Bad Romance Data, Monsters and New Publications

The data does NOT exist to support the statement that romance is a billion dollar industry. Quite frankly, the data does not exist to make any sweeping statements about the size of the popular romance genre market.

So says Andrea Martucci of the Shelf Love podcast, who's been taking a hard look at the "popular romance genre market data between 1972 and today" and presented her "research on 'Bad Romance Data' at the 2023 International Association for the Study of Popular Romance conference." You can read her analysis and conclusions here (and it's archived here).

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Also via Andrea (but this time not by her), comes a call for participants:

Whether you're solely into humans or a monster romance enthusiast, I'd love for you to take part in my survey. I'm a graduate student doing my thesis on whether or not monster attraction could be explained through evolutionary anthropology.

The survey will be available from January 9, 2024, to March 12, 20204, and it will take about 20 to 30 minutes to complete (although some people have finished it in as little as 12 minutes). It's completely anonymous and only requires that you be at least 18 years old to participate.

Andrea spotted it on Reddit but there's also a more formal announcement giving details of the research on the Research Study Consent Form to be found at the website of California State University, Fullerton.

The research is being "carried out by Phoebe Santillan, under the guidance of Dr. Elizabeth Pillsworth" and

The purpose of this research study is to gather information on people who are attracted to fictional monsters. You are being asked to participate in this study because any and all data is valuable at this stage within the research process. Attraction to fictional monsters is not required to participate in this study.

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And here's a short list of new publications:

Allen, Amanda K. (2024) "Ruling the Court: Reflections on Midcentury Junior Novel Romances." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 13.

Robinson, Rachel (2023). Reading and writing dogs in popular romance fiction, PhD, University of Tasmania. [Only the abstract is currently available.]

 

Warnaar, Karin (2023). "Dresses and Drapery: The Material Essie Summers." Scope: Contemporary Research Topics art & design 25:91-96. [Full pdf available for download at the link provided and, as a bonus, here's a link to a 2018 Otago Daily Times article about Essie Summers' life and work which Warnaar cites.]

Ya’u, Mohammed Sani, Sabariah Md Rashid, Afida Mohamad Ali and Hardev Kaur Jujar Singh (2023). "Semantic Extensions of Hausa Visual and Auditory Perception Verbs gani and ji in Romance Fiction." Pertanika Journal of Social Science and Humanities 31.4:1441-1464.

Romance Miscellany: Online, In the Media, In Journals/Academic Volumes

Laura Vivanco

On the Internet:

Bornschein, Anne N. 'The Stars (and bars): race and racism in Susan Elizabeth Phillips’s Chicago Stars series'.

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."]

In the Media:

Anonymous, 2016. 'Roberta Gellis (1927-2016): Obituary'.

Roberta Gellis (1927 - 2016)

Obituary

Roberta Gellis (1927 - 2016)

Obituary

Roberta Gellis (1927 - 2016)

Obituary

Roberta Gellis (1927 - 2016)

Obituary

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.']

Sanusi, Isa, 2016. 'A hunger for romance in northern Nigeria', BBC, 4 May 2016.

Academic Articles:

Hess, Jonathan M., 2010. 

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. Excerpt Abstract [Focuses on Bertrice Small's Sky O'Malley and Patricia Gaffney's Wild at Heart]

JPRS CFPs: Erotic Romance, Latin American Popular Culture, Animals, Heyer, and Religion

The Journal of Popular Romance Studies has put out three updated calls for papers: see the sections on the JPRS website about "animals in popular romance" (new deadline October 1, 2012); Georgette Heyer (new deadline October 1, 2012); and "love and religion in global popular culture" (new deadline December 1, 2012).

There are also two new CFPs for JPRS, one on "erotic romance fiction" and the other on "romantic love in Latin American popular culture":
 
Before and Beyond Fifty Shades of Grey: New Approaches to Erotic Romance Fiction
 
Since the 1970s, both the content and the institutional practices surrounding erotic romance fiction have been transformed. The remarkable popularity of E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy has brought a number of those transformations to light, not just in terms of the novels’ BDSM-inflected sexual content (old news in the romance world) but also in their publishing history, moving from online Twilight fan-fiction to e-book format to paperback bestsellers.

Yet the world of erotic romance fiction extends far beyond Fifty Shades—not just historically and aesthetically, but geographically, racially, and in the range of sexual identities and practices made visible by these texts. The range of critical and scholarly approaches to these texts ought to be equally various, whether looking back to foundational essays like Ann Barr Snitow’s “Mass-Market Romance: Pornography for Women is Different” or drawing on the latest in queer theory and cultural studies.

To that end, the Journal of Popular Romance Studies is looking for essays, interviews, and pedagogical materials on the subject of erotic popular romance fiction, now and in the past. Essays on individual authors and texts are encouraged, along with work on the business side of the genre—its publishers, its marketing, etc.—and explorations of its reception, including fandom, censorship, and the public debates surrounding erotic romance. All theoretical approaches are welcome. Submissions are due by February 1, 2013, and this special issue of JPRS will be published in December, 2013.

More details here. 

Romantic Love in Latin American Popular Culture
 
The Journal of Popular Romance Studies is looking for essays, interviews, and pedagogical materials on romantic love in Latin American popular culture, for a special issue guest-edited by David William Foster (Arizona State University), to be published in September, 2013. The deadline for submissions is January 7, 2013.

How have Latin American film, fiction, poetry, popular music, TV, and other media represented romantic love, now and in the past? How do these representations compare across national, cultural, and regional divides, and how have they been deployed in the service of nationalism and / or political change? How does romantic love intersect with evolving ideas of gender and sexuality, and with the eroticization of the Latin American body (e.g., the “Latin lover”) in other parts of the world? How do Latin American popular texts eroticize the Other—Indigenous, African, Asian, European—in their own right? How do high-art traditions like love poetry—by Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, Julia de Burgos, Delmira Agustini, and others—function as popular culture in Latin America, and what happens when they are taken up outside of literary and academic circles?

Essays on broad cultural trends are welcome, as well as in-depth work on individual songs, films, novels, telenovelas, and other popular texts. Essays dealing with LGBTQ issues are particularly encouraged. Papers should be written in English and translations provided alongside the original text.

More details here.

Horses, Heroes and Heroines

Laura Vivanco

Heroes are not infrequently to be found on horseback and horses have often featured on the covers of romances; I've posted a short piece about heroes, heroines and horses at my website. I should probably warn you that I chose the covers above purely because they include horses, not because they're attached to any of the texts I quote from in my mini-essay.

On the topic of covers and heroes, I thought I'd return very briefly to the issue of race and cover art by posting the cover of Cindy Dee's Soldier's Rescue Mission.

And re heroines in historicals, Isobel Carr has been doing a little bit of research into the ages at marriage of Georgian and Regency aristocrats:

How old were most daughters of the peerage (the most common heroines in our books) when they married for the first time? Stone’s chart shows that during the first part of the era, the median age was ~20-22. Post 1750 (correlating with the passage of Hardwicke’s Marriage Act; Coincidence?), that age jumps up to ~23-24. So, the most common age for the daughter of a peer to marry was not when she was in her teens, but when she was in her early 20s, and an unmarried twenty-five year old would not really be much of an outlier.

She also discusses accurate ages for heroes at marriage elsewhere in her post.

CFP Deadline Extended: Animals and/in Romance

Laura Vivanco

"I thought I was late for a very important date..."

Eric Selinger, as Executive Editor of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies, has sent out the following message:

Due to an error in the submissions email address, submissions to the special forum on Animals and / in Romance have been getting bounced back to their authors as undeliverable!

We are therefore extending the deadline, and have a new, correct submissions address below. Please circulate the corrected CFP, as well as our apologies for the confusion.

The new deadline is January 6, 2012 and

Essays of up to 10,000 words (MLA citation style; Word documents preferred) should be submitted to An Goris, Managing Editor of JPRS, at managing.editor@jprstudies.org.

The original call for papers can be found here.

The illustration is one of Sir John Tenniel's drawings of the creatures in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). It shows the White Rabbit looking at his watch and was downloaded from Wikimedia Commons.

CFP: Animals and/in Romance

The Journal of Popular Romance Studies (JPRS) seeks essay submissions for a special forum examining the role of animals in popular romance media (fiction, film, TV, music video, etc.) from around the world.

How and why do animals mediate, complicate, or facilitate romance narratives? What role do animals—both real and imagined--play in courtship rituals or the articulation of sexual desire? In fiction and film, the romance genre abounds with creatures of all kinds, from the leopard in Bringing Up Baby and the dogs in Jennifer Crusie’s novels to the werewolves and dragons and undefined “Beasts” in fairy tale and paranormal love stories. Why does romance need animals, and what does this say about the relationship between love, desire, animals and human beings? How do invocations of the “animal” in romance differ from culture to culture, era to era?

Essays might explore a variety of questions and concerns, such as:

• If animals have traditionally been aligned with the oppressed (women, slaves, the lower classes), how might the representation of animals shed light on issues of gender, race and class?


• Conversely, since animal metaphors are often deployed to construct masculinity (the “alpha male”) as well as femininity (woman as horse to be broken, or falcon to be tamed), how might the representation of animals shed light on those same issues?


• Are there similarities in the representations of love for an animal and romantic love between humans?


• How might recent Animal Studies theory be brought to bear upon popular romance media?


• Conversely, what do theories of popular romance have to contribute to Animal Studies?


• How are historical changes in petkeeping or animal rights activism reflected in romance media?


• How might recent scientific discoveries about the nature of animal sexual behavior (the flourishing of homosexuality among animals, for example, or new research into the non-monogamous behavior of species previously believed to mate for life) influence contemporary romance narratives?


• What does it mean to be human in a narrative world filled with animals? How does the representation of animals relate to the representation of human desire, emotion, and subjectivity?


• What role do Bestiality and Zoophilia, broadly defined, play in the genre of paranormal romance, or in romantic deployments of animals more generally?

Essays of up to 10,000 words (MLA citation style; Word documents preferred) should be submitted to An Goris, Managing Editor of JPRS, at managing.editor@jprstudies.org by December 1, 2011. Please note in your subject line that your submission is for the Forum on Animals in Romance Media. Suggestions of potential peer reviewers are welcome.
[Edited: "Due to an error in the original submissions email address, submissions to the special forum on Animals and / in Romance have been getting bounced back to their authors as undeliverable!" To avoid confusion, I have now amended the address included in this post. The deadline has been extended to January 6, 2012.]

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All eye images were downloaded from Flickr where they were made available under Creative Commons licences. They were taken by mikebaird, jcmar.net, TheHideaway (Simon), mcamcamca, Vicki DeLoach, voyageAnatolia, Paul Wellner Bou, and Yamanaka Tamaki.