New to the Romance Wiki Bibliography: African Love Stories, Masculinity, Pirates, Pregnancy, Virginity and Some Romance History

Here's what's new to the Romance Wiki Bibliography:

Clasen, Tricia. 2017. 

“Masculinity and Romantic Myth in Contemporary YA Romance.” In Gender(ed) Identities: Critical Rereadings of Gender in Children’s and Young Adult Literature, edited by Tricia Clasen and Holly Hassel. New York: Routledge, pp. 228–241.

Gehrmann, Susanne, 2018. 

“Remediating Romance: Forms and Functions of New Media in Contemporary Love Stories from Togo and South Africa”. Africa Today 65.1: 65-84.

Harris, Racheal, 2018. 

“Really Romantic? Pirates in Romantic Fiction.” Pirates in History and Popular Culture, edited by Antonio Sanna (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company Publishing), pp. 109–119. Excerpt

McAlister, Jodi Ann, 2015. 

"Romancing the Virgin: Female Virginity Loss and Love in Popular Literature in the West". PhD thesis, Macquarie University, 2015. [Abstract and link to pdf]

 

Rosanowski, Annika, 2019. 

"Can She Have It All? Pregnancy Narratives in Contemporary Category Romance", Journal of Popular Romance Studies 8 (2019).

Waller, Philip, 2006. 

Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [See chapters "In Cupid's Chains: Charles Garvice" (681-701) and "Hymns and Heroines: Florence Barclay" (702-728).]

New to the Wiki: Death, Monsters, Migrations, Du Maurier and more

Here are the new entries, recently added by Christina Martinez and me.

Leonzini, Alexandra, 2018. 

‘“All the Better to Eat You With”: The Eroticization of the Werewolf and the Rise of Monster Porn in the Digital Age.’ Exploring the Fantastic: Genre, Ideology, and Popular Culture. Ed. Ina Batzke, Eric C. Erbacher, Linda M. Heß, Corinna Lenhardt. Bielefeld: transcript. 269-294. [“Starting her analysis with 19th-century horror fiction before moving to 20th-century films and 21-century romance and erotic literature, Leonzini traces the changes in the construction of the gendered and sexualized body of the figure of the werewolf” (12) and there is therefore quite a lot of reference to romance, which is deemed to have laid the groundwork for modern monster porn. Excerpt.]

Lowery, Karalyne, 2018. 

"The Militarized Shapeshifter: Authorized Violence and Military Connections as an Antidote to Monstrosity." University of Toronto Quarterly 87.1: 196-213. Abstract.

O'Mahony, Lauren. 2017. 

"Death and the Australian Rural Romance Novel." TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, vol. (Supplement 45), Oct. 2017, pp. 1-14. [Full text]

 

Salvador Miguel, Nicasio, 1995. 

¿Hay precedentes de la novela rosa? Letras de la España contemporánea. Homenaje a José Luis Varela, ed. N. Salvador Miguel (Alcalá de Henares: Centro de Estudios Cervantinos): 319-327. [Full text]

Suman [Sigroha], 2018. 

"Gendered Migrations and Literary Narratives: Writing Communities in South Asian Diaspora." Millennial Asia 9.1: 93-108.[Full text] [On "educated skilled women from South Asia who migrate as ‘trailing spouses’" and turn to romance-writing as an alternative, portable career.]

Turner, Katherine. 2017. 

"Daphne Du Maurier's Mary Anne: Rewriting the Regency Romance as Feminist History." University of Toronto Quarterly: A Canadian Journal of the Humanities, vol. 86, no. 4, pp. 54-77. [Abstract]

Vitackova, Martina, 2018. 

"Representation of racial and sexual ‘others’ in Afrikaans popular romantic fiction by Sophia Kapp." Tydskrif vir letterkunde 55.1. 122-133. Abstract and link to pdf

New Article: Romance in South Africa

Laura Vivanco

Christopher Warnes begins his article on "Black Economic Empowerment and the South African Popular Romance" by explaining that:

Between 2010 and 2011 two new publishing enterprises appeared in South Africa: Sapphire Press, an imprint of Kwela Books, which is in turn owned by the giant NB Publishers, and Nollybooks, a small-scale entrant into the market. Between them, in the course of their first two years, these publishers brought out twenty-seven romance novels. Aimed explicitly at a black female readership, and written to a tightly prescriptive set of guidelines, these postapartheid romances are of identical length, have similar plots, characters, and themes, and are packaged and marketed in much the same way. They tell the stories of feisty, attractive young women, often from poor backgrounds, working their way up the ladder of professional success and falling in love with handsome, successful older men, often their bosses. Hero and heroine are always black, and the romantic attachment between the two is always the main theme. The progress of the romance is bound up with the overcoming of work-related obstacles, and the ending of each novel harmonizes the romantic and professional triumph of the heroine. (154)

I took a look at the guidelines given by Kwela and they do seem "tightly prescriptive" (though it's possible that as with Harlequin Mills & Boon, in practice, there's a bit more variation than one might guess from reading the guidelines):

Typical style of a Kwela romance

• Think Mills & Boon
• The story must be set in South Africa, preferably a big city like Johannesburg
• The story is told from the main female character’s perspective
• The story is told in the third person
• Both hero and heroine should be black South Africans.

The main female character (heroine)

The heroine is:
• an independent, spunky, smart woman;
• financially independent;
• in her mid-twenties to early thirties;
• extremely self-motivated;
• determined to achieve success; and
• committed to overcoming past hardships.

The heroine feels:
• financially responsible for her family.

The heroine has:
•  a strong spiritual base;
•  at least two girlfriends on whom she can rely for moral & emotional support; and
•  a modern outlook on life and on the role of woman in society.

The heroine likes to:
• visit local hotspots to see who’s who and to be seen.

The heroine should:
•  experience personal growth and self-discovery; and
•  realise her own worth and inner strength.

The main male character (hero)

The hero is:
• strong
• Intelligent
• good-looking
• slightly older than the heroine (late thirties to early forties)
• successful in his career
• more traditional in his outlook on life than the heroine (cause of tension).

The plot

The main plot-line:
•  revolves around the heroine & hero’s struggle to build a romantic relationship
•  outside forces (at work or in their communities) try to keep them apart
•  their own conflicting beliefs about modern society and the role of women also threaten to keep them apart

Keep sub-plots to a minimum:
• Only those that influence internal growth in the heroine should be developed.

Romantic tension should be built up until a satisfying conclusion is reached between the heroine & hero:
•  i.e. when all obstacles between them have been overcome and love triumphs.

One or two intimate scenes should be included (though only between the heroine and the hero – no other boyfriends/lovers).

Your target readers:
• All those thousands of people who love Mills & Boon!
• Upwardly mobile black female readers.
• In terms of typical South African readers, think of those who currently read True Love, Move and Drum.
• Age groups: from teenagers to 50+, i.e. quite a broad group

 Warnes states that

These novels represent, in a striking way, a new departure in South African writing: the arrival in prose form of the mass-produced fantasy for black women. This is not to say that the romance has not long been a major part of South African popular reading habits. Afrikaans-language publishers like LAPA, NB Publishers, and Tafelburg have well-developed series which regularly outsell more literary novels, and the presence of a "Mills and Boon in Afrikaans" publisher similarly speaks to the popularity of the genre for Afrikaans readers. In English, Mills and Boon titles and stalwarts of the genre like Danielle Steel routinely appear near or at the top of bestseller lists. (154)

The "new departure" has been made possible by changes in the political situation in South Africa:

Although popular fiction has long been part of the South African cultural landscape, it is only since the demise of formal apartheid that it could be said to have begun to flourish. During the apartheid years there was a strong critical perception that popular fiction abrogated the social and political mission to document injustice, challenge perceptions, and conscientize readers. The end of apartheid was interpreted as signalling the lifting of this literary-political injunction to be serious. The creative energies that have filled the void left by the departure of the "struggle aesthetic" in the years since 1994 have been most noticeable in the explosion of genres such as crime fiction, romance, chick lit, science fiction, gangster noir, and comedy. (156)

However, they are not wholly lacking in "serious" elements. Warnes examines a number of romances in order to show how they "negotiate anxieties around enigmatic male behavior, around the workplace, and around the broader national economic issues" (162) and he claims that "the popular romance performs a [...] specific empowerment function, articulating for its reader a clear vision of ideal working conditions" (166).

----

Warnes, Christopher. "Desired State: Black Economic Empowerment and the South African Popular Romance." Popular Culture in Africa: The Episteme of the Everyday. Ed. Stephanie Newell and Onookome Okome. New York: Routledge, 2014. 154-171. [Excerpt]

Romance in South Africa

Laura Vivanco.

As a follow-up to my post about developments in romance publishing in India, in which I also mentioned African-American romances, I thought it would be interesting to look at the situation in South Africa. According to the South African Romance Writers' Community,

While South Africa has a substantial number of romance writers, the majority are published in Afrikaans and are therefore only sold in South Africa. Over the years there have been a few South Africans who have published romance novels through international publishers (just don't ask us for names and details!) but not yet in sufficient numbers to make an impact on the global market.

African settings are rare in romances published elsewhere in the world, but those of us who've read older Mills & Boon romances may recall Rosalind Brett who

not only set sales records but would establish a new style for the Mills & Boon novel in the 1950s. Her name was Lilian Warren.
Warren wrote under three pen-names - Rosalind Brett, Kathryn Blair, and Celine Conway - and contributed 59 novels to Mills & Boon. Born in London, Warren [...] married and moved to South Africa, and travelled widely throughout the African continent. [...] The foreign settings appealed to readers weary of wartime deprivation. (McAleer 97)

and "Warren's sexy style as Brett, with its hint of violence, often had to be watered down by the firm" (210). Although Arlene Moore, author of the entry on "Kathryn Blair" in Twentieth Century Romance and Gothic Writers states that "A timeless quality in her writings makes her one of those rare writers who has something to say to any generation reading her" (79), there is a pervasive racism in Rosalind Brett's depiction of the secondary, black African characters. Of course, they always were secondary characters in those days.

Things are rather different now:

Moky Makura, a Nigerian-born author and publisher [...] set up Nollybooks in 2009 after picking up on Mills & Boon's huge global figures [...]. Nollybooks is inspired by Nigeria's thriving movie industry, Nollywood.
"Nollywood proved that Africans want to see themselves reflected in what they consume, and that is exactly what Nollybooks represents," says Makura. [...]
She is not the only one who has discovered this market. South African publisher Kwela Books has created Sapphire Press in response to a need for "black romance" in the country."Mills & Boon sell more than 20,000 units per month here," explains Lindsay van Rensburg, a junior editor at Sapphire.
"We thought it would be quite appealing for those readers to have access to books set in South Africa." (Boswell)

Like Makura, Sapphire Press have also learned from Mills & Boon: in their extremely detailed guidelines to authors they describe the "Typical style of a Kwela romance":

• Think Mills & Boon
• The story must be set in South Africa, preferably a big city like Johannesburg
• The story is told from the main female character’s perspective
• The story is told in the third person
• Both hero and heroine should be black South Africans.

While Sapphire Books require "One or two intimate scenes [...] (though only between the heroine and the hero – no other boyfriends/lovers)," Boswell reports that there is no sex in Nolly Books romances:

"I don't believe that you need sex to have story-telling," Makura argues.
"I am trying to show young girls that you can have a heroine who is educated and doing well, but who doesn't sleep around or have to have sex, and still ends up with a good guy."

Another difference between the two publishers is that Nolly Books are "looking for authors who can create escapist fiction – a hybrid genre combining stiletto-sharp Chic Lit with to-die-for Romance."
---------

• Boswell, Frederica. "South Africa discovers the joy of romantic novels." Focus On Africa. BBC. 30 January 2011.
  
• McAleer, Joseph. Passion's Fortune: The Story of Mills & Boon. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.
• Moore, Arlene. "Blair, Kathryn." Twentieth Century Romance and Gothic Writers. Ed. James Vinson and D. L. Kirkpatrick. Detroit, Michigan: Gale, 1982. 77-79.