New Pages (and Videos) on Love (and Romance Scholarship)

Laura Vivanco

Documentary-maker Laurie Kahn invited Eric

to curate some “Resource Pages” of links relevant to topics raised in Love Between the Covers, the romance documentary, and they’re now live!  They’re designed to be of use both to teachers and curious readers.

The pages include links to video-clips, documents and other web-pages on the topics of

• The Happily Ever After -- and the Tragic Ending
• Race and Romance
• Love Across Cultures
• Jane Austen and the Romance Revolution
• Romance in the Digital Age

Over on the website of Kahn's production company, you can see videos taken at the Library of Congress during

What Is Love? Romance Fiction in the Digital Age [...] a two-day Popular Romance Project conference that brought romance authors, readers, publishers, and scholars in many disciplines together for four fascinating panel discussions.

The links below take you straight to the videos on Vimeo:

Panel 1 discussed "What Belongs in the Romance Canon?"

Panel 2 asked "What Do The Science and History of Romance Reveal?"

Panel 3 looked at "Community and the Romance Genre"

Panel 4 focused on what's "Trending Now: Where is Romance Fiction Heading in the Digital Age?"

Details about all of the panelists, panels and the introduction to the conference as well as all the videos can be found here.

Also out recently is a podcast featuring Lisa Fletcher,

one of the scholars working on a project called Genre worlds: Australian popular fiction in the 21st century (2016–2019). This project won an RWA (US) grant, followed by a very prestigious grant from the Australia Research Council. Lisa talks about the project’s goals and  methodology, as well as other themes and topics in popular fiction that pique her interest. She also talks about the challenges of teaching romance at university, and some of the books and techniques she uses in her classes.

The podcast can be found here.

CFPs: Recycling, Whiteness, Paper and Asperger's Syndrome

Laura Vivanco

These calls for papers aren't specifically about romance: they're about "cultural recycling," whiteness, "the materiality of literary texts" and Asperger's Syndrome. One could, though, discuss romances in conjunction with all of these issues.

Since fairy tales and references to Shakespeare, occur fairly frequently in romance, and since in For Love and Money I took a quick look at some romances which were reworkings of the Pygmalion myth, and others which reworked the tale of Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady, it seemed to me that romance fiction is full of "allusions and echoes."

Allusions and echoes – cultural recycling and recirculation

An international colloquium at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK

June 16-17, 2012

Deadline for paper/panel submissions is March 30, 2012.

The many ways in which stories are recirculated is astounding – from relatively straightforward retellings of fairy tales and classical myths, to feminist, queer, postcolonial or ecocritical subversions of central themes, to fan fiction’s adaptations of beloved characters and story worlds.

The international colloquium "Allusions and echoes – cultural recycling and recirculation" is an opportunity to explore the various ways in which texts communicate over borders of space, time, genre and medium. What themes, motifs, backgrounds and details capture the imagination of authors, readers and viewers? How are they recycled and recirculated from one period, or one audience, to another? How and why do they gain currency again and again? Contributors are invited to cast their net widely and consider not only contemporary works, such as The Canongate Myth Series (2005-2011) and Cinderfella (1960, 2013) but also older texts, such as Chaucer’s The Physician’s Tale and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. 

More information here.

Apparently "Interracial and interethnic marriages are at an all-time high in the US" (BBC) but I've not seen a lot of work on race in romances (other than The Sheik and romances specifically marketed as being about characters of a particular racial group) since Stephanie Burley's "Shadows & Silhouettes: The Racial Politics of Category Romance" was published in 2000 (in Paradoxa 5.13-14). Abstracts for the following conference are due by today, but maybe it'll still be of interest:

2nd Global Conference
Images of Whiteness

Saturday 7th July 2012 – Monday 9th July 2012
Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

Since the publication of Richard Dyer’s seminal study 'White' in 1997, academics have increasingly turned critical attention to the subject of racial whiteness. Publications include historical accounts detailing the emergence of whiteness as a racial category, cultural studies exploring the representation and construction of white identities in popular culture, film and television scholars examining narratives about white people, reflecting white themes, white obsessions, and white anxieties. Consistent with the shift in critical studies from minority identity formations to consider ‘central’ identities – masculinity, heterosexuality – the study of whiteness is increasingly understood as central to understanding the operation of ‘race’ as a form of social categorisation. Inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary perspectives are sought from those engaged in any field relevant to the study of whiteness including media and film studies, performance and creative writing, cultural theory, sociology, psychology and medical approaches including cosmetic surgery, and other cognate areas

More information here.

Has publication in the mass-market format affected perceptions of romance novels?

Distinctions that Matter: Popular Literature and Material Culture

Essays are invited for a special issue of Belphégor that seeks to explore the relationship between distinctions of taste and textual production by examining how the materiality of literary texts influences and perhaps even determines their cultural status. In the nineteenth century, for example, printing and binding became cheaper, faster, and more easily accessible than ever before, which resulted in an explosion of print material. As printing costs decreased and print runs increased, the price of books became cheaper and publishers were able to attract more readers, which led to a greater demand for new content. The cultural impact of this shift was twofold. On the one hand, this decrease in printing costs lowered the cultural entrance level, which resulted in the expansion of popular or trivial literature as well as a wide range of new popular formats, such as dime novels, pulp magazines, comic books, and paperbacks. On the other hand, publishers also attempted to mimic the conventions of exclusiveness through printing and binding techniques in order to preserve the highbrow status of literature as a marker of class distinctions. This led to the rise of competing formats that attempted to challenge the perceived lowbrow status of popular literature, such as deluxe editions and graphic novels. As the divide between highbrow and lowbrow taste widened, the materiality of the text became the primary site where the cultural status of popular literature was both constructed and contested. The same issues also inform cultural debates concerning digital media, as cultural distinctions are now being reconfigured through new forms of electronic display in the post-print era.

Abstracts must be submitted by 1 March 2012. More details here.

After the success of Jennifer Ashley's The Madness of Sir Ian Mackenzie and the recent publication of Eloisa James's The Duke is Mine in which the heroine

is torn between a duke with an Asperger's-like inability to express emotion, who relies on logic, and her fiancé Rupert, who is all emotion with almost no logic. (interview with the author)

I wondered if there was some material in romance novels which would be relevant to the following volume:

Bright Lines: Culture On the Autism Spectrum

"Am I on the spectrum?" asks Abed Nadir, a character on the show Community. He then provides an answer: "None of your business." His joke presumes that the audience will understand this reference to the autism spectrum, and Community introduces the topic of Asperger's Syndrome in its pilot episode. Since the publication of Temple Grandin's work on autism in 1986, there has been a textual explosion of work on Asperger's Syndrome and the autism spectrum. Changes to the DSM-V will replace Asperger's Syndrome with Autistic Spectrum Disorder, a broadening that could threaten the culture that aspie/AS-identified people have produced in the form of literature and visual media. This volume would explore representations of autism within popular culture.

Abstracts are due by 1 May 2012. More details here.

Primary Texts, Long Tails and Electronic Solutions

I've got a long post planned about politics in a particular historical romance, but I thought I'd wait a bit longer before posting it, since many of you will either be fed up hearing about current U.S. politics, or will still be glued to analysis of the results. We've had quite a lot of coverage of them here in the UK, and I'm sure there's interest in them all around the world. In previous years we heard a lot about pregnant, dimpled and hanging chads, as well as about irregularities concerning the electronic voting machines. Clearly electronic voting has both advantages and disadvantages.

Today, prompted by an item in the Dallas Morning News, Maya Reynolds was posting about e-books in classrooms, and she discussed their advantages and disadvantages. It seems unlikely that these students would be studying romance novels. Even at university level 'there are very few enlightened institutions of higher learning where romances are making up many of coursepacks', as Isabel Swift, Harlequin's VP, Author & Asset Development has observed.

One problem facing scholars who wish to study and teach romance is availability (or rather non-availability) of texts. While it may be possible for an individual to find second-hand copies on ebay, at Amazon or in second-hand book shops, they're not the most dependable sources if one wants to buy large quantities of primary texts. University libraries don't tend to have extensive collections of romance novels (I'd imagine that many university libraries have no mass-market romances at all), although there are a few exceptions, such as The Ray and Pat Browne Library for Popular Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University, which

holds a wide range of romance materials from novels to valentines. The collection includes more than 10,000 volumes of category romance series from publishers such as Harlequin, Silhouette, Loveswept, Candlelight Ecstasy, and others. The holdings also include a sizable collection of mass-market romance novels, including Georgian, regency, gothic, contemporary and historicals. Leading novelists like Georgette Heyer, Dorothy Eden, Faith Baldwin, Barbara Cartland, Janet Dailey and Jayne Ann Krentz, among others, are represented in the collection. (more details here)

and the University of Melbourne:

The Romance Fiction Collections is a comprehensive collection of paper-back fiction by Australian and New Zealand, as well as British and American romance novelists; published from the 1960s up until the present, by publishers such as Mills and Boon, Silhouette and the Women’s Weekly Library. (more details here)

A significant problem for romance scholarship, then, is availability of primary texts, and not just in university libraries, but in the quantities needed if the novels are to be bought and read by large groups of students. As Juliet Flesch has noted,

These days, romance novels are published with all the appurtenances of normal books: they have title-pages, printing histories, ISBNs and copyright statements. They have, however, a remarkably short shelf-life. Harlequin Enterprises, for example, keep a backlist of three months. After that, unless they are reprinted in a “classic” edition, the books are out of print. (Flesch 1997: 119)

While single-title romances may remain available in the bookshops somewhat longer, availability, particularly for non-current titles written by some of the less famous authors, or even for the earlier works of now-famous romance authors, can be problematic. And if an academic wishes to have students study a category romance, he or she is going to have to work fast to find the book, read it, analyse it, decide it's worth teaching and make sure that the students buy sufficient copies of it, all before the book is replaced by next month's batch of category romances.

There's been a lot of talk about the 'long tail' (see here, for example), whereby a book continues to be sold and read long after its publication date:

[Chris] Anderson [who coined the term] argued that products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough. Examples of such mega-stores include the online retailer Amazon.com and the online video rental service Netflix. The Long Tail is a potential market and, as the examples illustrate, the distribution and sales channel opportunities created by the Internet often enable businesses to tap into that market successfully. (Wikipedia)

There are two ways in which this relates to the romance genre. The first is due the rise of the e-book. Many romances are now being published or republished as e-books (though there are still problems with standardising formats and hardware). The second is the creation of the Espresso Book Machine:

which can print black-and-white text for a 300-page paperback with a four-color cover, and bind it together in three minutes. [...] "Our goal is to preserve the economic and ergonomic simplicity of the physical book," said Epstein, who laments the disappearance of backlist and ready access to books in other languages. By printing from digital files, ODB hopes to make warehousing—and much of today's distribution model—obsolete. "In theory," said Epstein, "every book printed will be digitized, which means the market will be radically decentralized. A bookstore with this technology, without any expense to themselves [other than the machine] can increase their footprint." [...] While the Espresso Book Machine can print original manuscripts [...], the ODB team has a more ambitious goal: they want stores and libraries to use the machine to print copies of slow-selling titles or books that have temporarily gone out of stock, as well as rare books. (Publishers Weekly)

I hope these new technologies will prove to be the perfect partners for the serious, detailed, in-depth academic study and teaching of individual modern romance novels.

• Flesch, Juliet, 1997. ‘Not just housewives and old maids’, Collection Building, 16.3: 119-124.