance, Optimism, and 'Authentic Happiness'" Eric Selinger
Radway's psychoanalytic analysis of heroine and reader argues that "The goal of all romances is the reestablishment of bond between mother and child." Readers, however, argue that reading the romance has transformed them in important ways, and Radway dismisses them. She cringes most visibly when the Smithton women talks about how reading romance makes them happier and gives them a more positive outlook on life, gives them feelings of hope and encouragement. What if we chose to take seriously the Smithton women’s argument that there is a therapeutic effect to romance reading?

There is empirical research into optimism, happiness, and how these can be created. Scholars like Martin Seligman argue that there are three contributors to how happy we can be: genetics and life circumstances account for no more than 8-15% each of a person’s happiness. Then there's a separate category that can be labeled as satisfaction about the past, happiness in the present, and optimism about the future. In Jennifer Crusie’s Agnes and the Hitman, Carpenter performs a marriage ceremony using these phrases and talks about learned optimism. The way the characters act en route to their HEA helps them move toward it. Satisfaction about past means that the interpretation of the past governs the present emotions about a past event. Rescripting thoughts and interpretations towards gratitude or forgiveness helps build present happiness. In Crusie’s Anyone But You, Charity writes a memoir about her romantic relationship past that is very harsh and cruel. A critique groups tells her that she needs to rewrite the same stories to draw out the good stuff about the past, to show that she has learned from her mistakes and that she should imagine purely as fiction a HEA for the heroine of her book. The cognitive therapy she uses to rewrite her past changes her entire world view.

Optimism can be learned, not as positive thinking, but as recognizing and disputing negative thoughts, rationally and actively. Bet Me's Min learns to dispute her negative interpretations of herself, her relationships, and the world around her. Of the three theories of love, only Beth's fairy tale allows women to have feelings of being in control and it’s the theory that comes to be accepted by the novel as the “right” one. Strategies for increasing happiness in the present include pleasure, and entirely sensory process, and gratification, which calls on skills as we live up to a challenge. Pleasure is consciously taking a mental photograph of an experience, focusing on a single sense, telling someone else about it, and self-congratulation. Gratification is putting oneself through painful things, and living up to challenge. Heroine in Welcome to Temptation does the pleasure stuff in the first sex scene, but the second half of the novel shows Sophie learning how to use her signature strengths. She has always used them with deeply mixed emotions, but she eventually finds a way to put her strengths to use in ways that the novel sees as worthy and she is morally and libidinally rewarded for the exercise. The final scene is not comfortable for Sophie, but she's justifiably proud of herself.

It is generally seen as slightly lower class to be taught life lessons by books, but the concept of learned optimism is taught by romances and readers pursue the aesthetics of romance through optimism.

PCA 2008: Romance VIII

Sarah S. G. Frantz

I will come back to Romance VII, I promise, but I've got this one ready, so I thought I'd post it. Just two more to go!

Romance Fiction VIII: Saturday 8:00-9:30am
Filling an Information Gap: Preparation & Development of the Encyclopedia of Romance Fiction – an Interactive Presentation
Doug Highsmith, California State University, East Bay
Kris Ramsdell, California State University, East Bay

This panel provided the audience with results from the Encyclopedia of Romance Fiction Survey. Romance provided over 6400 romance titles in 2006 with $1.37 billion of sales. It’s important that popular romance fiction have an encyclopedia, because Encyclopedias are at the top of the reference book food chain, proving that a topic has become important enough to attract attention of publishers because the demand is there for information about the subject. The more interest a topic generates, the more reference books it produces and the further up the food chain it goes again. Romance has a history of scholarship, and it has some reference sources, but they are mostly biographical, which is obviously different from scholarship. The survey was to figure out what scholars wanted out of an Encyclopedia of romance, to help determine what topics researchers and other users would be most interested in seeing included in the Encyclopedia. Doug comes to the Encyclopedia from comic books. The Encyclopedia is scheduled for publication in 2009.

PCA 2008: Romance VI

Sarah S. G. Frantz

Romance Fiction VI: Friday 4:30-6:00pm
Beyond the Straight and Narrow: Power Exchange and Gay/Lesbian Romance

Chair: Sarah Frantz, Fayetteville State University

“BDSM to Erotic Romance: Observations of a Shy Pornographer” Pam Rosenthal

It was wonderful to meet Pam. As Molly Weatherfield, she wrote the BDSM novel Carrie’s Story and its sequel. As Pam Rosenthal, she’s written Almost a Gentleman among others. She also obviously has a long history with the feminist establishment in San Francisco, which added fascinating little tidbits to her presentation. Her presentation discussed how she came to erotica and romance as a writer.

Pam got started in the genre through conversations she overheard in the lesbian communities in San Francisco, including an article by Pat/Patrick Califia satirizing the political correctness of feminist culture. She came to realize that the utopian dream of sexuality which obviated hierarchy and domination/submission play were, in their own way, as repressive as the patriarchal mindset that the lesbian and feminist communities were trying to overcome. She is very thankful, however, for the lesbian and feminist communities for raising these issues in the first place, however subsequently misguided they may have seemed. Pam argues that Ann Snitow shouldn’t get a bad rap in the romance community, because although she was arguing that romances are soft-core porn, she was also arguing that women can and should be able to have access to porn. Porn, after all, isn’t not good for women. When she was writing Carrie’s Story, she was having internal debates with Andrea Dworkin about whether she was a good person or not. She argues that the SM novel has a simplistic episodic structure that follows a simple escalation of sexual experimentation. But in some respects, SM novels are also pedagogy novels, initiation stories, bildungsromans. The interesting thing, though, is that they’re told by the bottom, by the student, which throws into question some of the critiques of SM novels as objectifying the bottom, because how can they be objectified when they’re so damn chatty? Pam relates that the sexual escalation was easy, but the closure for the novel was difficult. In Carrie’s Story, the top finally spoke from his heart, forced to face his own subjectivity and the power balance shifted because it shows the moment when the person holding the power recognizes his own limits.

“Lesbian Romance: Identity, Diversity, and Power” Len Barot
Unfortunately, Len was not able to join us.

“Fetishizing Patriotic Lesbian Masculinity: Valiant Butches, Wanton Terrorism, and the Homonational Imaginary” Shruthi Vissa, Emory University
Combining nervousness about my own paper and the complexity, layers, and theoretical nature of Shruthi's paper, I absorbed very little of what Shruthi was saying. But here goes:

The original title of the paper was “Queering the Marriage Plot? Love and Heteronormativity in the Queer Romance Novel” but it changed as Shruthi’s writing progressed. She is examining the spectacular masculinity of butch lesbians, in which the lovers union makes possible the beginning of nationhood. Lesbian romances have been rarely studied, and they have never been studied in light of female masculinity. Shruthi examines Radclyffe’s Honor series with a patriotic white, uber-butch lesbian hero who is in the Secret Service who guards the President’s daughter, and they end up falling in love….

And that’s all I got. I’m so sorry, Shruthi, but I doubt I could do justice to your ideas anyway, as layered as they were. I know I thoroughly enjoyed the paper, and if you want to add a summary in the comments or email it to me, I'd be more than happy to add it here.

“Polysexuality, Power Exchange, and the Construction of Gender in Popular Romance Fiction” Sarah S. G. Frantz
I presented this paper with severe laryngitis—I figured if Diane Rehm could run a syndicated radio show with her voice, I could talk for twenty minutes. So, I did! I am lucky, however, in that I get to cut-and-paste bits of my paper for your edification, rather than having to remember what my notes mean.

By analyzing popular romance fiction through the lens of BDSM identities and practices, it is possible to interrogate more broadly and more deeply the ways in which popular romance fiction constructs gender and the power dynamics and negotiations between hero and heroine. (BDSM, of course, is a combined acronym that stands for the main components of the sexual practices and orientations more commonly, but wrongly, known as S&M: Bondage/Discipline, Domination/ Submission, and Sadism/Masochism.) I argue with Ivo Dominguez that BDSM is a sexuality and a sexual identity as much as Kinsey’s homosexual/heterosexual continuum indicates a sexuality. So rather than one axis of sexuality, there are multiple axes of polysexuality, all affecting each other differently. In Charlotte Lamb’s otherwise vanilla romance, Vampire Lover, the heroine ties up and rapes the hero; it is only the rather kinky act of nonconsensual bondage that allows the characters to break out of the traditional male dominant/female submissive gender roles that so terrify the heroine, allowing them enough individual control over their fate to strive for their happy ending. I then turn to examining female dominant/male submissive BDSM romances. But while fem-dom romances overturn the traditional gender roles, they reinforce the construction of gender—the heroes are more male and more alpha than other heroes, the heroines more powerfully female and comfortable with being female than other heroines, and the Alpha male submissives thereby serve as an exaggeration of the value of the final submission to love of normal romance heroes. But fem-dom romances also present another problem in that they seem to try to naturalize the concept of a essential, even compulsory connection between the axes of dominance/submission and sadism/masochism where dominance and sadism map together and submission and masochism are inevitably joined. Finally, however, the relationship between the submissive but Alpha male hero and the female dominant heroine is—the best word I can come up with is—consummated in a reversal of the roles, an exception that proves the rule and serves to solidify the female dominant aspect of the relationship. So, while on the one hand fem-dom romances experiment with power structures of gender roles in the sexual relationship by making the heroines the sexual Alpha--and pretty kick-ass the rest of the time too--these novels reinscribe both construction of gender (men as "real" men, women as "real" women) and the connection between Domination and Sadism.

PCA 2008: Romance V

Sarah S. G. Frantz

This is the point during the conference at which I started to get very tired (I had a bad cold and laryngitis through all of the conference, and it really caught up with me here). And the papers in this particular panel were very brilliant and layered and complicated, and I just KNOW that I don't do them justice here. These summaries are short and disjointed, and I apologize for that. Please know that the papers were fabulous and interesting and much much better than what I have below.

Romance Fiction V: Friday 2:30-4:00pm
Recurring Figures, Enduring Debates
Chair: Eric Selinger, DePaul University

"Rape as Memory: Re-examining Sexual Violence in Romance Fiction" Jayashree Kamble, University of Minnesota
The presence of rape in romance reflects the reality of life during the time the romance is written. Jayashree examines the use of rape in the 1970s and 1980s bodice rippers, then looks at how rape is used in JD Robb's In Death series. In the older novels, the heroes raped the heroine. Nowadays it's usually other people raping the heroine. Robb's novels show the heroine's rapist as her father, which separates rape and romance, reflecting a new social outlook about rape and romance. The rapist as the heroine's one true love shows the cultural idea that women were afraid to report rape for fear of the loss of their reputations. Romance fiction has understandably been a lightening rod for issues of rape and romance, however, novels like the In Death series forces reconsideration of romance's use of rape. Modern romances document the end of the conspiracy of silence around rape. Early romances did not challenge rape, but they reflected the reality of the time. They did not provide a moment of revolution but did still provide a moment of critique. Now, in Robb's books, the father/patriarch is being accused and symbolically punished for the abuse of the heroine. The genre is a "scribe" of the victimization of women to violence by men and provide an indictment of the legal system that holds everything else higher than protecting women. In one In Death novel, Roarke is coerced as well in the one instance that he has sex with a reluctant Eve. Sharon Stockton's argument show that men are acting in a pre-existing script at the will of patriarchy, as well as heroines, that they are victims in the act of raping as women are in being raped. Romances rewrite the patriarchal script to make us uncomfortable with it.

"Harems and Houris: Literary Antecedents of Orientalist Historical Romances" Hsu-Ming Teo, Macquarie University
Hsu-Ming is (I think) primarily an historian. She also talks very quickly, with very full PowerPoint slides, so I got lost in a lot of the detail when trying to take notes on her talk. It was brilliant, I hasten to add, and informed us all about a fascinating sub-genre, but I missed a lot of it, as my paltry notes below reveal. I apologize!

The 1920s and 1930s were host to a huge outpouring of desert romances, which then died after WWII until the 1990s. The modern romances provide a very positive representation of middle eastern characters. The tropes of the sub-genre include virgin heroines, abduction, orientalist characteristics, opulence of the east, hybrid heroes (ethnically muslim/culturally western), romantic love and conversion. Historical harem romances started in the 1970s. There is a strong connection between the Orient and sexuality which arises from the historical evolution of the western vision of the East. There is a sophisticated history of love poetry in the Middle East in which enslaved English virgins conquer the head of the seraglio. Byron's oriental poetry, starting with the The Giaor, leaves a long legacy for romances to continue.

"Deconstructing Desire, Reconstructing the Bodice: Romance Novels and the Paradox of Love" Angela Toscano
The romance can be defined as a story about journeys, with each protagonist on a quest. Why is a marriage a happy ending? Is it merely a convenient trope? Binaries always lead to hierarchies and the HEA subverts hierarchies, by giving equal weight to the journeys of both protagonists. Protagonists are separate subjects. The heroine's cleverness puts her at odds with the world. Beneath the outward opposition between the hero and heroine lies a sense of commonality. In Georgette Heyer's Devil's Cub, both Vidal and Mary are proud—Vidal can flout authority, Mary always runs away to avoid obligations to other people. Mary shooting Vidal is the cataclysmic violence of the story, where Vidal finally sees Mary as she really is. Angela also analyzed The Devil's Waltz by Anne Stuart. Romance is to literature what counterpoint is to music and marriage is contrapuntal paradox.

"'The Measure of a Lady?' Representations of Gender in 21st Century Christian Romances" Joanna Fedson, University of Western Australia
Joanna provided a history of Christian romances, including definitions of Christian romance as novels in which violence and sin are not used to titillate. Inspirational romances are heavily regulated by publishers, writers, bookstores, and readers, but are also a rapidly expanding genre, which began with Janette Oke's Love Comes Softly (1979). Lynn S. Neal's Romancing God focuses on women readers, rather than on the texts themselves. Lee Tobin McClain argues that romances are significant in the ways that they are conservative, but also in the way that they are not. Inspirational romance provides a gentle Christian feminism. Rivers' Redeeming Love is a watershed romance because it departs significantly from the traditional Inspirational. Hosea is the passive character who stays home, takes care of the heroine, cooks, looks after the house and garden. The heroine runs away, the hero stays home. There is a very strict idea of what IR is, but this definition is growing and expanding to include new romances and authors as appropriate. Inspirational Romance novels are changing because they're fully engaging in evangelical culture and that is changing, too, caused by changes in the family unit, an increase of evangelical women in the workplace, and generational changes.

PCA 2008: Romance IV

Sarah S. G. Frantz

Romance Fiction IV: Friday, 8:00-9:30am
The Romance as Transformation (Special Session/Author Conversation)

"Romance as a Practice of Freedom" Lynn Coddington

This presentation was a chapter of Lynn's dissertation from the late 1990s. It discusses the conservation and transformation of one writer's practice as a writer. Lynn wrote her first romance in her first year of her Ph.D. program and, in doing so, discovered the most exciting community of readers and writers. She was surprised at how strongly writers were committed to improving their craft, and to marketing for and sharing with readers. Academic studies back in the late 90s just didn't "get" romance at all. She asked an RWA group how romances had changed their lives and was stunned at the variety of positive responses: one woman had started a book store that specialized in romances, one had switched gender roles with her husband so that he stayed at home and took care of the kids, and one had left an emotionally abusive relationship because of what romances had taught her. Romances are an amazing explorations of bell hook's claim that love is a practice of freedom. Academics looking at romance completely missed the power and beauty of romance novels. Lynn decided to do a small ethnographic study of a romance writers group between 1993-1997 for her dissertation. The basic theoretical frame of previous romance analysis was the belief that traditional forms of genre fiction don't invite or excite radical transformations of social change and that romances in particular didn't give women a chance to show truly transformative social realities. The theories of literacy that Lynn was working with needed to focus on personal and social transformation, not on a sweeping scale, but on a much smaller scale, and looking at romance in this way revealed many more examples of transformative, although not sweeping, social change, including the garden variety workings of changes of gendered power dynamics. Lynn asked how writing/reading romance was both conservative and transformative. She examined one writer in particular, "Katie," a 34 year old, married, college grad, RWA writer in the San Francisco Bay Area. Katie had sold her first three books on one contract, and was in the process of negotiating her second three book contract. She had received lots of support from her editor and publisher but had a mediocre agent, who negotiated standard advances and boilerplate contracts and seemed to be scared to ask for anything more. Katie had just attended a local chapter meeting about negotiating with publishers and was struggling specifically with the patriarchal construction of power relationship with editor and agent, because she felt like the recalcitrant child when she was talking with them, and knew she needed to change that view. The novel "Katie" wrote during negotiations embodies the transformation that Katie was looking for in her contract negotiations. She was focusing on the emotional transformation necessary to gain power in the situation while also trying to protect that spark of validation and affirmation that writing gave her, which was why she wasn't more hard-headed about the contract negotiations. While she didn't seem overtly "feminist" from the outside, she was making choices and engaging articulately with the process, both emotional and business-wise of how to institute change in herself and her life.

"Transformation and Resistance" Kate Moore

Kate is coming at romance analysis from three different practices: teaching, reading romance, and writing romance. She has always seen romance as part of a much larger body and tradition of literature and believes that romance is connected to marriage plot (Chaucer and Homer would recognize this plot) rather than connected to fairy tales. Kate works with adolescents and from the outside one can see the potentiality for change between an 11 year old who enters her school and the 18 year old who leaves it, but the kids themselves are very suspicious of the process of change. Heroic teacher stories depend for their narrative success on the transformation of the resistance of the child who doesn't want to be educated. The narrative usually follows the path of the advantaged teacher delivering to the disadvantaged student access to the power that they hold in trust for the students. Critics say that the romance narrative does this, with the powerful, advantaged hero tutoring the disadvantaged heroine, but it's usually the opposite, with the hero being the resistant individual who doesn't want the power of love and the narrative following the transformation of the resistance to acceptance. Sophie Jordan's One Night With You had a very resistant hero and a heroine who is completely devalued and restricted in every possible way, although she has female friends who give her a ball dress to attend a masked ball, defying convention to seek her own pleasure. The heroine has tried to unite the two selves she is, trying to effect her own transformation, but it puts her back in an abject position of marriage without love. The hero makes very clear his rejection of the heroine's self, the person she is. He says over and over that he'll lose control and identity if he falls in love. When he continues to refuse to change, the heroine leaves him, refusing to be with him without transformation. He tries to fall back on the convention of the marriage of convenience, but finally has to admit, "I will cease to exist without you," claiming that the heroine has saved him. Liberation has to be mutual. In Laura Kinsale's The Dream Hunter, the heroine gains a certain amount of freedom she wouldn't have otherwise because of her disguise. She is more valued as a Bedouin boy than as a virgin aristocrat, but she wants to be Victorian lady. Her outward transformation doesn't effect an inner transformation and the hero ends up searching for her under her Victiorian lady trappings. She thinks he just sees the Bedouin boy and can't see the woman she has become. They connect in dream states. The biggest barrier between them is the contract negotiations over their marriage. The thing that gets them together is her realization that she is the only one who knows what he is and if she abandons him, he'll be lost to humanity.

I completely failed to do justice here to Kate's very nuanced interpretations of these two books, and to her discussion of transformation and resistance in the hero and heroine of romance and the power behind it. So please know that the almost telegraphic nature of this summary is all my fault, and by no means a problem in Kate's original paper.

"Parallel Scenes and Transformation: Scene Structure in Austen and Kinsale" Alicia Rasley

Alicia is very interested in how romance novels are structured and examines here parallel scenes that bracket a situation or issue in a novel; the parallel structure demonstrates the change that the characters have undergone from one scene to the parallel scene later in the book. The parallel scene doubles the issues and themes in the scenes, which is so right for romances as the genre that meshes two people into one. Parallel scenes are very similar to foils as a character device. Again, romance comes out of the same traditions as classical literature, all the way back to the Odyssey. The heroine is hugely important, obviously, but there are two protagonists, and we give the guy his time in the sun, too. Why are all the examples of male transformation? Because we're women and want the guys to change. The first example Alicia chose was the two proposal scenes in Austen's Pride and Prejudice. In the first scene, love has overcome him Darcy, an invasion of who he is. The love is presented as symbolic rape, both of him and his assault on Elizabeth, presented with no foreplay, no preparation. They both think the other is trying to make them something they're not. The letter after proposal is the first time Darcy presents himself as HIM, which starts the transformation that transforms both of them. Her change is dependent on his change. There is a change in how he presents himself, even though it goes deeper than that. Conflict is potential in a novel; the more the conflict, the more the potential for change. Laura Kinsale's Flowers from the Storm deals with issues of identity. Jerveulx's identity is stripped away from him. The parallelism in the first and last scenes are about babies that show the transformation he undergoes because of love. Both times, Jerveulx notices before the women that there's a pregnancy. The first scene is with his mistress, the second scene is with his wife and a ghostly staghound. In the beginning, he's a total rationalist; in the end he can recognize the miracle of love and family. Finally, Alicia used a quick example of Dorothy Dunnet's Lymond Chronicles, which starts with Game of Kings: the first words of the novel are "Lymond is back" in the crowd's point of view. The parallel scene comes at the very end of the six book series, from the heroine's point of view, showing the transformation of Lymond's family's acceptance of the hero. Even in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Spike is first introduced knocking down the "Welcome to Sunnydale" sign, while at the end, the crater that opens up when he sacrifices himself for Buffy eats the replacement of the same "Sunnydale" sign, indicating his sacrifice for a love he could never have imagined at the beginning of the show.

Overall, it was great to see three such smart women--romance writers, romance readers, and recovering academics or analytically inclined--who loved the genre they were analyzing. And they had such smart, interesting things to say about how romances were constructed.

PCA 2008: Romance III

Sarah S. G. Frantz

Romance Fiction Open Forum: Thursday 6:00– 8:30pm

The program said, "The Romance Fiction Area Chairs, Eric Selinger and Darcy Martin, invite conference attendees to an open forum on romance fiction. We have in attendance a fascinating and eclectic group of romance writers writing in every genre of romance fiction, publishers of romance, romance scholars, and others interested in the genre participating in the panels. This Special Session affords attendees the opportunity to participate in an informal discussion of a variety of topics of interest to the attendees. Please join us."

We had a wonderful time. We got together in a circle rather than in "typical" panel format of a front table and audience chairs. We went around the circle, introducing ourselves, our interests in romance, our research/writing, and then we discussed what we thought the field of romance scholarship might need in the future to remain a thriving concern.

One highlight for me personally was meeting Lynn Coddington. Years ago, as a baby graduate student, I read Foucault's The History of Sexuality in a graduate seminar my first year of graduate school, and I wrote a paper on how his formulation of confession spoke to why popular romance fiction is so popular. Then in my second year of graduate school, I decided to write a paper on heroes who breast-feed from their heroines during the course of the novel. I wrote/posted to RRA-L and to AAR and asked all the readers and writers there to recommend books that have this scene in them and their response to the scene. I got many responses back, which was wonderful, and the paper, combined with my use of Foucault's theories, went on to be published as "'Expressing' Herself: Romance Novels and the Feminine Will to Power" in Scorned Literature. But one of the responses was an email each from Lynn and Jenny Crusie saying words to the effect of, "You're not alone, even though you feel like you might be. There are more academics who study romances out there than you might think. Keep at it." Lynn told me privately that they also emailed each other, speculating as to whether I was serious about studying romances positively. So it was doubly great to meet her, so that I could thank her for that long-ago encouragement and prove to her that I was serious about what I was doing and that I'm still doing it.

More generally, it was wonderful to see so many diverse interests coming together under the hat of academic criticism of popular romance fiction. We had writers and editors, graduate students and professors, librarians, teachers, and readers there. We discussed how to raise the reputation of romance novels, from trying to get librarians not to rely solely on donations for their romance collection, but to buy them outright, to going into libraries and book clubs and presenting on individual romances, as well as volunteering ourselves for high school teacher inservice days to talk about romances. We also speculated as to what the field of romance criticism needs, including more books (general introductions to the romance, books on individual authors, and on major issues like colonialism and race), awards (still slightly confused by that one), a journal dedicated to popular romance fiction, and more conferences, both within the US and internationally. People offered their services for contacts with authors, publishers, readers, and RWA. Finally, we discussed mentoring of graduate students, and Eric and I (Sarah) would both love to have it known that we would be very happy to be outside dissertation readers for US-based graduate students. Neither of us are (yet) at schools that have Ph.D. programs of their own, but we'd love to help as much as we can from the outside. In fact, another need that was discussed was the need for a graduate program that was "the place" for graduate students to go who were interested in doing Ph.D. work on romance novels, but that's mostly out of our hands.

Plans were made and reputations were ruined….no, no, we wouldn't do that. It was an affirming, fascinating conversation that continued through dinner at a fabulous Indian restaurant within walking distance of the hotel. I don't think anyone could have come out of that thinking that romance scholarship wasn't vibrant and exciting and set to take over the world!

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• Frantz, Sarah S. G. "'Expressing' Herself: The Romance Novel and the Feminine Will to Power." Scorned Literature: Essays on the History and Criticism of Popular Mass-Produced Fiction in America. Eds. Lydia Cushman Schurman and Deidre Johnson. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2002: 17-36.

PCA 2008: Romance II

Sarah S. G. Frantz

Romance Fiction II: Thursday, 10:00-11:30am
Histories and Rediscoveries
Chair: Darcy Martin, East Tennessee State University

"Australia Doesn't Have to Rhyme with Failure: Australian Romance Pulp Fiction of the 1950s" Toni Johnson-Woods, University of Queensland
Toni was reporting on her new research grant, detailing the information about Australian Popular Fiction to 1959 that will be posted on Austlit.edu.au over the next few months and years. She is focusing solely on Australian authors, because it's a government grant to see how much influence Australia and Australian products (both books and authors) have had on the international market. After 1939, cheap pulp fiction that came from US was taxed by the Australian government as a protectionist measure. As a result, Australian-produced pulp fiction only took off after 1945. Researchers have mostly ignored the US influence on Australian fiction, focusing instead on the British influence, but pulp fiction shows how much the US influenced the Australian market as well. Australian pulp novels are worth hundreds of dollars on eBay nowadays (Toni brought some with her to show us, but made us promise we'd give them back!). The novels had a hybrid format: double-columned with comic book-style pictures. The covers kept changing, from comic book covers in the 1940s, to artistic photos in the 1950s, and paperback-style covers in the late 1950s and the 1960s. One very prolific author was Gordon Clive Bleek: he published 300 books in 20 years, 40 of which were romances. He epitomizes the Australian amateur writer; he was a working class man who looked on writing as a way to supplement his income as a postal worker. He wrote a daily diary with details about his writing, his publisher, and his earnings. In 1951 there was a surge in interest in romance, which resulted, if nothing else, in a disjunction between the covers and the plots due to the factory style production. Interestingly enough, females on the covers can meet the gaze of reader, but men are often not seen from the front but instead in profile or from the back. And men were sometimes much smaller on the cover. In 1959 the tax on imported materials was removed, resulting in a flood of US material into the Australian market, although Australians still wrote a lot of Westerns. The University of Queensland bought Juliet Flesch's romance collection, and Toni is currently scanning all the covers and posting them on the web, although in a password protected format.

"1960's Chick Lit., Female Desire and Empowerment: Rereading Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls" Jennifer Woolston, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Chick lit as seen as emergent or as part of the larger romance genre. Studies either look at older authors like Austen, or at new writers like Helen Fielding. Jennifer looked at Jacqueline Susann as part of the chick lit tradition. Susann's Valley of the Dolls is still in the Guinness Book of World Records as the best-selling title ever. Written in the language of common speech, in modern language, it focuses on the drives and the feelings of its characters, acting as a template for all women to discover and identify with it. The book's expression of women's sexual desire, the fact that it wrote openly about female desire, was enthralling to its reader. The patriarchal view of sex was instilled in the character Ann by her mother and was used as excuse for Ann to seek to leave her small hometown. The novel as a whole seemed to be looking for an outlet for female desire in a male-dominated literary world. The depiction of lesbianism shows female sexuality as fluid in nature. Susann unwittingly depicted a poignant social commentary of the feminist criticism of patriarchal culture and its effects on women in society and condemning Susann for not writing an obviously feminist novel is anachronistic. The fact that she focused on female sexuality and female subjectivity is a feminist act in and of itself, even if was not meant to be. One can easily make a connection between modern chick lit and Susann's huge bestseller, because she questioned the dominant power structure, just as chick lit does today.

"Romance for the Masses: The 'Dime Novels' of Bertha M. Clay" Darcy Martin, East Tennessee State University
Darcy discovered Bertha M. Clay in a sale of books (can't remember if it was a library sale or a second-hand bookstore, or what). She decided to do some more research on who this woman was and why her books were so popular. Bertha M. Clay was actually a "stable" of authors with 500 novels to her name. She started as a real person, Charlotte Brame, but she died when she was 49, and her name was continued by her publisher. She was born in 1836, and from 1870 to her death, there's 70 manuscripts that are hers. She wrote the dime novels that had their heyday between 1860-1915 and were the direct ancestor of modern popular genres. Rural women, especially, were the audience and fiction came more and more to focus on women's sphere: home and family. With sensation fiction, they were the prototype for the modern soap opera and were the ultimate example of the trivialities produced for "mindless, passive" consumers. George Eliot particularly condemned the "oracular" novels Bertha M. Clay wrote, novels that she wrote to forward her particular, conservative moral view with simpering, pure heroines. Dora Thorne is the most popular and long-lasting novel under Bertha M. Clay's name. Three silent films were made. The story housed three love stories in one: Dora Thorne and Ronald Earl, an earl's heir. [Bathroom break—sorry! I came back in at the very end.] We should be looking at novels that were popular precisely because they were enjoyable to the readers, no matter how strange they may be to us today.

"Eleanor Sleath: A Writer Rediscovered" Carolyn Jewel
Unfortunately, Carolyn was not able to attend the conference.

This panel shows us some of the exciting new research that is being done around the popular novel for women, if not necessarily around the modern romance novel.

PCA 2008: Romance I

Sarah S. G. Frantz

Well. So, not so much on the live blogging. I apologize for that. The main issue was time. What with the panels and needing to eat three times a day (someone needs to change that!) and spending time with my colleagues and with my mother and son, the blogging didn't get done. But the other reason is because I wanted to do the papers justice. The bare-bones notes that I took at the panels needed fleshing out (and I somehow actually found it more difficult to take notes on the computer rather than with pen and ink and I'm still trying to figure out why that is—although the computer notes allow for quicker editing rather than transcription into blog posts, so that's good), and that editing process is taking considerable time, actually. The straight text below each title is a summary of the panel. I hope I did a decent job, but the presenters and other attendees should PLEASE feel free to correct me. The text in italics are my comments about the presentations, the presenters, and how the paper might fit into the larger scheme of scholarship of popular romance fiction, if and when applicable.

I'll post panels individually and create a master post when I'm done, linking everything together, as Laura did for the Virgin Slave, Barbarian King extravaganza. So without further ado:

Romance Fiction I: Thursday, 8:00-9:30am
The Romance Industry: Authors, Editors, Translators, Readers
Chair: Eric Selinger, DePaul University

"Romance Novels in France: Another World?" Severine Olivier, Université Libre de Bruxelles
Severine is a graduate student in Brussels and a quiet, wonderful person who kept apologizing for her English. While her accent was strong, she was completely understandable and amazingly articulate, and as Darcy said, "Sorry about our French!"

US, UK, Canadian, and Australian romances are translated to target French readers and add a French touch by the French romance publishers, Harlequin and J'ai Lu. The publishers claim that the French authors are not as good as English language writers, and as such, native French authors have few incentives to write romances. Economic strategies influence romance production and the novels are transformed, cut, and adapted so much that original novels are about one third shorter when translated. Changes that are made include narrative and aesthetic changes—repetition and cultural turns of phrase are deleted, because the fluidity of text is of primary importance. Additionally, there is a focus on main plot at expense of subplot and digressions; no suspense subplots are allowed and style is less important than story. Authors as such are unknown and unimportant in France (except Cartland and Roberts), so the authors' names are in tiny print on the cover and their forewords and acknowledgements are never included. This raises questions of who is the author of the novel in France: the author? The publisher? The translator?

Any novel too removed from French experience is not chosen to be translated. Additionally, English-language novels are culturally adapted. The quality of the adaptation depends on individual translators and editors because there are no explicit guidelines. The main modifications made to the originals when translated are to cultural representations of love and sexuality, which are the nodal areas of cultural expression. In the French translations, the heroine's thoughts are emphasized in love scenes. Heroes are made colder and more mysterious than in the original novels. In the French translations, the heroines are more naïve, less combative. The French translations of the original romance novels have to be a little bit more conventional, especially those that target older readers. Irony, insults, and swearing are not kept or are sanitized. The way to write about sex is codified in French, much less explicit than in English. Love scenes in the original are seen as much pornographic than erotic when represented exactly in French. In order to make them acceptable in French, translators add much more cliché, making the reading process easier. French translations of romance novels are more utopian, less pragmatic than English-language romances. The function of French-language romance novels are primarily to encourage dreaming. Overall, concepts of escapism and fantasy depends on national imagery, as is shown in comparisons between English-language and French-translated romances.

This paper was amazing. Last year, An Goris told us informally about translated romances in Europe and how they did not match up the original novels, but to have Severine analyze the differences so astutely and draw conclusions about the cause and effects of cultural constructs around notions of love, romance, and sexuality was incredible to hear. One thing that is so heartening about the current state of romance scholarship is the truly international nature of our community. Having Severine and An and the Australian contingent (Glen Thomas, Hsu-Ming Teo, Toni Johnson-Woods, Joanna Fedson) there added to the Romance Area of PCA immeasurably.

"A Genre of One's Own: Popular Romance Writers Create Community and Heritage" Glinda Hall, Arkansas State University
It was wonderful to see Glinda again. She and Eric were two of the original three who were put on a PCA panel together in 2006 (just two years ago!) because there was no Popular Romance Fiction Area. We can blame them for everything that happened since then, because they were the ones who decided that This Shall Not Do. Glinda is very close to defending her dissertation and will be venturing out onto the market after that. Good luck!

Glinda claimed that her paper was almost in opposition to what Severine argued. It is a condensed version of the last chapter of her dissertation. For her dissertation on Heritage Studies, she was originally planning to focus on very traditional stories and memoirs of Southern women. A theorist of her field claims that a sense of place creates identity and that is what she wanted to analyze. One day she picked up a novel by Jennifer Crusie and discovered in it a voice, narrative, and community that called to her. She also could see connections between Crusie's fiction and Raymond Williams' ideology. As a result, she ended up deciding to write instead an ethnographic study of romance writers in the South.

There is an intrinsic search for meaning in a community. In order to understand the shared and coded language, ideologies, and symbols one needs to be part of the group, rather than merely a dispassionate observer. Glinda had found herself becoming part of the romance reader community, which is what precipitated her dissertation topic, and she started contacting the RWA writing communities in her area. There were groups willing to speak with her, but one group was extremely resistant to her and wary and skeptical of her academic perspective, assuming she was going to be negative about romances. Her pass into all the groups was admitting that she was a reader and fan of romances, just like them. She participated in one group in particular (River City Romance Writers of Memphis) both as an academic, but also as a friend of most of the writers, who accepted her into their homes and lives. She was trying to discover intentionalities in the romance novels the authors produced that would support her own research agenda, but interviews and interactions went in different and fruitful directions. For example, the writers specifically wanted to talk about the publishing world. Additionally, she was interviewing Southern writers and wanted to know how they were Southern in their writing, but many of the writers were resistant to that label—they wanted to be universal.

Romance is an all inclusive group and its heritage has created common ground and communities that accept and celebrate differences. The writers she interviewed expressed the compulsion to tell stories, but were also concerned about dealing with trends (for example, some author hate writing sex scenes and resist the need to be more graphic). Writers claim that RWA is a very feminist and supportive community, which is all about mentoring and sharing and a lack of hierarchy, even within the hierarchy. Glinda titled her paper "A Genre of One's Own" after Virginia Woolf's room because her research has shown her that the genre is a private and safe space to create a female community, and a fiction where women become the subject, the actors. "History" becomes "Her-story."

"Romance Unbound: Comparisons in E-Publishing and Print Publishing by Erotica and Erotic Romance Authors" Crystal Goldman, University of Utah
Crystal is an academic librarian and an erotic romance author.

In her The Natural History of the Romance, Pamela Regis defines the romance as focusing on a single relationship between a hero and a heroine. This is no longer true in the erotic romance industry, with m/m romances and ménage novels. Erotic romance started online at the e-publishing houses and has since moved to New York print houses. (New York publisher means that all works published in paper format, with some potential e-publishing. On-line publishers means all works published in electronic format, with some potential print publishing.) There is an assumption is that NY pubs are more conservative than the on-line houses. Crystal interviewed many erotic romance writers about the differences between their experiences with e-publishers and NY publishers, incuding Kate Douglas, JC Burton, Sasha White, and Evangeline Anderson (those were the names I could catch in a very long list of authors). The first issue that came up was that promoting print book is different from promoting e-pubs. Kate Douglas claims that presses do the minimum amount of promoting possible. Tawny Taylor invests all of her advance in her promoting, which other authors claim is "insane." The issue of earnings arose quickly too, with authors claiming that they make more actual money on print pubs, but that e-pubs are more lucrative for them, although it varies for each author. Douglas said that because the different types of presses pay the authors so differently (NY royalty checks come once to four times a year, e-pubs pay every month), it's actually difficult to say which makes more for the author. As a whole, the e-book market has not lived up to its potential or expectations for it, but the erotic e-book market is the only e-book area actually making money. Lynne Pearce claims in Romance Reading that niche markets become evermore specialized, mainly based on the inclusion or not of sex. Authors claim that they are encouraged, implicitly or explicitly, to push the sexual boundaries: some like it, some call it pornographic. Most authors claim they hadn't experienced any prejudice because of their writing. They claim that, on the whole, the only group they'd experienced prejudice from were other romance writers. Erotic authors claim that this is because the traditional romance authors resent the raised heat requirement across the board. A letter in RWA Report (Jan 2008) calls raised erotic content "prostituting" romances. In general, the "boy meets girl" format has changed. Eden Bradley claims that what is taboo for one reader or writer is different for others. There's a difference between "taboo" being forbidden but titillating and being completely unacceptable, but that line is different for each person and each publishing house. Right now, fem-dom and f/f stories not being bough by the e-publishers. Print publishers will always lag behind e-pubs in innovation and trends because the lag time to turn a book around is much longer in traditional publishing.

This was an interesting paper because there are so many rumors, especially on the internet boards, about the differences between print and e-publishing, and it was wonderful to have Crystal, with her many contacts in the erotic romance industry, give us some insights into the confusing world of publishing.

"Romancing the Reader: Romance Authors on the Web" Glen Thomas, Queensland University of Technology

Technologies have always changed the way communities can be formed, and contemporary technologies, especially the internet, are no exception. The internet and its systems of networks have created communities that could never have been available even ten years ago. Authors are increasingly using personal websites to foster relationships with readers, which allows readers to get a sense of engagement with authors as well as with their work. The online presence of authors seems to create a "personal insight" for the reader on the world and life of the authors. Authors have become very market-oriented with publishers cutting back on marketing, and now see an internet presence and close connection with readers as part of what it means to be an author, although some authors do it with a sense of "well, I supposed I've got to," rather than with a real desire to create that connection. Janet Evanovich's website is a master of marketing that includes competitions that increases traffic to site hugely. She claims a million hits a week. Increasingly authors are willing to discuss the creative process with readers in order to keep material at the site current and regularly updated, which means that readers can now track a book from inception till they hold it in their hands, which changes the relationship between producer and consumer considerably. As a result, readers' relationship to consumption has changed: you can read what you like, when, where and how you like in ways like never before. Technology enables readers to go beyond simply and only consuming printed book. However, most author promotion is largely self-funded, especially with Harlequin. There is authorial recognition that romance market is a crowded place and they have to generate their own name recognition, a situation that seems to be unique for romance authors. They can't simply wait for market to come to them, they have to go out and find market. This new entrepreneurial spirit is good for authors, but of course fabulous for publishers, because they don't have to pay for promotion any more. New technologies have created new field for creative entrepreneurs which changes the capital-R Romantic idea of the reclusive author genius who is misunderstood. The Web, according to Stephen Fry, creates "reciprocity" and "interactivity" in a two-way process, which allows the readers to have an increased investment in the final product. The Dogs and Goddesses site by Jennifer Crusie, Lani Diane Rich, and Anne Stuart includes a blog that actually posts scenes for instant reader feedback, creating a broadened collaborative creative process, between both authors and authors, and authors and readers, allowing readers an insight into production of work itself. Writing, then, has become a public practice and the engagement with new technology changes the idea of what it means to be a writer. However, everyone is still very much attached to the physical book. There are two major issues that arise with an online presence. The first is the time that it takes to keep material current (an author Glen knows calls it feeding the blog monster). The second is the potential for attracting the crazy people. Anna Campbell's Claiming the Courtesan, with its discussion of rape, culminated for her in death threats through her posted email address on her website. Without the technology, that immediate contact would not have been possible. New technology can foster anger that can be vented right away—the loss of the buffer that is so attractive normally goes both ways. Readers also get angry when an author's work goes in different directions than expected. Over all, the bottom-up movement of author-driven marketing made possible by the new technology of the Internet is very different from publisher-paid book tours, indicating how publishing is changing in this new world of ours.

Taken together, these four papers that made up the panel discuss ways in which romance publishing changes and is changed by novels, authors, readers, and new technology. It indicates how romance publishing is an international industry, even when local concerns are important too. It also indicates how romance is at the cutting edge of innovations in technology, reader interaction, and change.

Popular Culture Association Annual Conference, 2008

Sarah S. G. Frantz

Well, we're off to the Popular Culture Association Annual Conference. In San Francisco! ::big wide grin:: It's going to be an absolute blast.

I'll be trying to live blog the romance panels as they happen, posting it after they're done, depending on the hotel's wireless coverage. Otherwise it'll have to wait till I get back to my room. But I'll definitely be updating throughout the conference.

The program is a HUGE PDF. Really huge--my computer dislikes opening it. So here's the Romance Area panels:

THURSDAY

Thursday, 8:00-9:30am
152 Romance Fiction I: Golden Gate Hall Salon B1
The Romance Industry: Authors, Editors, Translators, Readers
Chair: Eric Selinger, DePaul University
* “Romancing the Reader: Romance Authors on the Web” Glen Thomas, Queensland University of Technology
* “Romance Novels in France: Another World?” Severine Olivier, Université Libre de Bruxelles
* “A Genre of One’s Own” Glinda Hall, Arkansas State University
* “Romance Unbound: Comparisons in E-Publishing and Print Publishing by Erotica and Erotic Romance Authors” Crystal Goldman, University of Utah

Thursday, 10:00-11:30am
189 Romance Fiction II: Golden Gate Hall Salon B1
Histories and Rediscoveries
Chair: Darcy Martin, East Tennessee State University
* “Eleanor Sleath: A Writer Rediscovered” Carolyn Jewel
* “Romance for the Masses: The ‘Dime Novels’ of Bertha M. Clay” Darcy Martin
* “Australia Doesn’t Have to Rhyme with Failure: Australian Romance Pulp Fiction of the 1950s” Toni Johnson-Woods, University of Queensland
* “1960’s Chick Lit., Female Desire and Empowerment: Rereading Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls” Jennifer Woolston, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Thursday 6:00– 8:30pm
330 Romance Fiction Open Forum
Golden Gate Hall Salon B1
The Romance Fiction Area Chairs, Eric Selinger and Darcy Martin, invite conference attendees to an open forum on romance fiction. We have in attendance a fascinating and eclectic group of romance writers writing in every genre of romance fiction, publishers of romance, romance scholars, and others interested in the genre participating in the panels. This Special Session affords attendees the opportunity to participate in an informal discussion of a variety of topics of interest to the attendees. Please join us.


FRIDAY

Friday, 8:00-9:30am
402 Romance Fiction III: Golden Gate Hall Salon B1
The Romance as Transformation (Special Session/Author Conversation)
Chair: Lynne Welch
* “Romance as a Practice of Freedom” Lynn Coddington
* “Transformation and Resistance” Kate Moore
* “Parallel Scenes and Transformation: Scene Structure in Austen and Kinsale” Alicia Rasley

Friday 2:30-4:00pm
502 Romance Fiction IV: Yerba Buena Salon 10/Salon 11
Recurring Figures, Enduring Debates
Chair: Eric Selinger, DePaul University
• “Rape as Memory: Re-examining Sexual Violence in Romance Fiction” Jayashree Kamble, University of Minnesota
• “Harems and Houris: Literary Antecedents of Orientalist Historical Romances” Hsu-Ming Teo, Macquarie University
• “Deconstructing Desire, Reconstructing the Bodice: Romance Novels and the Paradox of Love” Angela Toscano
• “‘The Measure of a Lady?’ Representations of Gender in 21st Century Christian Romances” Joanna Fedson, University of Western Australia

Friday 4:30-6:00pm
538 Romance Fiction V: Yerba Buena Salon 10/Salon 11
Beyond the Straight and Narrow: Power Exchange and Gay/Lesbian Romance
Chair: Sarah Frantz, Fayetteville State University
• “BDSM to Erotic Romance: Observations of a Shy Pornographer” Pam Rosenthal
• “Lesbian Romance: Identity, Diversity, and Power” Len Barot
• “Queering the Marriage Plot? Love and Heteronormativity in the Queer Romance Novel” Shruthi Vissa, Emory University
• “Power Exchange in Popular Romance Fiction” Sarah Frantz

Friday 6:30-8:00pm
574 Romance Fiction VI: Yerba Buena Salon 10/Salon 11
When Boy Meets Boy: It’s All About the Story (or) This is Not Your Father’s Homoerotic Romance (Special Session/Author Panel)
Chair: Sarah Frantz, Fayetteville State University
James Buchanan, Matthew Haldeman-Time, Raven McKnight, Stephanie Vaughan
Erotic romance editor Raven McKnight, popular authors James Buchanan, Matthew Haldeman-Time, and Stephanie Vaughan will take their cross-genre style and focus it onto m/m romance, one of today’s most popular subgenre elements. Addressing the particular importance of including the romantic element and character/plot development in m/m-inclusive stories, they will lead a discussion of m/m fiction, its critical elements and the importance of striking the balance.


SATURDAY

Saturday 8:00-9:30am
625 Romance Fiction VII: Yerba Buena Salon 10/Salon 11
Filling an Information Gap: Preparation & Development of the Encyclopedia of Romance Fiction – an Interactive Presentation
Chair: Darcy Martin, East Tennessee State University
• Doug Highsmith, California State University, East Bay
• Kris Ramsdell, California State University, East Bay

Saturday, 10:00-11:30am
656 Romance Fiction VIII: Yerba Buena Salon 10/Salon 11
New Critical Approaches
Chair: Eric Selinger, DePaul University
• “Reading Romance through a Darwinist Lens: The Sylph and Indecent Proposal” Jonathan Gross, DePaul University
• “Romancing the Genre” An Goris, Ku Leuven
• “Beyond the Kitsch Mirror: Chick Lit and the Culture Industry” Laura Gronewold, University of Arizona
• “Nothing but Good Times Ahead? Romance, Optimism, and ‘Authentic Happiness’” Eric Selinger


Non-Romance Area Panels and Presentations that might be of interest:

WEDNESDAY 12:30 – 2:00 p.m.
034 Eros, Pornography, and Popular Culture I
“Ten Cent Sex: The Homosexual Dimestore Romance in Mid-Century America” Joelle Del Rose, Wayne State University

WEDNESDAY 2:30 – 4:00 p.m.
069 Eros, Pornography, and Popular Culture II
“e-Romance as Electronic, Erotic, and Postmodern: Exploring New Forms of Third Wave Feminism and Gender Peformance in Internet Romance Communities” Kerrita Mayfield, Vassar College

WEDNESDAY 4:30 – 6:00 p.m.
083 Film IV: Jumbled Genres–Western, Romance, Caper
Chair: Daryl Lee, Brigham Young University
“Analysis of the Balance of Genres in Films: The Western” Jule Selbo, California State University, Fullerton
“Abundant Loving in Housesitter” William Krier, University of Notre Dame
“Art Imitating Art” Michael Genz, Edinboro, University of Pennsylvania
“`Got No Imagination’: Kantian Poetics in the Heist” Daryl Lee, Brigham Young University

THURSDAY 10:00 – 11:30 a.m.
185 Film and History VI: Representing an Era on Film
“‘The ‘New Woman’, Star Personas, and Cross-Class Romance Films in the 1920’s” Stephen Sharot