Horne, Jackie C. reviews Catherine M. Roach's Happily Ever After: The Romance Story in Popular Culture. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
Linda. Review of Rita-nominated Toward the Sunrise by Elizabeth Camden at Smart Bitches Trashy Books ["unfortunately, underneath the charming plot ... was a
backbone of unremitting Orientalism and historical revisionism."]
Bilde, Marie, 2016. 'It’s Springtime for Romance in Denmark', Publishing Perspectives, April 25, 2016.
["Romantic fiction in Copenhagen has mainly lived in kiosks alongside
magazines — until now. As April smiles on Denmark, new imprints are
bringing romance into the open."]
Owen, Jonathan, 2016. 'Gransnet jumps into bed with racy publisher Mills & Boon for content partnership', Campaign, May 03, 2016. ['Romantic
publisher Mills & Boon and the website Gransnet have announced what
they call a "budding romance", and will begin working together to
capitalise on the interest of older women in sex and romance.']
Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity.
Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. [See Chapter 3:
"Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance: Love, Fiction, and the
Virtues of Marrying In"] Excerpt
Salmon, Catherine, 2016.
"What Do Romance Novels, Pro Wrestling, and Mack Bolan Have in Common?: Consilience and the Pop Culture of Storytelling." Darwin's Bridge: Uniting the Humanities and Sciences. Ed. Joseph Carroll, Dan P. McAdams and Edward O. Wilson. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016. 167-182. Excerpt
Tidwell, Christy, 2016.
"“A Little Wildness”: Negotiating Relationships between Human and Nonhuman in Historical Romance", Creatural Fictions: Human-Animal Relationships in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Literature, Ed. David Herman, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). 151-171. ExcerptAbstract [Focuses on Bertrice Small's Sky O'Malley and Patricia Gaffney's Wild at Heart]
"The Journal of Popular Romance Studies started publishing almost exactly five years ago: August 4, 2010" (Selinger) and Issue 5.1is now available, for free, online.
That's the pop-cult acronym that popped into my head last night as I thought (again) about my upcoming senior capstone seminar.
I've been tying myself in knots with ideas and options for the class: novels to assign, history and theory and books about love to read, etc. All of them good ideas, and worth pursuing, but all of them coming at the cost of simplicity.
Behind that flurry of options, I think, lies my own itch to read more widely, both in the genre and outside it, in related secondary material. Fair enough--and a senior seminar isn't a bad place to get that reading done.
On the other hand, I have another, narrower, more immediate goal for the quarter: to research and write up an essay on Susan Elizabeth Phillips' Natural Born Charmer, much of it drawing on ideas that I encountered a few years back in a book by Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. (Tip of the hat to An Goris, who suggested I read it!)
The simplest solution--which I thought of weeks ago, then set aside--is to build the course around those two texts, turning it into a sort of scholarly atelier. I'd balked, on the theory that some students might not like the novel, but whenever I'd tried to decide on another book, I got paralyzed with options; and, frankly, I missed the clarity and sharp focus of a course about a single book.
So: one book it is, with some room for students to jump out tangentially into topics of discussion raised by the Illouz book and by the novel (which nods to art history, Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks, the cultures of sports or therapy, and a bunch of other material).
We'll start with a couple of weeks on the Illouz, then read through the Phillips very slowly, 3-4 chapters a week. Each class on the novel will feature 1-2 student presentations, with a rhythm that looks like this:
M: Introduction to the Class and to Each Other.
W: Illouz, CRU, Introduction; chapters 1-2
M: CRU: chapters 3-5
W: CRU: chapters 6-8, plus Conclusion
M: Phillips, NBC, paratext and chapter 1: 2 presentations
My thought is to have the presentations stay short--say, 500-750 words, like a blog post--and to give the students instructions that look something like this:
If you’re on a day when we’ve read new chapters (generally a Wednesday), your presentation should do three things:
1.Briefly summarize the important events in the chapter; 2.Call our attention to 1-3 scenes or passages of interest, raising questions about them or illuminating them using ideas, issues, or topics that seem relevant (from Illouz or elsewhere); and, 3.Suggest new avenues of research or inquiry that you or someone else might pursue, whether in a final paper or in a later presentation.
If you’re presenting on a “follow-up discussion” day, your presentation should do three slightly different things:
1.Situate your remarks as a response to a previous presentation or discussion, either in terms of something that was said or something that was overlooked or left out. 2.Critique or develop that previous material, for example, by following up on a “research lead” someone suggested, by making connections between points made by several people, or by offering your own, well-supported, contrasting arguments. 3.Suggest new avenues of research or inquiry that you or someone else might pursue, whether in a final paper or in a later presentation.
At the end of the quarter, everyone turns in a final research paper--not sure of the length yet, but something fairly hefty--which could focus on the novel itself or could branch out into some area of research that came up in our discussions throughout the quarter.
Come to think of it, depending on how my own writing progresses, I could also have the class give me feedback on draft material from my essay. Not sure how useful that would be, or how much I'd have to re-configure the schedule to accommodate that, but it might be worth trying.
In any case, the books are ordered, so we'll see how it goes!
After a lot of dithering (my usual way of thinking things through), I finally chose the books and topics for my popular romance course next quarter. As you'll see, I'm sticking with the idea of building the course around Laura's book, and since I'm not going up for promotion this year, I hope to have the time to blog about how each segment goes. I did, though, change the list of novels considerably. It's not even remotely representative of the genre now--there's only one historical romance, for example, and that one isn't a Regency--but the books all do the three things they need to do: fit the topics, help me with my research, and teach well, year after year. Now to choose the books for course #2, the Love Seminar! (Hint: I think I'm going to take the easy way out, whatever that turns out to be....)
Schedule Of Classes,
Topics, And Readings
Topic
1: What is a “Romance”? A “Romance Novel”? A “Popular Romance Novel”?
M: Introduction to the Class and to each
other. Introduction to “romance,” the
“romance novel,” the “popular romance novel” and the “Harlequin Romance” as
critical and historical categories.
W: Vivanco, Introduction and Chapter 1
(“Mimetic Modes”) of For Love and Money
M: Unsung
Hero: chapters 1-10 (feel free to
read ahead)
W: Unsung Hero: the
rest of it!
Topic
2: Twice-Told Tales: Romance, Myth, and
Fairy Tale
M:Vivanco, Chapter 2
(“Mythoi”)
W: Bet Me
M:Bet Me
Topic 3:
My Metafictional Romance
W:Vivanco, Chapter 3
(“Metafiction”)
M:Natural
Born Charmer
W:Natural
Born Charmer
Topic
4: My Metaphorical Romance
M: Vivanco, Chapter 4 (“Metaphors”) and
Conclusion
W:Homecoming
M:Homecoming
Topic 5: Lore, Deportment, and Problem
Fiction: Thinking in Romance
W: Thomas Roberts, An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction, chapter 7 (“Thinking with Tired
Brains”) and chapter 8 (“Reading in a System”); Catherine Roach, “Getting a Good
Man to Love: Romance Fiction and the
Problem of Patriarchy."
M:False
Colors
W:False
Colors
M:False
Colors
Topic 6: (Psst! Isn’t It Really Just “Porn for Women”?)
W: Ann Barr Snitow, “Mass Market Romance: Pornography for Women is
Different”; assorted readings on Fifty
Shades of Grey (to be chosen later)
The new quarter starts Monday, here at DePaul, so I'm hard at work on the syllabus for English 469: Topics in American Literature: Popular Romance Fiction.
At the moment, our Required Texts are:
Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Natural Born Charmer Laura Kinsale, Flowers from the Storm J. R. Ward, Dark Lover Joey Hill, Natural Law Victoria Dahl, Talk Me Down Ann Herendeen, Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander Beverly Jenkins, Captured Nora Roberts, Montana Sky
I say "at the moment" because I've just heard that the Victoria Dahl may have been hard for the bookstore to come by. NOT that I heard this from the bookstore, mind you--but I've called to follow up, and won't rest easy until I know for sure that it's in stock. (If it isn't, I'll use another Dahl--but the topics I wanted to pursue with Talk Me Down don't come up the same way in the next two books in that series, so I'll be thrown off, just a little. "Recalculating," as the GPS unit likes to say.)
Of those, I've taught five before (SEP, Kinsale, Ward, Hill, Herendeen); three are new, although I have a ringer in my class to help with the Roberts: An Goris, who's writing her dissertation on NR, has come to Chicago to work with me this year.
Here's the tentative Course Description:
American academics began to study popular romance fiction seriously in the 1980s, with the publication of Janice Radway's Reading the Romance and Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women, by Tania Modleski. The conventions, genres, and readership of romance fiction have all evolved dramatically since this time, however, and critics have not always kept pace with them. In this course, we will explore some of the varieties of popular romance fiction (and of romance criticism) currently published in the United States. Using tools from cultural studies, feminist psychoanalysis, the philosophy of love, and aesthetic analysis, we will learn to read popular romance from a variety of contemporary authors and subgenres; in the process, we will get to know something about the lively, reflective on-line romance community.Our challenge, week by week, will be to make the novels as interesting as possible, by any means necessary.
As for the Course Requirements:
All students in this course will be expected to do three things:
Come to class with the books and / or articles read, and contribute to class discussion;
Deliver a thoughtful, well-organized in-class presentation on one of our novels—think of this as a succinct mini-lecture, about 10 minutes long, with an accompanying handout of quotations from critics, discussion questions, or anything else that can provoke subsequent discussion; and,
Write a scholarly or creative nonfiction essay (12-15 pp.), probably based on the presentation, that uses critical approaches studied in class to analyze one of the course texts.
My next big task is to assemble the secondary texts we'll read in the first couple of weeks.
Week 1:Introduction to the class, to each other, and to the novels we will study.Initial assignment of presentations. Discussion of "romance" as a literary term, especially in American literary history, with passages from Hawthorne, James, and Northrop Frye.
Week 2:Introduction to some of the critical debates surrounding popular romance fiction.
Germaine Greer, selection from The Female Eunuch (1970)
Tania Modleski, “Mass Produced Fantasies for Women” and “Harlequin Romances” (Loving with a Vengeance, 1982)
Janice Radway, “from New Introduction” (1991), “The Readers and their Romances,” and “The Act of Reading the Romance: Escape and Instruction” (Reading the Romance, 1984; rpt. 1991)
Laura Kinsale, “The Androgynous Reader”; Linda Barlow, “The Androgynous Writer”; Susan Elizabeth Phillips, “The Romance and the Empowerment of Women” (Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, ed. Jayne Ann Krentz, 1992)
Tania Modleski, “My Life as a Romance Reader” (Paradoxa, 1997)
Jennifer Crusie, “Romancing Reality: the Power of Romance Fiction to Reinforce and Re-vision the Real” (Paradoxa, 1997), “Defeating the Critics” (1998), and “Let Us Now Praise Scribbling Women” (1998); available on line at http://www.jennycrusie.com/for-writers/essays.
Pamela Regis, “The Romance Novel and Women’s Bondage” and “In Defense of the Romance Novel” (A Natural History of the Romance Novel, 2003).
Eric Selinger, “Re-reading the Romance” (essay-review of recent criticism, 2008)
Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan, selections from Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches Guide to Romance Novels (2009).
That's the list I have so far--but it's more or less the same list I used two years ago, which leads me to believe that I've missed a few things. If you can think of anything for me to add, let me know!
After that, we turn to the novels themselves. Here's the order so far:
Week 3:Susan Elizabeth Phillips,Natural Born Charmer (Contemporary)
Week 4:Laura Kinsale, Flowers from the Storm (Historical)
Week 5:J. R. Ward, Dark Lover (Paranormal)
Week 6:Ann Herendeen, Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander (Historical—mmf)
Week 7: Victoria Dahl, Talk Me Down (Contemporary)
If anything occurs to you about the sequence, let me know that as well. (I've been wondering whether to assign the Dahl before or after the Hill, for example.) I'll begin assembling ideas for secondary reading, topics, questions, etc., as the next week proceeds.
I've been thinking recently about the ways that romance novels relate to religion, and more specifically about the ways that they deploy religion and religious discourse, whether or not they are "Inspirational" romances per se. Here's what I've come up with so far--and if you can give me any help, I'd be mighty grateful!
1) First off, and most obviously, romance novels can use religious discourse pervasively, in order to advance a particular religious agenda:e.g., Christian inspirational romance. Books like this explain the coincidences, transformations, and other events of the novel in religious terms (they’re providential, quite literally) and they name the type of love that the novel endorses in specifically religious terms (i.e., as an expression of God’s love for us).
In a way, this first use of religious discourse is implicitly dialectical, or at least engaged in an implied argument. It reclaims the strictly Christian meaning of terms that are also used in the quasi-religion of romantic love: salvation, redemption, forgiveness, worship, even "love."
Books like this let the text minister to its reader, or make itself of use in a community of believers in a way that a "secular" or "worldly" romance would not be. But even within such a novel, we can sometimes find moments of tension or counter-discourse, in which the "worldly" meanings of terms reasserts itself. (I think here of the wonderfully romantic moment in Beth Pattillo's Heavens to Betsy where David, the hero, admits that he "worships" the heroine. In the religion of love, the one that Robert Polhemus calls "erotic faith," that makes perfect sense, but in Christian terms it's problematic, even idolatrous.)
2) Romance novels can use religion / religious discourse in order to give a deeper resonance or meaning or importance to the story by recalling the religious roots of Erotic Faith, the Religion of Romantic Love.
They can do this without worrying about or rejecting its potentially heretical nature, as though there were no particular difference between them:e.g., Susan Elizabeth Phillips’s novel Dream a Little Dream, set in a town called Salvation. It's been a while since I read it, so perhaps I'm misremembering, but my recollection was that this was a deeply Christian novel, but not specifically an "inspirational" novel, in part because the book seemed to equate its theology with romantic love.
They can also do this in a way that brings our attention to the potential tension between Christianity and Erotic Faith without resolving the issue in either direction, leaving the tension unresolved. What do I mean by this? Maybe that romance novels sometimes use religious discourse as one of many explanatory frameworks or languages in the book, thus putting it into dialogue with the other ones without choosing among them or endorsing one over another.
They can also exacerbate that tension in order emphasize or play with the heretical nature of the Religion of Romantic Love, putting the novel into dialogue with previous Christian texts precisely in order to highlight the heterodoxy of the new book. (I think here both of something like Crusie's Welcome to Temptation, which alludes to but inverts various Christian topoi, like the Fall, and also of fantasy novels like the first Kushiel trilogy by Jacqueline Carey, which offer a new, imagined religion in competition with Christianity.)
3) Romance novels can use religion and religious discourse to give a deeper resonance or meaning or importance to a particular scene or moment, letting the novel open onto vistas of meaning without guiding the reader into them throughout.Thus Mary Balogh's Slightly Dangerous ends at Easter, which suggests a number of symbolic possibilities, but the novel doesn’t develop them at any length (or so I remember); likewise Joey Hill's Natural Law invokes the language of body and soul, and speaks of Wicca, at crucial moments, but the novel as a whole is not invested in those references. Does this make sense? Is this really a separate category? I'm not sure.
4) Some romance novels offer an imagined or recovered religion as a counterpart / contrast with Christianity. I've mentioned this already, in point two, but I'm wondering if maybe it isn't a whole separate category.
I think here of various Goddess novels that echo the pop-cultural idea of a "Goddess in every woman," from Nora Roberts to P.C. Cast to the Crusie collaboration, Dogs and Goddesses. These are variously serious and comic, but they seem to me connected, not least by a sort of self-help theology.
I also think of novels that imagine a whole pantheon that allows the author to explore issues of gender, etc., on multiple levels in the novel (mythic, superhuman, human, etc.), reclaimic the mythic dimension of romance. The Scribe Virgin & Omega in J. R. Ward's Black Dagger Brotherhood novels and the religion of Elua in the Kushiel books by Carey set each of these novelsinto dialogue with Christianity, and perhaps in the process they do to Christian discourse what Christian inspirational romances do with the religion of Erotic Faith, contest and revise it?
What am I missing here? Any categories that you can think of that are not in the list? Do any of these overlap so much that they really aren't distinct in any useful way? Any novels that come to mind that use religion or religious discourse in a way that doesn't fit into any of these?
The competition is based on the care and judgment by which the student has shaped the collection. Monetary value and number of books are not critical in determining a winning collection. Primary consideration is given to discrimination and judgment in building the collection around the collector's interest.
work with Resources for Sexual Violence Prevention here on campus has interested me in how romance communities are struggling with questions of sexuality and violence within the framework of the courtship plot. I collect romances that take up themes of sexual violence, either by explicitly challenging paradigms of male power in the intimate realm or by uncritically incorporating partner violence into the courtship. I also seek out romances that challenge heteronormativity or that struggle with incorporating ambiguous sexualities into the courtship plot. These books are windows into how communities of women are struggling with questions of identity and power under the cover of pink typeface and floral covers.
In addition, she includes many "cross-genre works and books of genre fiction that reference the romance. I am always delighted when I find a covert romance hiding in another section of the bookstore, and reading these romances with a curious and critical eye yields fascinating stories."
On her blog Elizabeth adds "The sweetest part of the whole deal? Displaying eight books (including this one) in the Reg for eight weeks." I'm sure Sandra will appreciate the honour.
I apologize to the presenters for simplifying their arguments. I take notes very well, but they're still notes and obviously can't do justice to the full scope of the presentation, which probably can't do justice to the full scope of what is probably a larger project anyway. But I'll try, and I'll also comment on how the papers talked to and with each other.
In fact, there's only one more Romance panel left. It's a special session tomorrow, Friday, April 5, 2007, 12:30-2:00pm. Authors Jennifer Crusie and Mary Bly/Eloisa James will be presenting, and then Suzanne Brockmann and Anne Stuart will respond and hold a roundtable session that should be a lot of fun and is being much anticipated by those of us here.
Of the five Romance panels that have taken place, I attended four. I missed the first one for embarrassing reasons (I was finishing up my own paper for the second session), so I'll just post names and titles and maybe someone who went can fill in details in the comments:
Romance II: Regional and Global Perspectives Chair: Emily Haddad, University of South Dakota
Christine Bolus-Reichert, University of Toronto: "The Descent of Romance: Madeleine Brent, Modesty Blaise, and the Imperialist Adventure" Apparently, if I'd been there, I would have been the only person in the audience to have read Madeleine Brent's novels, for which I can thank my mother! I'm very sorry I wasn't there, because I love Brent's stories. I imagine Christine wishes I'd been there as well. Christine very graciously gave me a copy of the paper, which I will read and comment on later.
Glinda Hall, Arkansas State University: "Inverting the Southern Belle" ETA: Glinda explained her paper to me over drinks, so let's see if I get it right. She said that she examined three (cut down to one) books that used New Orleans as a setting. And while people in the South say that New Orleans is "different," where everyone gets wild and crazy, Hall's argument is that New Orleans is actually where everyone's motivations and real feelings actually come out instead of being repressed. So it's only different in that people are expressing all that they've repressed, rather than acting completely out of character.
Emily Haddad, University of South Dakota: "Postmodern Victorianism and the Romance of India"
The second session of Thursday was the session I was in (I had finished my paper by then!). Unintuitively, it was called Romance I because our time was switched with Romance II to accomodate travel schedules of presenters.
Romance I: Heroes and Heroines Chair: Darcy Martin, East Tennessee State University
Julie Taddeo, University of Maryland, College Park: "Searching for Romantic Heroes in Catherine Cookson Country Taddeo discussed Catherine Cookson, a best-selling English author of over one hundred novels published between 1950-1998. Cookson's historical novels recreates a "lost" British way of life, and her readers insist that the appeal of her novels is not the romance, but the struggles and troubles the characters go through. Taddeo discussed in particular Cookson's construction of her male characters, especially the physically and emotionally crippled men who populate Cookson's novels. Cookson's women usually marry up, but they marry a man who has physical or emotional scars that equalize the relationship. Women also rescue their men from domineering first wives or shrewish mothers. Cookson was apparently troubled by the sexual revolution, but her depictions of troubled masculinity appeals to her readers because of their moments of gender subversiveness in which it is the man who needs to be mothered and saved.
I know I'm not doing justice to Taddeo's consideration of Cookson, but I thought she had some fascinating points about an author with such a long-lived publishing career and how her readers focus is NOT on the romance so much as the barriers to romance.
Kerry Sutherland, Kent State University: "Marital Rape as a Plot Device in Catherine Coulter's Historical Romances: Appropriate or Appalling?" Sutherland's discussion of Catherine Coulter's historical romances centered around the vexed question of marital rape. Historically, rape in marriage was a legal impossibility and Coulter defends her use of marital rape as necessary to maintain historical accuracy in her novels. Sutherland, however, is deeply troubled by the fact that the rapist husband is redeemed not through a change of heart and much groveling before the heroine, but through the heroine excusing and rationalizing her husband's behavior and accepting all the blame. Sutherland questions whether female readers accept the rape: Are events acceptable because the reader is in control fo the fictional experience? Is it that husband rapists in Coulter's novels do not act as real-life husband rapists do and act on overwhelming passion, rather than through violence? Pamela Regis claims that rape in romances needs to be seen in the context of its setting, but Sutherland questions whether the heroine and/or the reader are empowered by converting the man who rapes her or does it just devalue the heroine and therefore the reader?
This discussion is, of course, very topical at the moment, with discussion at Dear Author and Romance B(u)y the Blog and Smart Bitches about rape and sexuality in general in romances.
Sarah S. G. Frantz, Fayetteville State University: "Sobbing SEALs, Frantic Football Players, and Weeping Vampires: The Rise of the Emotional Masculine Perspective in Romance Novels" I discussed the spectacle of tears shed by hyper-masculine romance heroes, especially in Susan Elizabeth Phillips' Chicago Stars books, Suzanne Brockmann's Navy SEAL Troubleshooter books, and J.R. Ward's Black Dagger Brotherhood vampire series. I demonstrated how the most important structural change in romance over the last twenty years is the inclusion of the hero's perspective, and how that focus on masculine emotional expression yields an increasing need for greater displays of feeling. Phillips' heroes cry to demonstrate to their heroines that they truly love them and it seems to be the only way in which the heroines can believe the heroes. J.R. Ward takes this a step further and directly ties her heroes' tears to their specific emotional barrier to a relationship with the heroine. The key to the entire character of Brockmann's Navy SEAL Sam Starrett is his relationship to his own tears and how they define what kind of man he is. For these alpha males, then, tears demonstrate the barriers through which they must break to fall in love with and admit their love to their heroines, but the way in which their tears are constructed allows them to enhance rather than threaten their alpha masculinity.
Darcy Martin, East Tennessee State University: "Exploding the Stereotype: The Heroine as Portrayed in the Silhouette Bombshell Series Martin discusses the heroine of the now-defunct Silhouette Bombshell line and how different she is from the "normal" heroine of category romances. The 124 books of the Bombshell line, published between 2004-2007 have heroines who are older, experienced, both professionally and sexually, not virginal, and how engage in high-risk professions. Martin focused specifically on the six original novels of the Athena Force series, in which the heroines emphasize their bonds of sisterhood (of choice, not blood). They are strong, loyal, intelligent characaters who fight and love hard and who never back down. In fact, some of the Bombshell books, with their "happy for now" endings, might not even be considered "true" romance novels. Martin's final point was the the Bombshell authors took risks with both their storylines and their heroines, especially.
The panel really worked well together, analyzing the construction of the heroes and heroines of these very different books in ways that worked together in interesting and exciting forms. The questions focused on ways in which to reconcile the marital rapes to the reader, and Eric Selinger suggested the idea of fantasies of resiliance for female readers, and then brought up Emma Holly's novel Hunting Midnight, in which violence is played out as sexual fantasy, but not as a "reality" that it seems to be in Coulter's novels.
(First of all I need to apologize for I said I would post this last week. But I got embroiled in another Ikea-adventure, which involved, among other things, a wooden bookshelf door dropping onto my foot and some major rearrangements of my library.)
Like fantasy, romance fiction employs various elements of fairy tales, a genre which has been analysed by Max Lüthi (THE EUROPEAN FOLKTALE, 1947), among others. The familiarity of romance with fairy tales becomes obvious in the structure: at the beginning, the order is disturbed; the heroine often has to leave her home (e.g. in Gaelen Foley's LORD OF FIRE) and has to master several adventures before the order is restored or a new order is established at the end of the book. Similiarly to fairy tales, this new order is usually represented by the marriage of the protagonists and/or by the birth of a child: the adventures are over, the villains punished, and hero and heroine can finally return home:
". . . they raced across the wild, windswept crags and green valleys of Scotland. Home. Their land. And the land of their unborn babe ... And all their sons and daughters yet to be. (Shannnon Drake, COME THE MORNING 420)
Contrarily to what Jeanne Dubino writes in "The Cinderella Complex: Romance Fiction, Patriarchy and Capitalism", "home" in these cases doesn't only stand for a building of a mortar and stone and most certainly does not stand for the suppression of woman and her exploitation as a houseworker in patriarchal society (compare Dubino 105-06). The term "home" in romance stands for the protagonists' love for each other and for a new harmony in their relationship.
Apart from using structural elements of fairy tales, several romance novels also refer to specific fairy tales, most importantly:
A) "Beauty and the Beast": in this case, the hero embodies the beast, which is emphasised by animal or demon similes, metaphors and nicknames. Paranormal romance even goes one step further: here the hero is not just described as a beast, he is a beast: a supernatural being, often a shapeshifter, as in Christine Feehan's Carpathian series. The heroine is often forced to stay in his home (e.g., in Foley's LORD OF FIRE) or he comes into possession of hers, either by conquering it (e.g., in Penelope Williamson's KEEPER OF THE DREAM) or by receiving it as a gift from his king (e.g., in Drake's COME THE MORNING). It falls to the heroine to conquer and tame the beast, "to change [the hero] from an emotionally frigid Neanderthal into a sensitive, caring, nurturing human being", yet with his warrior qualities still intact (Susan Elizabeth Phillips, "The Romance and the Empowerment of Women" 58).
B) "Cinderella": the heroine in romance is often poor and has a lesser social status than the hero. Their love story consequently bears a resemblance to the Cinderella tale, and while only few heroines become actual princesses, they do become countesses/duchesses (in historical romances) or the wives of a multi-millionaires (in contemporary romances, especially category romances).
Despite all these similarities to fairy tales, it is important to realize romance (and fantasy, for that matter) differs from fairy tales in one important point: in contrast to the latter romance is set in reality, albeit a fictional one. Thus, even though romance uses elements of the fairy tale genre, it does not share its most important characteristics as described by Max Lüthi: romances are in set in specific places not just in "a forest", in "a village"; the characters are three-dimensional and, thus, they age, learn from their experiences, bleed and hurt when cut, and experience a host of emotions. In romance characters are individuals with individual names (the only names that appear in fairy tales are either nicknames like Little Red Riding Hood or commonplace names like Jack/Hans, Gretel); they are usually neither completely good nor completely bad.
The vital difference between romance/fantasy fiction and fairy tales becomes especially pronounced when magical gifts like gems and flowers falling out of one's mouth while talking come into play: in the "real" life of fiction such a gift turns out to be immensely impractical: "'I can still say 'morning,' ' Rowena growled, 'but I'm deleting the other word [i.e. good] from my vocabulary. Rose thorns hurt when they scrape across your lips'" (Elisabeth Waters, "The Birthday Gift" 104).
Eric asked me to post my list of my personal "transcendent" romances, to quote Lydia Joyce. I'm not sure a personal list of one person really counts, and one thing that's becoming obvious from the responses on the listserv is that no one's list is even close to being the same. While I believe that I'm posting romances that anyone could agree are "transcendent," am I choosing SEP's It Had to Be You because it's truly a great romance, with great characters and all the requirements of a "true" romance, whatever that might be (although Pam seems to have a better idea than most of us), or did I choose it because I personally really identify with Phoebe Summerville and her body-image issues?
So, instead, I will ask the question: Do you have ONE ultimate romance? One romance that is the absolute perfect, most transcendent romance?
Mine is Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.
The perfect heroine who learns and improves, the perfect hero who learns and improves, a little bit of tension over whether they'll get together, perfect relationship foils in Elizabeth's sisters' relationships (Jane and Lydia), both internal and external plot movement, and a truly satisfying ending.
But I know a lot of my own personal love for the novel is because of my own personal feelings, both academic and fangirly, for Mr. Darcy.
So, anyone else willing to commit to just ONE book?
