The IASPR conference starts tomorrow and the schedule (with abstracts of the papers to be presented) is available for download here: https://www.iaspr.org/conferences/schedule-romance-revitalised/ . The topics for the various panels include: Booktok, Black Romance, Historical Romance, Love Studies, Paranormal Romance, Queer Romance and much more!
The conference will also see the launch of Jayashree Kamblé's new book, Creating Identity The Popular Romance Heroine's Journey to Selfhood and Self-Presentation (which you can read more about here).
In addition, this week only, the ebook version of Publishing Romance Fiction in the Philippines by Jodi McAlister, Claire Parnell and Andrea Anne Trinidad, which was published earlier this year by Cambridge University Press, is available for free download here.
Here's a list of some other recent publications:
Ali, Kecia (2023). "The End of the World as We Know It: Climate Catastrophe in Nalini Singh's Paranormal Romance Fiction." The Journal of the Core Curriculum: An Annual Literary and Academic Anthology in the College of Arts and Sciences at Boston University 32:81-86. [At the time of adding this to the list, the 2023 volume of this journal wasn't yet available online.]
Burge, Amy
(2023).
"Romantic Love across Borders: Marriage Migration in Popular Romance Fiction."
Contemporary Love Studies in the Arts and Humanities: What's Love Got To Do With It?
Ed. Madalena Grobbelaar, Elizabeth Reid Boyd and Debra Dudek. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. 39-49. [Abstract]
Phipps, Catherine (2023). "‘The Machine for Showing Desire’: Desert Romance Fiction and Knowing Sexual Desire." Historical Research, Creative Writing, and the Past: Methods of Knowing. Ed. Kevin A. Morrison and Pälvi Rantala. New York: Routledge. [Abstract and Excerpt]
I'm not keen on the use of the word "spat" here, as I think it trivialises what's going on, but the news itself is of interest to Romancelandia:
Romance novelist Nora Roberts
donated $50,000 Sunday to help keep the doors open at a Michigan
library that was defunded in early August in a spat over LGBTQ-themed
books. (Bridge Michigan)
Note that, given how prolific and popular Nora Roberts is, "Patmos Library, serving a township of 10,000 people, has 144 Nora
Roberts books in its collection, compared to about 90 total books with
LGBTQ themes."
---
Turning from censored books to ones with low status, Vassiliki Veros has written a very personal reflection, drawing on her family history, about the importance of
theuncatalogued,theunwrittenmetadataofpopularromancefiction [...] romancefictioncollectionsthatremainundocumented,unregistered,whosetranstextualelementshavebeenobfuscatedornotfullyrealised—thoseworksthatremainseparate,independent,successfulwithoutinstitutionalengagementandrecognition. (The Aleph Review)
Dr. Nicola Welsh-Burke, a scholar of fairy tales and romance, is here to
discuss hot wolf boys, brooding Byronic figures, pseudomarriage and
pseudovirginity, hot villain discourse, and why young women need beastly
men to unlock their sexuality.
---
And now on to the new publications:
Allan, Jonathan A.
(2022).
"One Sexy Daddy: Desirable Dad 'Bods' and the Popular Romance Novel." Fashionable Masculinities: Queers, Pimp Daddies, and Lumbersexuals, Ed. Vicki Karaminas,
Adam Geczy and Pamela Church
Gibson.
New Brunswick, New Jersey:
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.
83-??. [Excerpt]
Hallett, Hilary A.
(2022).
Inventing the It Girl: How Elinor Glyn Created the Modern Romance and Conquered Early Hollywood.
Liveright Publishing Corporation. [Excerpt here. The prologue of the book makes a somewhat less sweeping claim about Glyn's relationship with the romance genre than the title does. Which, given that her most famous novel does not have an HEA, is probably for the best.]
Larson, Christine
(2022). "Streaming books: confluencers, Kindle Unlimited and the platform imaginary."Communication, Culture and Critique. [Abstract]
a PhD! With typical Covid fanfare, my conferral was emailed to me today. As I don’t own a floppy graduation hat, I donned my fave tiara (yes I own more than 1), my fave conference dress and took some pics with my fave romance fiction book
Since one advantage of this is that we can all join this virtual "graduation ceremony" I thought I'd post her photo here.
The PhD is titled "What the Librarians Did: The Marginalisation of Romance Fiction Through the Practices of Public Librarianship" and it's in Information and Knowledge Management/Digital Information Management, from the University of Technology, Sydney.
Since it's not currently available online, here's a list of Vassilikí's existing publications about romance, most of which are free to access:
Veros, Vassiliki
(2012)
"The Romance Reader and the Public Library."Australian Library Journal
61.4:298-306 [Free Access]
Veros, Vassiliki
(2015)
"A Matter of Meta: Category Romance Fiction and the Interplay of Paratext and Library Metadata."Journal of Popular Romance Studies
5.1 [Free Access]
Veros, Vassiliki
(2017)
"Keepers: Marking the Value of the Books on my Shelves."Proceedings from the Document Academy
4.1 [Free Access]
Veros, Vassiliki
(2019)
"Metatextual Conversations: The Exclusion/Inclusion of Genre Fiction in Public Libraries and Social Media Book Groups."Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association
68.3:254-267 [Abstract]
Veros, Vassiliki
(2020)
"The selective tradition, the role of romance fiction donations, and public library practices in New South Wales, Australia."Information Research 25.2 [Free Access]
The RWA has announced
that the RITAs will be replaced by a new contest, called The Vivian,
after Vivian Stephens, one of the founders of the RWA. [Archived version
here.] There was some coverage of this in The Guardian. Here's a bit more detail about Vivian Stephens and why she's such an important figure in the history of romance:
A Black editor in a predominantly white industry, Stephens sought to
incorporate the voices of women of color into the burgeoning romance
industry. In 1980, Dell published the first category romance by a Black
author with Black protagonists- Entwined Destinies by Rosalind Welles
(the pseudonym of journalist Elsie Washington). Stephens also made sure
that Dell’s Candlelight lines included romances by Indigenous, Latina,
and Asian authors, creating almost single-handedly the category that
trade publications called “Ethnic Romance”. (BGSU University Library)
There's more about her here. Some negative responses to the proposal to rename the RWA's main awards after her can be found here, including a comment from one author who stated that
I dislike people who try to rewrite history. I live in the
South-Southwest where every county seat has a memorial to the
Confederate soldiers. Taking them down does not change the Civil War. We
all know that was a terrible event. I hate when people try to make
history politically correct. It wasn't. We can't alter it.
Possibly
a comment which says rather more about the RITAs than the author
intended. Also, as an academic blog, I have to point out that historians
are constantly "rewriting history." For example, here's an article
about the history of the rewriting of the history of the US West. Often
history needs to be rewritten because the version that's currently
known is inaccurate:
Black cowboys and cowgirls have shown up to support Black Lives Matter
this week, but their presence also symbolizes something much more. Black
cowboys have long been part of American history: Historians estimate
that during the 19th century, one in four cowboys was black. Many
ranchers depended on these skilled black workers to herd their cattle,
and many went on to become famous rodeo stars themselves, such as Bill Pickett,
who invented the bulldogging technique. Yet throughout the 20th and
21st century, the narrative shifted. Hollywood films whitewashed the
idea of the cowboy, turning it into a stoic caricature. (Vogue)
I only have one new publication to report in this post. However, it's freely available online:
On a more positive note with regards to libraries, the University of
Wisconsin Milwaukee, which has a collection of nurse romances, now also
has an online exhibition of some of these texts, Angels and Handmaidens,
which is designed in part to demonstrate how romance fiction can be a
useful resources for scholars working in a wide range of fields:
This exhibition is a demonstration of how to begin primary source
research; it suggests numerous ways that students and scholars might
approach popular romance as a resource, and gives examples of the types
of questions that can be asked of resources from popular culture while
inviting the viewer to generate their own questions about the sources.
The
exhibition was created by Katie Stollenwerk, who recently completed a 3
year internship with the UWM Special Collections department.
these days there’s a lot of people who’d agree that consent is a Good
Thing, but they don’t want to hear about it. Consent in romance sex
scenes is frequently covered with a single “do you want this?” or
variations thereon. (Or even “If you want me to stop, tell me now
because I won’t be able to control myself much longer.” That was in a
book published two years ago. Wow.)
The argument goes, roughly, that we know we have to tick the
consent box, but:
it’s unsexy to ask permission
a properly sexy alpha hero can intuit that the virgin hero/ine really wants flagellation followed by anal on their first time
consent is wishy-washy PC nonsense that gets in the way of the good stuff
consent is boring because it’s just endless repetition of ‘may I kiss you’/do you like this?’ and people don’t really do that.
As it happens, some recent research by Jennifer L. Piemonte, Staci Gusakova, Marissa Nichols & Terri
D. Conley, provides evidence in support of Charles' thesis that consent can be sexy. Here's an excerpt from the abstract of "Is consent sexy? Comparing evaluations of written
erotica based on verbal sexual consent":
In Study 1, we compared brief excerpts of erotic fiction in which verbal
sexual consent was either present or absent and determined that U.S.
adults judged the stories similarly and, if anything, considered the
excerpts with verbal consent sexier. In Study 2, we generated erotic
stories that followed familiar, heterosexual scripts and compared
evaluations of erotica with consent expressed explicitly and verbally to
erotica with consent expressed implicitly through no resistance.
Participants considered both versions equally as sexy, indicating that
public concerns about consent ruining sexual dynamics are potentially
unwarranted.
The IASPR 2018 conference now has its programme online but prior to that appearing there was a lot of very thorough tweeting by a number of attendees, using #iaspr18. Since Kat (@BookThingo) has really comprehensive threads, I've used the threadreaderapp to bundle her tweets together and I'm linking to them below.
Session 1 - Romancing Australia, with papers by Amy T. Matthews and Amy Mead (Flinders University), Kate Cuthbert and Jodi McAlister (Deakin University) SEE THREAD
There's more about changes affecting cover art, as discussed by Kate Cuthbert, here, from Claire Parnell via the @PopFicDoctors: Coverart and here's a podcast interview with Jodi McAlister in which she discusses her paper: Podcast. In addition, Renée Dahlia has written a blog post about the session.
Session 2 - Gender and Sexuality, with papers by Ellen Carter (University of Strasbourg), Christina Vogels (AUT New Zealand) and Andrea Anne Trinidad (Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines) SEE THREAD
Renée Dahlia's written a blog post about this session.
Here's a podcast from New Zealand Radio with Christina Vogels about her PhD thesis, titled It's a masculinity sort of thing: Young men talk about the rules of (hetero)romantic relationships.
Session 3 - Places and Spaces of Love, with papers by Kecia Ali (Boston University), Jacqueline Jones (LaGuardia CC, City University of New York) and Vassiliki Veros (University of Technology, Sydney) SEE THREAD
A similar presentation by Vassiliki Veros on "Exploring library metadata and how it can marginalise romance fiction" is up on YouTube.
Session 4 - Keynote Panel on “Romancing Popular Fiction Studies: A Theory of Genre Worlds” by Beth Driscoll (University of Melbourne), Lisa Fletcher (University of Tasmania) and Kim Wilkins (University of Queensland) SEE THREAD and, from Jodi McAlister, with more graphics: See thread
There's also a podcast recorded with the presenters in advance of this panel: Podcast
Session 5 - History and Romance, with papers by Stephanie Russo (Macquarie University), Jennifer Wallace and Francesca Pierini (Academia Sinica, Taiwan).
Kat had to miss most of this session, so the thread is by Jodi McAlister: SEE THREAD
Philippa B's summary of Stephanie Russo's paper on "Georgette Heyer’s Unruly Eighteenth Century" can be found here.
Phillipa B's summary of Pierini's presentation about "Italian timelessness" can be found here.
Jennifer Wallace writes romance as Jennifer Hallock and she's put her paper up on her website in two parts. Part one looks at how the bestsellers in historical romance are
disproportionately: (1) set in Great Britain; (2) overpopulated with
nobles; and (3) selective in their historical accuracy. Part two looks at how the aggregate impact of these chronotopes can be
harmful to our understanding of history, to the romance market as a
whole, and particularly to authors of diverse books. For links to more graphics and a way to help Jennifer crowdsource historical romances which differ from the chronotope she identified, go here and scroll to the end of the post.
Phillipa B's summary of Jennifer Wallace's "History Ever After: Fabricated historical chronotopes in romance genre fictions" can be found here.
Session 6 - Power and Patriarchy, with papers by Heather Schell (George Washington University), Nattie Golubov (Centro de Investigaciones sobre América del Norte, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), Therese Dryden (University of Newcastle) and Jayashree Kamblé (LaGuardia CC, City University of New York) SEE THREAD
Philippa B's post about Heather Schell's "The Soft Power of Popular Romance" can be found here.
Philippa B's post about Nattie Golubov's "Dangerous loves endangered: nationalism, violence and territoralization in US paramilitary romance fiction" is here.
Philippa B's summary of Therese Dryden/Michelle Douglas's "The Single Mother and the Law: Romance novels making room for female voices in patriarchal spaces" is here.
And details of Jayashree Kamblé's “One of the Guys? Eve Dallas as a Masculine Worker Heroine in J.D. Robb’s In Death series", also by Philippa B.
Session 7 - 19th Century Legacies, with papers by Sarah Ficke (Marymount University), Steven Gil and Lucy Sheerman SEE THREAD
See Renée Dahlia's blog post about the session.
Details here about Sarah Ficke's “House, Home, and Husband in Historical Romance Fiction", from Philippa B.
Steven Gil's "Beloved Monstrosity: Romance and Romanticism in Frankenstein" has been summarised by Philippa B.
Philippa B has summarised Lucy Sheerman's “Reader, I mirrored him: the recasting of romance tropes in Jane Eyre fanfiction" here.
Session 8 - Muslim and Middle Eastern Romance, with papers by Kathrina Daud (University of Brunei), Claire Parnell (University of Melbourne), Javaria Farooqui (University of Tasmania) and Amy Burge (University of Birmingham) SEE THREAD
See Renée Dahlia's blog post about the session.
Philippa B's posted about Kathrina Daud's "Muslims reading romance: Bruneian considerations of “Halal” and romance novels" here.
The abstract of Claire Parnell's “Reading and Writing Muslim Romance Online” and notes on the session by Philippa B can be found here.
Philippa B's post on Javaria Farooqui's “The Kitchen and Beyond: Romantic Chronotope of Pakistani Popular Fiction" is here.
Amy Burge's “Girls of Riyadh and Desperate in Dubai: Reading and writing romance in the Middle East" is summarised here by Philippa B.
Session 9 - Romancing Chinese Worlds, with papers by Fang-Mei Lin (National Taiwan Normal University), Huike Wen (Willamette University), Jin Feng (Grinnell College) and Erin S. Young (SUNY Empire State College) SEE THREAD (by Jodi McAlister)
See Renée Dahlia's blog post about the session.
The abstract of Huike Wen's “On the Way to a Better Life: Countryside themed romance in recent Chinese Television" and some additional comments from the paper are provided by Philippa B here.
Philippa B also provides these for Jin Feng's “Life Is Elsewhere: The Economy of Food and Sex in Chinese Web Romance”
and for “Romance in Chinatown: The Love Stories of Edith Maude Eaton” by Erin S. Young.
Session 10 - South/South-East Asian Romance Communities with a paper by Meghna Bohidar (University of Delhi)
Bohidar: young romantic couples are less concerned with caste and religious differences, however they still shape subjectivity e.g. through taste. #IASPR18pic.twitter.com/QrvvM5tZFt
For those who can't read the text in that photo, it contains a definition of an important term used in Bohidar's paper: "Habitus is a set of microbehaviors consisting of a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions that are unconsciously ingrained based on one's class position"
SEE THREAD and Philippa B's summary of Meghna Bohidar's “Negotiating Romantic Love in India: Family, Public Space, and Popular Cinema"
The session then moved on to Kat Mayo's interview of/conversation with Mina V. Esguerra
Session 11 - Subversions of Race, Culture and History with papers by Eric Murphy Selinger (DePaul University), Mallory Jagodzinski (Indiana University South Bend) and Johanna Hoorenman (Utrecht University) SEE THREAD and, from Jodi McAlister, A SUPPLEMENTARY THREAD
The abstract of, supplemented by notes by Philippa B on, Eric Murphy Selinger's “The Wild Heart of the Continent: Love and Place in Sherry Thomas’s Silk Road Romance Novels”
The same, but for Mallory Jagodzinski's “Love is (Color) Blind: Race, Belonging, and Nation in 21st Century Historical Romance Fiction" is here.
Again, an abstract followed by comments by Philippa B, this time on “‘You stayed’: Love, law and the reservation in Jenna Kernan’s Apache Protectors series" by Johanna Hoorenman.
Session 12 - Love in Other Worlds with papers by Donna Hanson (University of Canberra), María T. Ramos-García (South Dakota State University), Athena Bellas (University of Melbourne) and Kristin Noone (Irvine Valley College) SEE THREAD and coverage of the FINAL PAPERS in this thread by Jodi McAlister.
Philippa B's post about Donna Hanson's “Love in Outer Space: Science fiction romance
—
the ideal place to explore gender and
love” can be found here.
María T. Ramos-García's “Representations of Otherness in Paranormal Romance: Nalini Singh and J.R. Ward” is summarised by Philippa B here.
I've now come across a couple of reports on the recent Georgette Heyer conference. Sophie Weston mentions that
A terrific paper from Vanda Wilcox made
the point that, however precise Heyer’s grasp of strategic issues at
Waterloo might have been, her officers “embody World War I values and
leadership style”. At the same time Heyer’s other ranks (gorgeous Gideon
Ware’s straight-talking soldier servant, for instance) are basically
WWI Tommies in red coats, rather than Wellington’s rapists and
pillagers. Convinced me completely.
Her full report can be found here. The evening discussion session is described here by Nicola Cornick.
On 29 June, at the Gendered Emotions in History conference held at the University of Sheffield there was a paper on romance, presented by:
Agnes Arnold-Forster (QMUL) - Gender, Emotions, and Professional Identity in Twentieth Century Medical Mills and Boon Novels
The EUPOP2018 conference will be held from July 24th – 26th, 2018. One of the keynote speeches is by
Professor Petr A. Bilek (Charles University, Prague)
Distant Encounters of the Third Kind: Why Is Popular Culture Not Popular within Central European University Curricula?
I'm always very happy to see scholars moving into the field of romance studies, so I'm glad to be able to mention that Johanna Hoorenman "is currently working on a cultural history of Native American themed
popular romance novels, tracing the roots of the subgenre to early
American women's captivity narratives and James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans" (http://muse.jhu.edu/article/662582).
Mary Lynne Nielsen writes at Dear Author that "the idea of some level of financial security is interwoven in romance."
Christian Peukert and Imke Reimers have found that "romance novels are more likely to be self-published than other genres [...]. The difference becomes particularly evident after 2010, as self-publishing became a successful “mainstream” distribution channel" and "After 2008 (the year after the introduction of the Kindle), there is a small increase in advances for romance novels, compared to a slight drop in advances for other genres. More pronounced, there is a sharp increase in deal sizes for romance novels after 2010 (the introduction of the iPad), whereas the deal sizes for all other categories remain almost constant." They write that:
The fact that more deals were made with future stars among the romance genre throughout the time period of our study suggests that publishers have been able to predict the future success of romance novels better than the success of non-romance books. After 2010 – concurrent with the large rise in self-publishing among romance bestsellers – the ability to predict bestsellers among romance novels increased further, with an increase in the share of future bestsellers among romance deals from about 2% to 5%.
New to the Romance Wiki academic bibliography are:
Markert, John, 2017.
“God is Love: The Christian Romance Market.” Publishing Research Quarterly. Online First.
Christian publishers have long produced romance novels, but the
production of these slim books of love have not been a significant part
of their overall output. This started to change in the 1980s in response
to the increased sensuality found in secular romance novels. The
Christian romance has undergone even more of a resurgence at the outset
of the new millennium for the same reason: secular romances have notched
up the sensuality of their romances today and Christian houses have
responded to their constituents who tire of the sexual slant of these
secular novels. Indeed, the strength of the Christian market has not
gone unnoticed by mainstream houses and numerous secular houses, notably
Harlequin, are today producing Christian-themed romances. The secular
Christian message is somewhat attenuated, however, which helps explain
the continued popularity of those romances produced by Christian
publishers. (Abstract)
"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.
Recently Vassiliki Veros was a member of a reader’s panel at the Australian Library and Information Association's 2012 conference and she's posted her paper at her blog. She's a librarian, but
As a reader, I gave up on accessing my books from my library early on.
I bought all my romances from newsagencies, supermarkets, second hand
bookstores, bookshops, markets, online and swapping books with friends.
As a romance reader I am not unique in this behaviour.
This is because
Libraries have treated romance readers as “the devil” for they maintain a
distance from them. We see this in librarians trying to improve
the readers choice, cataloguers not valuing the books the readers
choose. All this is reflected in the romance readers survey responses
that the library is not a provider for their reading needs.
Why can’t we love the undead? So many friends push aside the idea of a
zombie lover completely (you guys can’t judge me! You read about vampire
sex!) [...]
As discussed before [see this post], zombie romance is more romance. Sex never enters the equation. It’s about a relationship of souls (personalities), a coming together of two people.
But still zombies aren’t good enough! The rotting is either done away with completely or can be avoided with medication. The eating of people or brains is the same. So where is the problem? They are undead humans, as are vampires. With rational thought, being capable of emotions, moral agency and free will, why are the undead any less suitable as mates?
The top shelf of my largest bookshelf is stacked two rows
deep with romances with titles like One
Night with the Sheikh by Penny Jordan and Desert Barbarian by Charlotte Lamb. These books (and a corresponding set of binders full of photocopies from 1920s movie magazines) are the remnants of a
research project on romantic Orientalism in the United States in the 1920s and
2000s which is currently on hiatus. [...] But now the blogosphere is in luck. This summer I’ve decided to set myself a lofty task:
Read and review all of my sheikh romances and post the reviews on this very blog twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays. On Wednesdays I’ll post a scan from one of the many articles about how hot Rudolph Valentino is. Is this an overly optimistic schedule for someone who’s also finishing her thesis? I guess we’ll see…
And you can read all about it here. She begins with an extended synopsis of/commentary on E. M. Hull's The Sheik (1), (2), (3) and (4).
Fifty Shades of Grey does an interesting dance with the explicit. It revels in the details of the taboo of BDSM while seeming to condemn it. [...] And many, many readers love this. They can masturbate furiously to the
scenes played out in the Red Room of Pain, while waiting for the heroine
to cure Mr. Grey of his perversions.
I am reminded of the masses who enjoyed the spectacle of the Salem
Witch Trials or denunciations of heretics during the Spanish
Inquisition.
"She consorted lewdly with the Devil!" the inquisitor proclaims, partly
for the judges but loudly enough to entertain the masses. He lovingly
details the proof of her perfidy. The women gasp and feel a quiver
between their thighs right before they all scream, "Burn the witch!" [...]
I don't think a large portion of mainstream society has evolved much
since then. And for erotica writers, who usually situate themselves
firmly in the sex-positive camp, this is very hard to comprehend. We
write novels about how erotic experience and the exploration of new
sexual territories helps us grow as individuals. For us, sex in a
doorway. Very often our themes are about revelation, completion,
redemption through experience. Not through shame or rejection or closing
down our sexual options.
The photo of "Zombie and Bride of the Zombie" came from Wikimedia Commons and was taken by Sam Pullara, who has made it available for use under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
