The Evolution of the Alpha Male

Laura Vivanco

In the introduction to How Well Do Facts Travel?: The Dissemination of Reliable Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010) Mary Morgan explains that sometimes accepted "facts" are false or unreliable. While the spread of facts is to be welcomed, that of false "facts" is more troubling:

Constraints on the travels of facts may be seriously detrimental to our well-being. Yet the free market may be equally problematic. The internet is such a free market, but one in which - as is well known - it is difficult to recognise trustworthy facts from untrustworthy ones, an age-old problem of open (or free) product markets that has lead to their habitual regulation, for example to prevent the use of poisonous additives to make bread white, or, in the case of travelling facts, to regulate the claims made for the efficacy of medicines.

Chapter 16 of How Well Do Facts Travel?, which focuses on the romance genre's alpha male, is by Heather Schell, and is available online (in a form which does not include the official pagination). That chapter and a recent post by Jessica at Read React Review about evolutionary psychology both emphasise the importance of examining one's evidence carefully.

Jessica's post raises some questions about the methodology used by evolutionary psychologists and was written in response to a recent post about the romance genre by evolutionary psychologist Maryanne Fisher (based on some research I've already analysed). Jessica also adds that "folks might be interested to know that several HQN authors, such as Sharon Kendrick and Penny Jordan, felt very positively about the study" by Fisher. I'm not sure that's an entirely fair assessment of what Kendrick and Jordan reportedly said: Kendrick's comment that "[Their] research into book titles shows that women gravitate towards ones which depict a loyal, fit, rich and sexy bloke. Funny, that! That would be as opposed to a commitment-phobe wastrel who plays around?" certainly isn't devoid of irony, and it isn't an explicit endorsement of the evolutionary psychology underlying the study's conclusions.

Nonetheless, Jordan's mention of

a bedrock instinctive 'feeling' within women that a man who is male and powerful enough to be desired by many women (ie not a stalker type) and who wants to commit himself exclusively, is the gold standard when it comes to the foundations for couple happiness

is not inconsistent with evolutionary psychology, which would explain such a "bedrock instinctive 'feeling'" by reference to the species' evolutionary past.

Schell's analysis of the romance genre's alpha male suggests reasons why some romance authors may find the evolutionary psychologists' approach to the genre attractive. Unfortunately, or perhaps appropriately given that it appears in a book about trustworthy and untrustworthy facts, Schell's account appears to contain some unreliable facts about the genre, including an assertion that "Harlequin [...] owns almost every romance publisher in North America, as well as Mills and Boon." I imagine that "fact" would come as rather a surprise to readers of single-title romances and romances published initially as ebooks.¹ Schell states that

Before the early 1980s, there were not many facts about romance novels. [...] Romance novels had not received any of the attention that scholars had begun to direct towards other types of mass culture; there was thus no contention among academics about what these novels meant. Romance writers themselves weren’t engaged in any collective soul-searching about the meaning of their work, either, in part because the conditions of their labour weren’t such as to foster dialogue: Romance novels were written by hundreds of women working in isolation, without agents, connected individually to their publishing houses through correspondence and through the written guidelines to plot and character (i.e., the “formulas”) to which prospective authors had to adhere. The facts about romance novels in the 1970s were limited to industry-generated data about sales and distribution.
That situation changed dramatically in the 1980s, for two reasons: romance writers organised, and scholars began to write about the genre and generate facts about what it meant. First, in 1980, Romance Writers of America (RWA) was founded.

This account appears to overlook Peter Mann's 1969 survey of Mills & Boon readers (unless any information about readers counts as "data about sales and distribution") and any analysis of the genre published during the 1970s, including Germaine Greer's scathing attack on it in The Female Eunuch and a variety of articles about Gothic romances. Schell also leaves unmentioned the rather important fact that

The Romantic Novelists’ Association was set up in 1960 [...].

They wanted respect for their genre. In her inaugural address, Miss Robins said that although romantic novels, according to the libraries, gave the most pleasure to the most people, the writers almost had to apologise for what they did. This had to stop. (Romantic Novelists' Association)

Schell then positions Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women (a volume of essays by romance writers which was edited by Jayne Ann Krentz) as "a multifaceted rebuttal of feminist criticism" of the sort to be found in Tania Modleski's Loving with a Vengeance. At the heart of that rebuttal is the

Alpha Hero. In an essay entitled “Trying to Tame the Romance: Critics and Correctness,” Krentz described alpha males as “the tough, hard-edged, tormented heroes … at the heart of the vast majority of bestselling romance novels.… These are the heroes who carry off the heroines in historical romances. These are the heroes feminist critics despise” (Krentz 1992b, 108–9). Note that Krentz defined the Alpha Hero in two contexts: as he related to romance novels and to feminist critics. Insofar as he would come to be used as the fact that definitively rebutted feminist criticism, the Alpha Hero was indeed the feminist critics’ enemy. She did not take credit for naming this hero, but suggested merely that he was “what has come to be known in the trade as the alpha male” (1992b, 107). In another chapter, Laura Kinsale cited Krentz as the source of the term and quoted an earlier definition of the alpha-male hero: the “retrograde, old-fashioned, macho, hard-edged man” (1992, 39). Kathleen Gilles Seidel, in the same volume, offered a slightly different origin story: “The term ‘alpha male’ came into use, I believe, because some authors were engaged in a struggle with editors about a certain type of hero and needed a vocabulary for the discussion” (1992, 178). Seidel liked the term in part because she saw it as “the only piece of jargon that has originated from the authors themselves” (1992, 178). None of these stories acknowledge the alpha male as a construct originating in a scientific community.

I'd like to quote Seidel in full and in context, because I believe she may be transmitting an unreliable fact. She writes that "what makes romance heroes romantic" is that "They surprise you, they unsettle you, they bring drama and excitement, but in the end they make you feel safe" (163). Her comments about the term "alpha male" appear in a footnote to that statement:

Which aspect of the hero is emphasized the most determines whether he is an "alpha male" or a "wimp." What interests me about this distinction is that, so far as I know, this is the only piece of jargon that has originated from the authors themselves, even though we are a close-knit community with astonishing lines of communication.
I view this lack of jargon as evidence of two things. First is the absolute sincerity with which we view our books. Glib, dismissive jargon does not feel appropriate. Second is that we view each book as unique. What matters to us is how each book differs from the others, something that jargon does not account for.
The term "alpha male" came into use, I believe, because some authors were engaged in a struggle with editors about a certain type of hero and needed a vocabulary for the discussion. (178)

There is, however, an alternative story of the romance genre's adoption of the term "alpha" which both challenges the view that it "originated from the authors themselves" and "acknowledge[s] the alpha male as a construct originating in a scientific community":

Although the modern Mills & Boon romance, tied to a specific formula, did not yet exist in the 1930s, it is apparent that Charles Boon did set down a few ground rules for his authors. Some have survived, and were passed down through the years in the firm by two names: 'Lubbock's Law' and 'the Alphaman'. Both still have an impact today. [...] The 'Alphaman' was based on what Alan Boon referred to as a 'law of nature': that the female of any species will be most intensely attracted to the strongest male of the species, or the Alpha. (McAleer 149-150)

In an earlier essay by McAleer we find the alpha male contrasted with the "wimp" (but note the lack of reference to Charles Boon):

The two main company guidelines for writers (still in use today) are called 'Lubbock's Law' and The Alphaman'. Lubbock's Law endorses the views of the literary critic Percy Lubbock, who argued that stories should be written from the heroine's point of view; that would promote reader identification and increase suspense and interest accordingly. The Alphaman', according to the Boon brothers, is based upon a 'law of nature': that is, the female of any species will always be most intensely attracted to the strongest male of the species, the alpha. In other words, the hero must be absolutely top-notch and unique. The wimp type doesn't work. Women don't want an honest Joe,' Alan Boon said. (275)

If McAleer's facts are correct, then it begins to seem unlikely that Krentz was, as Schell suggests, "the author who introduced the term 'alpha male' to the romance community" and Schell would also be incorrect in stating that "Feminist literary criticism was the original goad that prompted romance writers to seek alternative explanations of romance novels’ appeal, and, via a somewhat indirect path, led to their discovery of the Alpha Hero." Of course, it might be that American romance authors adopted the term entirely independently of any input from the Boons and the editors who'd worked for them at Mills & Boon. It's possible, I suppose, since for quite a long time after Harlequin took over Mills & Boon the company didn't have many US authors.

An earlier date for the adoption of the term "alpha" (whether in the form "Alphaman," "alpha male" or "alpha hero") to describe a particular type of romance hero would not invalidate Schell's facts about the spread of the term in the US around the time of the publication of Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, nor its definition in that context. The Boons' version(s) of the Alphaman, based on their belief that the "laws of nature" which apply to many species of animals also apply to humans, may have differed from the alpha males created by romance authors who, Schell suggests, were influenced by evolutionary psychology, as evidenced by their references to 'cave days' and 'the ancestral hunter' in descriptions of the alpha hero. On the other hand, even if they weren't aware of Boon's term for him, it seems impossible that US authors could have remained unaware of the Mills & Boon "Alphaman" as a character type, since Harlequin had been publishing romances edited in in the UK by Mills & Boon for some considerable time before the publication of Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women.

Schell's focus on evolutionary psychology as the unmentioned source of the "alpha" hero, and her assumption that he emerged in response to feminist criticism of the genre, leads her to conclude that

once the battle with academic feminism was over, there simply was not as much need for the facts about sexual strategies. Even as the animal behaviour model gained ascendancy in American popular culture, the Alpha Hero’s star began to fade within the romance writing community.

and

No longer a staple in mainstream romance, the Alpha Hero survives primarily in the paranormal subgenre, in which, in his dual role of monster and lover, there is no doubt that he is a fantasy character and not a fact.

I suspect that many romance authors and readers would be rather surprised to learn that alpha heroes survive "primarily in the paranormal subgenre." Of course, it depends on how one defines the "alpha" hero. If one assumes an "alpha" hero must be based on cavemen and male hunter-gatherers, then perhaps that's true. But if the term "alpha" is being used primarily as the opposite of "wimp" (i.e. "beta"), or as a shorthand for a range of qualities which make him "absolutely top-notch and unique" then there is room for the term itself to continue to have relevance, even as the heroes to which it refers change over the decades.

I have the feeling, though, that Schell's real interest is in the "facts" of evolutionary psychology, and all the preceding facts (both reliable and otherwise) about the romance genre are given in order to provide background for her analysis of the ways in which evolutionary psychologists have attempted to use the romance genre as proof that their theories are correct:

the truth status of the Alpha Hero facts for evolutionary psychology is based on the facts’ freedom from the influence of human culture. If instead it was clearly understood that the romance community had adopted and perpetuated the Alpha Hero facts, then the heroes of romance novels might cease to embody the facts. The novels would no longer look like “a window into our natural preferences” (Salmon 245) – that is, a clear, transparent, unmediated view of our true selves, untainted by culture. Even if the Alpha Hero facts could survive, they would be messier, equivocal facts, tainted with human intent.

If it was the Boons, rather than Krentz, who popularised the concept of the "alpha" hero, Schell's case is perhaps even stronger, since McAleer provides clear evidence of the ways in which the Boons provided their authors with considerable editorial direction.

Has anyone else got some reliable facts about when or how the term "alpha" came to be used to describe romance heroes? Has the meaning of the term changed over time? And do you think the alpha hero himself is in decline, or has he just evolved quite quickly since the 1980s?
---------

• McAleer, Joseph. "Scenes from Love and Marriage: Mills and Boon and the Popular Publishing Industry in Britain, 1908-1950." Twentieth Century British History 1.3 (1990): 264-288.
• McAleer, Joseph. Passion’s Fortune: The Story of Mills & Boon. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.
• Morgan, Mary S. "Travelling Facts." How Well Do "Facts" Travel?: The Dissemination of Reliable Knowledge. Ed. Peter Howlett and Mary S. Morgan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. [Quotations from unofficial version available here (pdf).]
• Schell, Heather. "The Love Life of a Fact." How Well Do "Facts" Travel?: The Dissemination of Reliable Knowledge. Ed. Peter Howlett and Mary S. Morgan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. [Quotations from unofficial copy available here (doc).]
• Seidel, Kathleen Gilles. "Judge Me by the Joy I Bring." Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance. Ed. Jayne Ann Krentz. Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania P., 1992. 159-179.

1 I also find the following description of single-title romances rather unsatisfactory: "Single-title novels can be longer, sometimes offering Dickensian casts and plots that span generations." It seems to me that if romantic novels contain plots (not simply "casts") which "span generations" they'd be classified as romantic sagas rather than as romances, since romances focus on a central romantic relationship (although they may also depict secondary romantic relationships between other characters).

The image illustrating human evolution came from Wikimedia Commons.

PCA Romance Panel 11: Happily Ever After: Romance Conventions In and Through Film and Fiction

Jessica "was not able to attend this final romance area panel" so she does not have notes on all the papers "but Phil kindly provided me with a copy of his paper from which to derive a summary." Phil Mathews's paper asked "Is Happily Ever After a Romance Imperative?" and Jessica has put up her summary of it. I don't want to copy and paste all of Jessica's post, so in what follows I'm taking it for granted that everyone who carries on reading this has already looked at her notes on Phil's paper.

Phil asks some interesting questions about the possible consequences of knowing that a novel is going to finish with a "happily ever after" but what I found slightly curious about his paper is that although it was written by an academic from the UK, it doesn't seem to reflect the complexity of the UK situation with regards to the "romance" genre. By that, I mean that in the UK what we have is not so much "romance" as "romantic fiction" which may, or may not, include a "happily ever after" (HEA). The RNA has recently updated its website but a previous version (cached here) contained the following description of "romantic fiction":

What is romantic fiction?

Romantic fiction is the cross-genre genre. In the UK it appears under a variety of publishers’ labels including general fiction, women’s fiction, historical, romantic comedy, chick lit, sagas – even spooky – as well as romance. These are among the UK’s most commercially successful book categories.

It embraces Jilly Cooper’s 900 pages as well as the 187 of Harlequin Mills & Boon’s category romances which are published every month; multi-generational sagas and Regency romps; deeply serious meditations on life and flippant twenty–somethings’ metropolitan shenanigans.

The engine of romantic fiction is love and relationships. The bodywork is infinitely variable.

Romantic fiction’s heritage

The first modern novel in English (‘Pamela’ by Samuel Richardson, published 1740) was essentially a romance, a highly coloured tussle between love and virtue. (Both won.) First Fanny Burney, then Jane Austen honed the genre, leading their heroines through agonising mistakes to emotional understanding and a happy ending. The Brontë sisters added social isolation, madness and tragedy; Thackeray gave us the truly amoral heroine in Becky Sharpe. The modern genre was born.

Phil would "like to argue that the Romance genre is stigmatised undeservedly because of the imperative for a happy ending" but the UK's Romantic Novelists' Association was founded "in 1960 by a roll call of notables in women’s commercial fiction" because

They wanted respect for their genre. In her inaugural address, Miss Robins said that although romantic novels, according to the libraries, gave the most pleasure to the most people, the writers almost had to apologise for what they did.

And yet,

even in the sixties, not all RNA novels ended Happy Ever After. RNA Committee member Maynah Lewis ascribed this to women’s widening horizons. Winner of the Romantic Novel of the Year in 1968 and 1972, she said, “In my first novel the heroine didn’t get her man, in my second the heroine was 64 years old, my third was a romantic suspense set behind the Iron Curtain, my fourth had no wedding bells, not even in the far distance.”

So while I think Phil raises some very interesting questions about the effects of the "imperative for a happy ending" in the romance genre, I'm not sure it's necessarily that imperative which is the cause of all of the stigma (though it may well be the cause of some of it). After all, romantic fiction is, and long has been, to quote Phil, "able to embrace the love plot, tragic or otherwise" and yet many authors of romantic fiction still felt so stigmatised that they founded the RNA.

The Science of Love: Good News/Bad News

Laura Vivanco

The Bad News - The Truth About Prairie Voles

Prairie voles might once have been thought suitable mascots for the romance genre, because, although "Fewer than 5% of mammals are habitually monogamous. Prairie voles (Microtus ochrogaster) are among the select few. After mating, the males "fall in love": they stick close to their chosen one, guard her jealously and help her raise their young." (BBC). Or so everyone thought. Now it turns out that

"monogamous" prairie voles are really just a bunch of randy rodents. A study published in Animal Behaviour found the prairie vole, Microtus ochrogaster, displayed considerable sexual promiscuity. Almost a quarter of litters were found not to have been fathered by the live-in partner of the mother prairie vole.

"There is a difference between social monogamy and sexual fidelity," said the study's main researcher, Professor Alex Ophir, of Florida University, Gainesville. "You can pair with a partner for life and still have sex with others - and that is what prairie voles do. There is a lesson there for humans."

The discovery of prairie vole promiscuity is crucial because these animals are favourite subjects among researchers, selected because they had displayed life-long monogamy. These previous studies also showed that dopamine, a brain chemical released during sex, played a key role in determining vole sexual behaviour.

Dopamine - the vole's love drug - causes males to lose interest in other females and acts on the nucleus accumbens, a region in the forebrain of many animals, including humans. Previous studies claimed dopamine locked the vole into monogamy and, by inference, played a similar role in humans - an idea that promised new ways of understanding, and possibly treating, serial promiscuity. (McKie, in The Observer)

The Good News - Romance Authors are Right to Mention the Hero's Smell

I've been noticing that the hero's smell is often mentioned in romances. The description often goes something like this: "he smelled slightly of horse, soap and a scent that was uniquely his." And it seems that smell, particularly the one that's "uniquely his," is important in mate choice:

Among the constellation of genes that control the immune system are those known as the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), which influence tissue rejection. Conceive a child with a person whose MHC is too similar to your own, and the risk increases that the womb will expel the fetus. Find a partner with sufficiently different MHC, and you're likelier to carry a baby to term.

[...] At the University of Bern in Switzerland, human females were asked to smell T shirts worn by anonymous males and then pick which ones appealed to them. Time and again, they chose the ones worn by men with a safely different MHC. (Kluger, in Time)

And in addition, to paraphrase the lyrics of Betty Everett's "It's In His Kiss" just a little, "if you wanna know, if his MHC is different from yours, it's in his kiss, that's where it is":

if the smell of MHC isn't a deal maker or breaker, the taste is. Saliva also contains the compound, a fact that Haselton believes may partly explain the custom of kissing, particularly those protracted sessions that stop short of intercourse. "Kissing," she says simply, "might be a taste test." (Kluger, in Time)

There's even a scientific basis for all those couples in romantic suspense who fall in love really quickly:

Meeting a stranger when physiologically aroused increases the chance of having romantic feelings towards them ... It's all because of a strong connection between anxiety, arousal and attraction. In the "shaky bridge study" carried out by psychologists Arthur Aron and Don Dutton in the 1970s, men who met a woman on a high, rickety bridge found the encounter sexier and more romantic than those who met her on a low, stable one. (Case, in New Scientist)

The Bad News - HEA may turn to Increasing Irritation

The initial glow of falling in love tends to wear off, as described in detail in Kate Nash's "Foundations" (lyrics here, and video and song here), and:

If your spouse already bugs you now, the future is bleak. New research suggests couples view one another as even more irritating and demanding the longer they are together. [...] [Kira] Birditt and U-M colleagues Lisa Jackey and Toni Antonucci looked at how negative views of spouses, friends and children changed over time [...] In all age groups, individuals reported viewing their spouse as the most negative compared with children and friends. The negative view of spouses tended to increase over time. (MSNBC)

and

Psychologists studying relationships confirm the steady decline of romantic love. Each year, according to surveys, the average couple loses a little spark. One sociological study of marital satisfaction at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Penn State University kept track of more than 2,000 married people over 17 years. Average marital happiness fell sharply in the first 10 years, then entered a slow decline. (Schechner, in the Wall Street Journal)

The Good News - True Love Can Last

For some people, however, that initial glow never fades: there are

men and women who say they live in the thrall of early love despite years of marriage, busy jobs and other daily demands that normally chip away at passion. Most couples find that the dizzying, almost-narcotic feeling of early love gives way to a calmer bond. Now, researchers are using laboratory science to investigate [...those] who live fairy-tale romances. (Schechner, in the Wall Street Journal)

And

Aron has conducted fMRI studies of some of those stubbornly loving pairs, and initial results show that their brains indeed look very much like those of people newly in love, with all the right regions lighting up in all the right ways. "We wondered if they were really feeling these things," Aron says. "But it looks like this is really happening." (Kluger, in Time)

For more on the science of love, RfP's got an index of Time's annual Mind/Body special issue on the theme of "The Science of Romance".


Other News

Harlequin's Valentine's site is now up and there are free short online reads available: an inspirational romance, Family Ever After, by Linda Goodnight, and a vampire paranormal, Desire Calls, by Caridad Piñeiro.

The RNA 2008 Romance Prize for category romances was won by Kate Hardy's Breakfast at Giovanni's. It'll be out in the US in April, with the title In Bed with her Italian Boss.

AAR's Annual Reader Poll closes on the 17th of February 2008. Only novels with a "first US publication date (copyright date) of 2007" are eligible. Laurie Gold has clarified that readers who don't usually visit AAR are eligible to vote: "we want more than simply AAR’s readership involved; we want to draw from the entire community of online romance readers."

The first illustration, from Wikipedia, is of the "theatrical masks of Tragedy and Comedy in refined mosaic" originally from Hadrian's Villa and now at the Capitoline Museums, Rome.

The second illustration is of Harlequin, from Wikimedia Commons.

Buying, Borrowing and Keeping Romance Novels

Laura Vivanco

It seems to be survey time in Romanceland.

Linda Esser (Assistant Professor in the School of Information Science and Learning Technologies at the University of Missouri) has observed that "There are only two academic libraries in the U.S. with romance fiction research collections. The collections romance fiction readers are creating may be how these titles are preserved." In effect, all of us who have "keeper shelves" are librarians of our own personal collection of romances.

Linda and her colleagues at the University of Missouri, Denice Adkins (Associate Professor) and Diane Velasquez, would be very grateful if romance readers could answer the following questions:

• What are your preferred sources for the romance fiction you read?
• Why do you choose these sources rather than or in addition to public libraries?
• Do you keep all or some of the books you read? How do you decide which books to keep?
• What do you see yourself doing with your personal library of romance fiction books in the future?

If you'd like to help them with this survey, please email your answers to Linda Esser at esserl@missouri.edu . More details about the project can be found below. The survey raises an important issue for all of us who care about the genre and want to ensure that the novels that comprise it are not lost to posterity (or, at least, do not become very difficult for scholars and readers of the genre to access).

All About Romance is holding its Top 100 Romances Poll:

Throughout the month of October we are polling for your top 100 romances. This is the fourth time since the inception of AAR that we have conducted this poll. We invite all romance readers to participate in this poll - to do so, simply provide us with a list of your top 100 romances, in ranked order. It is not necessary for your list to include 100 titles, but you may include up to that amount. In order for the results of this poll to be as valid and representative as possible, we need as many romance readers to vote as possible.

You can submit your ballot of up to 100 romances, in ranked order, here.

The UK's North West Libraries’ Reader Development partnership Time To Read, in partnership with the Romantic Novelists' Association, is holding a Pure Passion poll. They'd like people to vote for their favourite novel from a list of 20 romantic novels. The romances on the list include Phillipa Ashley's Decent Exposure, Nicola Cornick's Deceived, and Liz Fielding's Reunited:Marriage in a Million. Readers outside the UK are eligible to vote but can't be entered into a prize draw. You can cast your vote here.

----

In addition to being academics, Linda Esser, Denice Adkins and Diane Velasquez are:

romance fiction readers who are interested in finding out more about readers like ourselves. What began as a conversation over coffee has turned into a project that has taken on a life of its own. We’ve explored public librarians’ attitudes toward romance fiction and its readers on both state and national levels with research funded by a grant from Romance Writers of America.

Of course, the more we’ve found out, the more questions we have. We’ve reached the point where we need answers to several of these questions from romance readers. We are interested in romance fiction readers as both consumers and conservators of the genre. From what we’ve found, romance fiction readers do not depend on public libraries for their books. We would like to better understand where romance fiction readers acquire their books, why they prefer particular sources, and what they do with their books after reading them. We appreciate your time and consideration.

Informed Consent:
The University of Missouri requires that research involving human subjects include an informed consent to ensure that participants’ rights are protected. As is customary, pseudonyms will be substituted in all data for all names of persons, public libraries/public library systems, cities, towns and counties. Every effort will be made to adequately disguise the participants’ identities and specific geographic location in any published materials or presentations. The print-outs of any responses will remain in the direct physical possession of the researchers. Relevant portions of the transcripts will be deleted upon request of any participant who decides to withdraw from the study.

Participants have the right to withdraw from the study at any time, no questions asked.

Refusal to participate, or withdrawal from the research project, will have no impact on the participant.

Do not hesitate to call, write or e-mail a member of the research team if you have questions or concerns about this research study.

We ask that you give permission for the results of this research to be used in professional presentations at national conferences and printed in professional publications. If you have questions your rights as a research subject, you may contact the University of Missouri Institutional Review Board Office at (573)882-9585 .

Denice Adkins adkinsde@missouri.edu
Linda Esser esserl@missouri.edu
Diane Velasquez dvelasquez@dom.edu
303 Townsend Hall
School of Information Science & Learning Technologies
University of Missouri-Columbia
Columbia, MO 65211

Phillipa Ashley - Decent Exposure

Laura Vivanco

Phillipa Ashley recently won the Romantic Novelists' Association 2007 Joan Hessayon Award for Decent Exposure,

her debut novel [...] published by Little Black Dress. The judges said: "This book had really great characters right from the start, especially the fish-out-of-water heroine and the hero who is 'always happiest when he's got something to be angry about'. We believed in this couple and their bumpy path to love. There is a real sense of lives lived, the close-knit team, the local rivalries, the small village, as well as the practical and psychological obstacles in the way of pulling the calendar together. We liked the humour nicely balanced with humanity and a bright, contemporary voice. Oh, and it has a cracker of a first sentence!" (Romantic Novelists' Association)

I haven't been able to find many reviews, but there's an excerpt available here.

Given that the premise of the story involves the making of a nude calendar for a charity fundraising effort, I couldn't help but be reminded of the film Calendar Girls,* but as Rosy Thornton of Birmingham Words explains, Ashley's initial inspiration was the BBC's adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South:

Phillipa had the original idea of placing a version of Gaskell's novel in the present day [...] A sharply witty romantic comedy, it tells how PR consultant Emma Tremayne seeks to raise money and publicity for a Cumbrian mountain rescue team by means of a nude calendar – falling as she does so for ‘Mr July’ Will Tennant. Like North and South it is the story of a bright southern girl being forced to travel north, and finding a culture shock and unexpected love in the process.

What I'd like to focus on is not the story but what Jenny Crusie's been describing as 'foreshadowing' using 'subconscious clues':

Subconscious clues are the deep structure clues, really more cues than clues, triggers for the reader that she or he many not even notice, often the motifs and metaphors that run underneath the story. [...] Is anybody but an English major ever going to notice this stuff? We certainly hope not; it destroys the enjoyment of the story. Is it crucial to the depth and resonance of the story, to the catharsis of the reader at the end? Absolutely.

In Decent Exposure the subconscious clues worked for me because I didn't notice them until I'd finished the book and started to think more closely about it. The foreshadowing begins in the first few pages (they're in the excerpt). I'm going to try to avoid giving spoilers, so this will be a relatively short post and I hope it doesn't 'destroy the enjoyment of the story' for anyone.

The most obvious theme is that of nakedness:

Excuse me, love,’ said the bearded man in the front row, ever so politely, ‘did you say naked?’
Emma Tremayne clutched her folder of proposals tighter and smiled a smile that went no further than her cherry-scented lipgloss. ‘That’s right, Bob. Naked.’
Bob, bald, ruddy-faced and fifty-something, nodded as if she’d just confirmed the price of a cheese scone in the local café.
‘You mean without any clothes on?’ murmured a whippet-like lad whom Emma recognised as a local builder.
‘That’s the general idea of a nude calendar, Jason, yes.’ (2006:1)

By the end of the chapter (and the excerpt) we have Will, the hero, agreeing to pose nude, 'But only if I absolutely have to' (2006: 18). What he doesn't yet know is that by the end of the novel he'll have been forced, despite his reluctance, to lay bare his emotional life as well as his body. Emma, the heroine, is his mirror image in that she's fairly open about her relationship history. She gives a synopsis of it on page 11 to a female member of the Mountain rescue team: 'My boss was shagging my boyfriend. I threw something at her and she sacked me' (2006: 11), but she's rather more cautious about literal, physical nakedness.

A second theme is that of risk, as embodied in the activities of the Bannerdale Mountain Rescue Team. All walkers and climbers take a degree of risk, and the purpose of the team is to rescue those who get into difficulties. What Emma doesn't expect is that in helping this team who have

saved over fifty lives in the past twelve months alone and were expert at abseiling and belaying and all kinds of skills which weren’t needed among the sushi bars and coffee houses and mirror-window tower blocks of the city life Emma was used to (2006: 2)

she's going to have to literally take a risk and learn a skill which wasn't required in her previous life: abseiling. She's also going to have to take a metaphorical risk, and in both cases she'll have to trust Will. Will too is going to have to take a 'leap of faith' (2006: 267) as he falls in love.

A third theme which is foreshadowed involves spin and PR. Emma may be a 'a seasoned PR person' (2006: 2) but 'she felt she’d tasted enough deception and spin over the past few months to last a lifetime' (2006: 11). Will may not trust PR, but, as we discover, he has deliberately shaped his own public persona and the reasons for this are hinted at in the first chapter when he opposes the calendar plan on the grounds that it would make the team a 'laughing stock' (2006: 4).

Ashley also slips in details which have a deeper symbolism. For example, Emma's duplicitous ex-boss at the appropriately named 'Rogue' PR agency is called Phaedra. In Greek mythology Phaedra first of all got her husband in somewhat ambiguous circumstances (some say Theseus preferred her to her sister, Ariadne, whom he abandoned after she'd helped him escape from the Minotaur). Phaedra later became an unfaithful wife and, in some versions of her story, a mistress of spin who made false rape allegations against Hippolytus. We also learn that at Rogue

If there wasn’t a pot of Blue Mountain bubbling somewhere in the office, there was always some assistant willing to fetch a Starbucks coffee or a smoothie. Emma shivered. That last beverage was now off the menu. In fact, she hoped she’d never see one as long as she lived. (2006: 12-13)

Emma has swapped 'Blue Mountain' for the hills around Bannerdale and 'smoothies' (both the drinks and men 'with a smooth, suave manner' (OED) ) for Will, 'a man who had all the charm of a grizzly bear' (2006: 4) and whose 'designer stubble made him look more like a grizzly than ever' (2006: 7).

Ashley, Phillipa, 2006. Decent Exposure (London: Little Black Dress).

* At the end of the novel mention is made of the fact that 'a production company [...] want to make a documentary' (2006: 274) about the making of the calendar, just as happened with the story of the 'Rylstone WI Calendar: 12 sepia-tinted photographs, showing various members naked - their modesty concealed only by the jam-panned, cider-pressing paraphernalia of traditional WI pursuits' (The Guardian). This became the basis for the film Calendar Girls, though it's hardly a documentary: ' "It's 75% of the true story," he [Director Chris Cole] estimates. That number might be a little generous' (Carrano 2003).

African-American Romances - A Short History

In 1865 'Julia C. Collins, a free black woman who lived in Williamsport, Pa., serialized The Curse of Caste [...] in The Christian Recorder, the newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church' (The New York Times). Whether or not it is the first published novel written by an African-American woman is a matter of controversy, but had it been completed it might have been the first romance written by an African-American. Unfortunately the author died before she could finish it, so the editors of the current edition from Oxford University Press have written two alternative endings, one 'The Happy Ending' and the other 'The Tragic Ending'. An earlier novel by the African-American William Wells Brown, Clotel; or, The President's Daughter (1853), ends tragically, and the heroine of Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig (1859) is abandoned by her husband.

In The Curse

The novel treads gingerly around issues of sexuality. The principal black women are essentially asexual. Claire [the heroine] is suddenly born on her mother’s deathbed, without warning that Lina was even pregnant.
“It was really dangerous for a black woman writer at this time to talk about passion and desire,” Mr. Andrews said. “There was a prejudice that black women were not faithful, not true to their marriage vows, and that marriage wasn’t prized by black people.”
The book differs from most novels of the period about mixed-race romance in that Lina and Richard [the heroine's parents] are allowed to marry and to be briefly, blissfully happy in the United States. “Typically,” Mr. Andrews said, “white writers and black writers who wrote about racial mixing pack them off to Italy or France.”
Ms. Collins, he said, is taking “the bold step of saying black women should be able to marry whomever they want.”

Monica Jackson recently posted an extremely thought-provoking item at Romancing the Blog about the publishing business and black authors. It seems to me that this is an issue which, among many other things, affects the history of the romance genre, and I've not seen much mention of African-American romances in the academic writing on the subject (though that could be because I haven't read widely enough).* On her own blog Monica offers a short history of black romance:

It wasn’t until the 1980’s that more than a very few romances with black characters appeared. Sandra Kitt [whose first book, Rites of Spring was published in the Harlequin American line in 1984 and whose Adam and Eva, also published in 1984, was 'the first Harlequin release to be written by a black author and to feature an African-American hero and heroine] and Francis Ray were pioneers. Gwendolyn Osborne wrote an excellent article on the subject of how black romance started. A portion of the romance reading market has always been women of color. Black women read romance and read it as voraciously as any group of white women. So what did black women read before the publishing industry allowed black heroines? They read white characters like everybody else.

When I was a teenager and reading romances, I wondered why you had to be white to fall in love according to books. If a black woman wanted to write romance before the mid-nineties, basically she had to write white characters. To put it in perspective, what if a white romance writer couldn’t write white characters and sell until 1994?

In the mid 90’s New York started seeking black popular fiction writers. We have Terry McMillan to thank for this primarily, because with the best selling status of Waiting to Exhale, she made them realize that not only do black people read; they spend money on books.

In 1994 Kensington Publishing started a line of romances featuring black characters, Arabesque. It did very well and Black Entertainment Television acquired it in 1998

If we look at the history of the romance genre in the USA in general, we can see that although romances written by Americans made up only a relatively small proportion of the romance novels published worldwide in the early 1970s, in subsequent decades African-American romances have not gone mainstream in the same way as romances written by non-black American authors.

In 1981, when Simon & Schuster launched Silhouette Books to challenge Harlequin’s domination of the market for short, sweet romance novels (often called “category romances”), most forms of the romance genre derived from British models and most writers hailed from Great Britain or the Commonwealth. Harlequin, a Canadian firm based in Toronto, did not at that time publish its own books at all. Instead, its entire list of paperback romances consisted of reprints of novels that were originally acquired, edited, and published by the British firm of Mills and Boon. As for the other romance subgenres, the lone exceptions to British dominance were the adventurous, sexy novels sometimes called erotic romances or “bodice rippers”, which had come to prominence in the previous decade. Erotic romances, unlike others, had been invented, shaped, and marketed by American writers and editors; and such authors as Rosemary Rogers and Kathleen Woodiwiss had turned many readers into avid fans of the genre [...]. But for the most part, these very popular American writers were few compared to the many British and Commonwealth writers of category, gothic, or historical romances, whose work was imported into the United States and Canada. (Mussell 1999: 1)

and

According to American writers who tried to break into the market in the late 1970s, the firm [Harlequin] showed little interest in recruiting writers from North America or in expanding the typical settings of their books into North American locales. (Mussell 1999: 2-3)

Simon and Schuster spotted a niche and began to publish Silhouette romances which were

a mirror image of Harlequin['s]. Their content was 'sweet contemporary'. The only variation on Harlequin’s content was to accentuate an American theme: The setting of the romance was to take place in the United States, and Silhouette’s hero[e]s and heroines were to reflect American values (Markert 1985: 85)

and, 'In addition, Silhouette recruited well-established Mills and Boon/Harlequin authors, such as Janet Dailey and Anne Hampson [who was not American], and also actively sought new North American authors' (Mussell 1999: 5). One can therefore see parallels with the current state of African-American romances, where African-American authors are recruited to write about African-American characters.

Harlequin bought Silhouette in 1984 and nowadays, with the Romance Writers of America having roughly 9,500 members and 144 chapters it's easy to forget that the American presence on the romance genre's scene is relatively new, and that the RWA was only 'founded in Houston, Texas, in 1980 by 37 charter members'. The Romantic Novelists' Association, by contrast, was founded in 1960, in the UK.

African-American romance authors would appear to have benefitted from the upheaval in the romance world that took place in the early 1980s.Gwendolyn Osborne writes that

By 1980, journalist Elsie B. Washington, writing under the pseudonym of Rosalind Welles, published Entwined Destinies. Believed to be the first-known romance featuring African-American characters written by an African-American author, Entwined Destinies was published under the Dell Candlelight imprint with editor Vivian Stephens.**

Stephens, one of the first African-American editors of romance fiction, bought the first works of several romance authors whose names now appear regularly on The New York Times best-seller's list. Later, during her tenure with Harlequin, Stephens was credited with updating and "Americanizing" the romance genre. She put into place the framework for the Harlequin American Romance, Harlequin Intrigue and Harlequin American Premier editions.

In 1985, Harlequin published its first romance by and about African-Americans with Sandra Kitt's Adam and Eva. [I found the date 1984 given in various other locations, including Sandra Kitt's website.]

Until 1994, no publishing house had a line devoted to black romance novels. Then along came Kensington Publishing, which became the first major house to develop a line of African-American romances called Arabesque. [...] In June of 1998, less than five years after the launch of Arabesque, Zacharius sold the line to black-owned Black Entertainment Television (BET). [Arabesque was sold to Harlequin in 2006 and is now one of the lines published by Harlequin's Kimani Press]

It would seem, however, that unlike the new American-set romances which would not be shelved separately from British, Australian, Canadian or New Zealand-set romances, and which, in fact, are probably what most American readers would think of simply as 'contemporary romance' (though Harlequin does retain a specific Harlequin American Romance line), the African-American romances remain separate. They are often shelved in special African-American sections and there are many lines which are labelled and marketed as African-American romances. Also, while some African-American romances are reviewed by the larger romance review sites (and All About Romance has had some in-depth columns on the issues related to book segregation and the difficulties some readers had in even finding AA romances in their local bookshops and libraries), there are also separate African-American romance review sites, such as Romance in Color. As Monica Jackson observed in her article, there are both advantages and disadvantages to being published in the African-American romance niche, but the Millenia Black case has brought the issue to the forefront of many people's minds and has led authors such as Monica Jackson, Millenia Black and Donna Hill to ask searching questions about the negative aspects of book segregation and why it persists.

• Markert, John, 1985. ‘Romance Publishing and the Production of Culture’, Poetics, 14.1-2: 69-93.
• Mussell, Kay, 1999. 'Introduction' in North American Romance Writers, ed. Kay Mussell and Johanna Tuñón (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press), pp. 1-9.

* Paula Morgan's 2003. ‘ “Like Bush Fire in My Arms”: Interrogating the World of Caribbean Romance, Journal of Popular Culture 36.4: 804-827, deals, as its title indicates, with Caribbean romances. Morgan notes that 'a definite innovation appears to be the creation of protagonists who reflect the multi-ethnic composition of this region's peoples. [...] One can expect these novels, at the very least, to undermine the myth that only Caucasian women can be beautiful' (2003: 807-808). Unfortunately I have not been able to find copies of Stephanie Burley's 'Shadows and Silhouettes: The Racial Politics of Category Romance', Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres 5.13-14 (1999): 324-343 or Rita Dandridge's (2003) 'The Race, Gender, Romance Connection: A Black Feminist Reading of African American Women's Historical Romances', in Doubled Plots: Romance and History, eds. Susan Strehle and Mary Paniccia Carden (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi).

** 'referring to her position as the new editor of Candlelight Romances in 1979-1980, Vivian Stephens (1984) could say, ‘The line wasn’t really looked at to make any money or make a statement for Dell. It was just there’. This lackadaisical attitude toward romances by management allowed Stephens room to experiment.' (Markert 1985: 86)

Defining the Genre

Jennifer asked

will you decide on the definition of a "romance novel" proper? Will they be only the books found on the Romance section bookshelf? Can any love story make the cut? [...] How much mystery or fantasy can a novel contain before it passes from romance to something else?

I think the definition given by the Romance Writers of America (RWA), that 'Two basic elements comprise every romance novel: a central love story and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending' is pretty much perfect as a short definition of the genre. For a definition of the structural components (e.g. 'barrier', 'moment of ritual death') of each romance, Pamela Regis' A Natural History of the Romance Novel is excellent.

One factor which complicates the definition of 'romance' is the historical usage of the term. Yesterday I went to a talk given by Eileen Ramsay, Honorary Secretary of the UK's Romantic Novelists' Association (RNA), and she said that when she thinks of the term 'romantic fiction' it brings to mind stories about knights. In an online article she's said that:

My dictionaries state that Romance is an idealized, poetic or unworldly atmospheric work of literature concerning romantic love or stirring action, medieval tales of chivalry. Romantic means concerned more with emotion than with form; characterized by or suggestive of romance.

She quoted from Robert Louis Stevenson's essay, 'A Gossip on Romance', in which he disparages stories about the 'clink of teaspoons and the accents of the curate' and instead praises romances, by which he means adventure stories.

One observation of Stevenson's which might, however, be applicable to the modern romance novel is that: 'This [...] is the triumph of romantic story-telling: when the reader consciously plays at being the hero, the scene is a good scene'. Though the novels described by Stevenson are not modern romance novels, one thing romances have in common with them is that they are books which stir the emotions and whose readers are often caught up by the story to the extent that they identify with the characters.

The modern 'romantic novel', according to Eileen Ramsay, is a novel with a love-story at its centre. She didn't at any point touch on the issue of whether the ending should be a happy or optimistic one, and this, I think, is a key difference between her tentative description (which, as far as I know, reflects the position of the RNA, though they do not have an official definition) and the RWA's official definition of what constitutes a romance novel. The RNA, as its name suggests, include writers of works which might not be strictly defined as 'romance' according to the RWA definition. The RNA is an association of 'romantic novelists', not just 'romance novelists'.

My feeling is that the RWA's definition focusses on what's at the core of romance. Of course, it's hard to define exactly when a love-story ceases to be 'central' and becomes more of a subsidiary element of the story, but I think most of us, most of the time, are able to recognise when the love-story is central and when it isn't, just as we can say which endings leave us feeling 'optimistic' and which don't. The RWA's short definition is interesting in that it doesn't actually specify the species, gender or even number of the participants in the 'love-story', and I'm glad about that, because I think it gives authors writing in this genre room to explore what is meant by a 'love-story'. They may fail to convince all readers that what they're portraying is a love-story (rather than, say, a lust-story, an orgy-story or a dull-and-comfortable-relationship-story), but they have the freedom to try. The RWA's definition is also relatively open regarding the ending of the novel, specifying only that there must be 'an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending'. Again, the authors may fail to convince readers that their ending is either emotionally satisfying or optimistic, but they're at liberty to explore the various options. In any case, readers are unlikely to agree on which endings leave them feeling 'emotionally satisfied' because, to take a couple of examples of possible elements present at the ends of romances, while some readers find babies romantic, others think them the antithesis of romance; some readers can think of nothing more satisfying than a marriage, others may feel this would restrict the characters.

I think having a definition of the genre is very useful because, as Pacatrue observed, this enables us to think about each romance on two levels:

What I have in mind is that when an author writes a romance novel, they are simultaneously creating a stand-alone work, which can be judged on its own merits, and creating the genre itself. The originality then might come not only from the nuances within the structure, but in creating the structure as well.

Although each work will stand or fail on its own merits, it will also be seen in the context of its place in the literary canon and/or within the conventions of its genre (e.g. romance, the gothic, the mystery) or the literary movement to which it belongs (e.g 'magic realism', 'the Romantics'). Readers conversant with the genre/literary movement will be able to perceive how the novel either reinforces the existing conventions, or pushes at their boundaries.

Of course, not everyone is happy with the idea of defining the genre, and it can lead to dissent and division, as was obvious in 2005 when problems arose within the RWA. As Laurie Gold asked during her discussion of the controversies related to genre definitions 'How far can you push the envelope before it tears? Do you create a larger envelope - or do you suggest that perhaps a second envelope is needed?'. What was challenging the genre definitions that year appears to have been both the erotic romance subgenre and romances featuring homosexual couples. Another issue is whether a writers' organisation should be involved in defining the genre. Personally, I don't see why the authors shouldn't create definitions of the genre - they are, after all, the ones who create the novels. But I can understand why some members might wish to avoid definition, as it can be both a distraction and a source of contention which dilutes the organisation's focus on helping to nurture writing talent. As Anne Gracie says of the Romance Writers of Australia, which is a much smaller organisation than the Romance Writers of America:

The organization is there to help people get published and to help published authors network and learn to further their career. We're not interested in splitting hairs over what romance is or isn't -- we support our members, no matter what they write or where they are in the long journey to getting published.

The UK's Romantic Novelists' Association also offers no official definition of the genre.

Romance is a genre which is often disparaged, and its readers are not infrequently mocked or belittled. For example, Zoe Williams, writing in The Guardian about Mills & Boon romances said that:

Everybody could tell you broadly what they do, but nobody ever reads them; it's not so much literature as a kind of seepage. [...] I understand the urge for a comfort read entirely, but my feeling about the Mills & Boon reader has always been that she's very, very idle. There is so little variance within the template that, really, you should be able to make stuff like this up for yourself.

Eileen Ramsay's talk was originally going to be titled 'The Genre That Dare Not Speak Its Name', though it ended up being called 'The Writing Business', and she suggested that one way to remove the stigma that's attached to romance and to romantic novels would be to drop the genre labels. Why, she asked, could her books not just be marketed as 'good books'? A librarian at the back of the room pointed out that readers would find it very hard to find the books they wanted if books weren't divided up into genres, which takes us back to some issues I raised in previous posts about reader preferences and how they select books which suit their mood. The issue of marketing was also raised by Kimber:

It seems to me that because romance novels are a commercial industry [...] one needs to take into account the commercial definition of romance [...]. Lots of books that aren't commercial romances, like "The Time Traveller's Wife," are romantic in theme. And I've read plenty of novels that are billed as general fiction, that were really straight-up romances (Ken Follett's "A Place Called Freedom" is a prime example).

So much of the analysis of romance novels seems to hinge on the social or political aspects of their marketing, audience, and low literary status, that you almost can't separate the publisher's definition from the actual definition (whatever that may be). From that point of view, it might be worth looking instead at the question, "why do some kinds of books get labeled 'romance' by publishers, and others not?"

I'm not sure there is a 'commercial definition of romance', or if there is, I've never seen it. It seems to me that publishers label books in whichever way they think will sell the most copies. Romance might be labelled 'romance', or it might be called 'chick lit' or 'women's fiction'. It could also be 'historical fiction' or 'mystery' if the book is in a particular sub-genre of romance. The process doesn't just work in one direction, though. Yes, romance may have a 'low literary status', but if it sells, then publishers are willing to put covers on works of literature which might suggest that the contents are chick lit or romance. Recent examples are the new editions of Jane Austen's works: Headline Review's May 2006 Pride and Prejudice, for example, and the same book as published by Bloomsbury, with an introduction by Meg Cabot, have covers which seem to indicate that the contents are 'romance' or 'chick lit'. I'd agree with Pamela Regis that Austen's works are romance, but that's not how they've usually been marketed or shelved, which is something that makes these new editions an interesting development.

Romance, then, as defined by Regis, may, or may not, be literature, and romantic elements are present in a very large proportion of literary works. As Eileen Ramsey demonstrated by reading excerpts from a variety of novels, including passages from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps, Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, Austen's Emma and a passage from a novel written by Sophie Weston (who writes for Mills & Boon, and, as Jenny Haddon, is the Chairman of the RNA), 'purple prose' may be found in works of literature and, conversely, there are some passages in romantic novels which are just as good as those to be found in works which would be classed as 'literature'. Ramsey concluded that each romance or romantic novel should therefore be assessed individually, not pre-judged by reference to the worst examples of the genre.

While I agree wholeheartedly that romance and romantic novels can be well-written, I wouldn't want to jettison the genre definitions in order for them to gain acceptance, and while I can understand why defining the genre may create problems for a writers' organisation, I continue to believe that basic definitions of the genre are very useful, both to readers looking for love-stories with happy endings, and to academics.

Metaromance (1)

In honour of the forthcoming Romance Writers of America conference in Atlanta, and the recently concluded Romantic Novelists' Association conference in Penrith, I thought I'd post about metaromances. We’ve mentioned them on the listserv a few times, but haven't really gone into a lot of detail about why metafiction intrigues so many of us. Metafiction is:

a type of fiction which self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction.
It is the term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.

and one of the most common forms of metafiction, and certainly of metafictional romances, is ‘A novel about a person writing a novel’ (both quotations from Wikipedia).

On the listserv we were using the term ‘metaromance’ to describe romances in which one of the characters (usually the heroine), is a writer, and usually the author of a romance. I thought I’d mention the author-characters of the metaromances, so they could take their place alongside the poet-characters discussed by Eric. In that post, Eric mentioned that questions were often asked about possible negative consequences resulting from reading chivalric romances, and he alluded to Cervantes’ Don Quijote, who went mad from reading too many of them, and as a result ended up tilting at windmills. Here’s a picture of Don Quijote in the world of his imagination, surrounded by all the strange creatures and exotic people who inhabit the world of the chivalric romances.

I thought I'd start with Amanda Quick's Reckless. Gabriel Banner, Earl of Wylde, is the anonymous author of The Quest, ‘the most popular book of the Season’ (1997: 24) and Phoebe, the heroine, is Wylde’s anonymous editor and ‘the mysterious backer who had rescued Josiah Lacey’s faltering bookshop and publishing business’ (1997: 24). Both Gabriel and Phoebe are collectors of manuscripts of chivalric tales. The owning, writing and editing of chivalric romances, as well as a shared love of the genre set the hero and heroine on a quest of their own. In the process, it raises the issue of whether Phoebe and other reader of romances and chivalric romances are mad, or at least, naive, to believe in chivalry, love and happy endings to quests. This being a romance novel, not a parody of the chivalric romances, the answer is that they’re not.

Other metafictional works by Quick, The Pirate, The Adventurer and The Cowboy (all from 1990) have been discussed by Pamela Regis (2003). She writes that:

As a romance novel with a heroine who is a romance novelist and a hero who reads one of her books (208), The Pirate is self-referential. This novel points explicitly to its own genre. Krentz uses the romance novels that her character has written to create a perspective - an echo, a mirror, a doubling, an ironic contrast - for the essential romance elements of the actual novel, The Pirate, that we, the readers, are holding in our hands. Through mirroring or echoing an element of the core romance novel, Krentz adds a set of meanings to the actual romance novel, intensifying them, commenting ironically on them, but never actually undercutting them. This generic self-referentiality becomes part of the courtship. (2003: 171)

This being the season of conferences for romance authors, though, it's interesting to explore not just how metafiction comments on fiction and the conventions of fiction, but also the ways in which the metaromance can explore issues such as the marketing of novels and what is involved in being a published author. The metaromance aspect of Reckless, for example, touches on issues related to the marketing of romance novels. Phoebe describes The Quest to a potential reader as a

novel [which] engages the most lofty of the sensibilities. Very inspiring treatment of the subject of love. You will be especially pleased with its hero. He is even more exciting than one of Mrs. Radcliffe’s heroes (1997: 110)

It’s the verbal equivalent of the modern back-cover blurb and I imagine Quick/Krentz would consider this a fairly appropriate description of Reckless itself. Reckless even concludes with a publicity event which will boost sales of the book, though Wylde is a somewhat shy author who has trouble coping with the adulation of his fans: ‘Wylde was very set against being identified as the author of such a successful book. I believe that when it comes to that sort of thing he is rather shy’ (1997: 368). Wylde comments that:

“I do not like this business of being a famous author.”
“Nonsense”, Phoebe said. “ [...] Surely you can handle a few admirers on the rare occasion such as tonight.”
“The occasions had better be extremely rare,” Gabriel warned. [...]
“They will be,” Phoebe promised. She gave him a gloating smile. “And just think of what it will do for your career. I’ll wager we shall have to go back to print for another five or six thousand copies after this lot returns to London. Everyone here cannot wait to inform his or her friends of the true identity of the author of The Quest. Lacey’s Bookshop will make another tidy little fortune.” (1997: 369-370)

Clearly this is an extremely close editor/author relationship, but the reclusive author’s reluctance to court publicity, and the editor’s desire to have the author meet his/her fans in order to boost sales remind me of comments I’ve read on the blogs and websites of modern romance authors. Here's one such description of writers, from Susan Holloway Scott/Miranda Jarrett on today's blog post at the Word Wenches:

Writers cherish anonymity. We’re not by nature a glamorous bunch. Books may be considered part of the entertainment industry, but writing is not a performing art. Which is why when we have to “go public” –– whether at a big conference like RWA, or a small book signing at a local store –– the results can be, well, challenging.

-----
Quick, Amanda, 1997. Reckless (London: Orion).

Regis, Pamela, 2003. A Natural History of the Romance Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).

Do we have Gods Among Men in the UK?

The metaphor Eric posted, about football, got me thinking about national differences. I'm from the UK, so when I see the word 'football', I think about the non-contact sport Americans call 'soccer'. American readers, however, will no doubt have had a somewhat different game in mind. And this got me thinking about other national differences, and how they might affect romance writing and romance readership.

The UK association for writers of romance is the Romantic Novelists' Association whereas the US has the huge Romance Writers of America. The RNA is relatively small, a fact which no doubt has something to do with the fact that romance is much less popular in the UK than it is in the US, with 'adult readers [...] turning away from romance to crime and thrillers'. Included among the 'romance' novels are the works of Catherine Cookson which may be better described as family sagas (with romantic elements). The RNA, as its name suggests, is for novelists whose works are 'romantic': there is no requirement for them to write the happy endings which are essential in 'romance novels' as defined by the RWA. We also don't see many books in the UK with the 'clinch' covers which are so often reviled by readers of romance in the US.

So national differences affect the packaging, genre definitions and reception of romance. But do they also affect the tone of even those books which are romances according to the RWA's definition? Juliet Flesch, author of From Australia With Love, certainly believes that 'Australian women's romance is culturally distinctive; in her chapter "The Beetroot in the Burger" she argues that there is an "egalitarianism, independence of spirit, a sense of fair play and a sense of humour" (p. 251) which can be attributed to a uniquely Australian sensibility'.

Getting back to the football, American football players look particularly 'masculine', with their padding exaggerating the size of their shoulders. This is a contact sport where the players literally clash and run into each other. Soccer players, on the other hand, wear clothing which reveals their bodies but does nothing to enhance them, and while players such as David Beckham may be considered extremely attractive to the opposite sex, he's also appeared in a sarong:

Did the different clothes, hairstyles, jewellery, make him less "masculine"? (99.9% of British men live in fear of being less masculine.)

No, it merely meant that the fashion pack began to join forces with the football followers - and worship him. [BBC article]

So what about American v British romance heroes? I tend to read mostly Mills & Boon historical romances, but I venture outside that sub-genre from time to time, and I've noticed a few trends, though I'll not be completely surprised if some more knowledgeable person comes along and disagrees with me in the comments trail. And before I begin, I'll make it clear that, as with all generalisations, I'm sure there are plenty of exceptions.

In the US romances, American heroes are popular, and they're often military or otherwise able to 'protect' a heroine physically/with a weapon. This applies in contemporaries as much or more so than in historicals where the English Regency period still dominates.

In the UK, Mills & Boon sell nothing which is the equivalent of Harlequin's American Romance line. And I'm open to correction, but in the contemporary romances I've read from M&B the tall, dark, powerful hero tends to be Greek, Italian or Spanish. I haven't found one Mills & Boon contemporary where the hero was a UK policeman or soldier, though I have come across one paramedic working with the Fire Service. The most common British hero I've come across is the doctor, usually found in the Mills & Boon Medical Romance. Interestingly, that's a line which is edited in the UK, although Harlequin in the US does sell some of them. It's maybe relevant that the guidelines for the series state that:

Heroes and heroines are equally matched and equally respected professionals. [...] These romances usually involve both hero and heroine working together in a medical environment. The focus should be a developing, emotionally driven romantic relationship pushed forward by the hero and heroine's involvement with patients and their medical treatment, and their medical colleagues.

Although this type of hero's special, he doesn't, I think, attain the status of being 'superior in degree to other men and to his environment, [...] whose actions are marvelous but who is himself identified as a human being', of the type discussed by Northrop Frye (see Eric's post below). The heroine is usually just as good a doctor as he is. So maybe UK romances tend more towards the 'realistic' end of the spectrum of romance. I certainly haven't noticed an outbreak of vampire/paranormal heroes here, and those are surely heading off the top of the scale when it comes to being 'superior in degree to other men and to his environment'. If UK romance readers want to read a romance, written by a UK author and published in the UK, with a hero who is 'superior in degree to other men', who is a Hero (with a capital H) or what might be termed a 'God among Men' (though not literally a god), then they seem to have to turn to historicals or foreign heroes, and I notice that the heroes of historical romances written by UK authors are very often affected by the more realistic trend too.

Now it could just be that American men are, indeed, Gods among Men, but I find that a little difficult to believe, just as I'm unprepared to believe that of the men of other nationalities. I've yet to meet any sheiks, but the Greek, Spanish and Italian men I've met are certainly not the arrogant, somewhat chauvinist males presented in the Mills & Boon's I've read . I am prepared to accept, though, that the way masculinity is constructed in US society differs from that in the UK. It's not that long since you had a Wild West, and you can still legally own guns (in the UK gun ownership is now extremely restricted). In terms of literary/popular culture influences, in the US there's the cowboy of the Westerns, and maybe patriotic feeling in the US contributes to the popularity of heroes who are in the military, the police and the fire services. Maybe the greater acceptance of capitalism in the US leads to more respect for entrepreneurs, and so there are more American heroes who are business tycoons.