.@dramyburge and I are in the very early stages of some work on the history and development of British romance fiction, and as you can see, we have a lot of very interesting ground to cover... https://t.co/X7IPjCKNSZ
The International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR)
is seeking a Secretary to join our Executive Committee. This is a
volunteer position, with a two-year term.
They're also looking for a Film and Television Editor, Journal for Popular Romance Studies. Details about that can be found here (and the deadline's 30 July).
If you're not already signed up to IASPR's quarterly newletter, I'd encourage you to do that here (where you can also see the newsletter's archive). This quarter's newsletter includes a link to PCA Romance Area 2022 Abstract Booklet which I don't think was available online during the event and an interview with the new IASPR President (congratulations Jayashree and I look forward to seeing your ideas come to fruition!)
Balteskard, Susanna
(2022).
Feminism in Romance: How the romance genre has(n't) changed since the 1950s.
Bachelor thesis,
Norwegian University of Science and Technology. [Abstract only.]
Buttrick, Nicholas
Westgate, Erin C.
Oishi, Shigehiro
(2022).
"Reading Literary Fiction Is Associated With a More Complex Worldview." Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Online First. [A preprint version is available for free online - see the links in the romance scholarship database entry I've linked to]
Namysłowska, Karolina
(2022).
Romance novels in translation: Focus on defining features of selected texts translated from English into Polish.
Masters thesis,
Jagiellonian University. [Abstract]
Also, since I was sent a free copy of New Frontiers in Popular Romance: Essays on the Genre in the 21st Century, I've been able to update the entries in the Romance Scholarship Database about it to include quotes that give a flavour of each essay.
and thanks to Cruz-Bibb, I've found references to some older dissertations I hadn't come across before:
Ganapathy, Subha
(2002).
Who Is Afraid of Romance Novels?: Women Readers, Patriarchy and Popular Culture.
PhD thesis,
Mother Teresa Women’s University. [Details here.]
The
last two reach very different conclusions from each other about lesbian
romance. Brown argues that lesbian romances differ significantly from f/m ones, whereas Secrease finds that they're really very similar. Both Brown and Secrease base their conclusions on small samples, and it could
be argued that they're comparing the lesbian novels to at least some
generalisations about heterosexual romances which have now been
superseded (and may have even been a bit out of date by the time the
dissertations were written) but it's interesting nonetheless that they
disagree. I linked to the entries in the Romance Scholarship Database
since I've included quotes there which are possibly not available in the
excepts at ProQuest.
---
Another item I found in Cruz-Bibb's bibliography is:
what I have experiencedas"feministchanges"to the romance genre began appearing in the mid-1980s [...] In my experience, in all but the subgenreofhistorical romance, gender stereotypes were beginning to change. Male characters were no longer portrayed strictlyasbrooding, dark, and macho; heroines were given more independence and depth. There were also thematic changes: for example, writers were beginning to pay attention to contemporary social issues, suchassingle parenting, substance abuse, and child abuse. (14)
On the topic of changes which took place in the 1980s, Steve Ammidown tweets that:
The
first mainstream contemporary romance to include condoms that I know of
is Elda Minger’s Untamed Heart. The first contemporary to discuss
abortion that I’ve seen was Sandra Brown’s A Treasure Worth Seeking. The
acquiring editor for both? Vivian Stephens. https://t.co/7pjFZyukPU
Minger's novel was published in 1983. Steve's
careful wording here reminds me that it's hard to keep track of
"firsts" in the genre: since there are so many romances, and many of the
earlier novels are somewhat difficult to access, their plots may not be
known to current scholars. There has been some work done on earlier
romances of course, and clearly some of them had plots we might find
surprising. For example, jay Dixon's The Romance Fiction of Mills & Boon 1909-1990s, describes
a romance by Elizabeth Carfrae, from 1929, in which the married heroine
conceives a child with the hero, to whom she is not married and "Her
husband thinks the baby is his and raises her accordingly until his
death, when the hero and heroine meet up again and marry" (139). One
early romance involving abortion is described by Joseph McAleer in his Passion's Fortune: The Story of Mills & Boon:
In November 1939 a Mills & Boon novel, How Strong is Your Love?
by Barbara Hedworth, made the Irish Government's list of prohibited
books, on the grounds that it 'advocate[d] the unnatural prevention of
conception', a provision of the 1929 Censorship of Publications Act.
[....] Mills & Boon published this novel [...] over a year earlier,
in August 1938. Splashy advertising for this title billed it as 'an
absorbing romance' and 'a love story that will delight everybody'.
Apparently not: [...] the heroine's father, a village doctor, is an
abortionist. He decides to help Rose, unmarried but pregnant, by
performing 'an illegal operation'. The abortion (never called such by
name) is a success, but a blood clot kills Rose. To spare his family the
shame and scandal, Dr Vickers shoots himself. (168)
I
suspect that Steve was thinking more of novels in which abortion is
"called such by name" and despite the censors' concerns, clearly this
novel does not present abortion very favourably given that Rose dies,
but it's interesting that the topic was at least present here: later on
Mills & Boon's policy was to avoid the topic completely so as not to
have their publications censored.
Still on the topic of changes in the genre, in a recent article, Ana Quiring argues that "a new subgenre of queer Regency-era romance"
align[s] the lovers with the most marginalized in society. In consequence,
these novels imagine queer love and sex as always political. Rather
than repeating the Cinderella dream of marrying up, they invent a new
one, no less fantastic: romantic love as a conduit to solidarity.
And by "new subgenre" Quiring doesn't mean that it's only just appearing in 2022: one of the romances described in the article dates from 2014.
Still on the topic of queer/LGBTQ+ romance, I'm a bit less sure about the historical perspective of a recent article in the Guardian, which
refers to "the rise of LGBTQ+ romance fiction" and notes that readers
of one of the works discussed "praised the novel for being refreshingly
joyful and funny –
including a happy ending, which is not that common for a book with an
LGBTQ+ plot." Obviously, given the dissertations by Brown and Secrease mentioned above,
LGBTQ+ romance (which, by definition, includes a happy ending) isn't actually something new but perhaps what's
happening is that it's relatively recently broken through into the
awareness of mainstream media?
Also apparently breaking through is Black romance. Naomi Elias states that Bolu Babalola's "romance books—by design, not default—have become outliers in the
publishing industry, since they center Black women as romantic leads" and the sub-heading of the article adds that Babalola's work "normalizes seeing Black women being loved loudly." Given that mainstream romance publishing has tended to publish too few Black authors, the word "outlier" seems fair enough but I think whoever wrote the sub-heading (and it may well not have been Elias) is overlooking the work of many other Black romance authors who've been publishing for decades.
July 1994 saw two landmark debuts in romance- the publication of Night Song by @authorMsBev, and the launch of Kensington’s Arabesque line with titles by Frances Ray and Sandra Kitt. 1/ pic.twitter.com/T8junhhdwj
Jayashree Kamble, Professor of English Literature at La Guardia Community College
Shana McDavis-Conway, Co-Director for the Center for Story-Based Strategy and Staff Reviewer for Smart Bitches, Trashy Book
I'll end, though, with something that's been present in the genre for a very long time: historically inaccurate clothing on covers. Bernadette Banner has redrawn some historical romance covers (and the
cover of one work of historical fiction) to make the costumes more
accurately reflect clothing in the periods and places in which they're
set. The novels are: Kelly Bowen's Duke of My Heart;
Beverly Jenkins's Something Like Love; Olivia Waite's The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics; Alyssa Cole's An Extraordinary Union; Gillian Bagwell's Venus in Winter;
Gayle Callen's Love with a Scottish Outlaw.
She
doesn't really explore the reasons why inaccurate outfits might be more
appealing to readers, and I'm not sure how much that's been discussed
by romance readers and scholars. Presumably the shirts that open in the
wrong way are more appealing due to the amount of bare chest they reveal
and I can see how some modern hairstyles might seem sexier than
accurate ones but is some of this due to which stock art was available? I
get the impression, though, that these were published by large
publishing companies who commission photo shoots specially for their
covers, so some of these choices don't make a lot of sense to me. Are
publishers making assumptions which aren't warranted about what will
appeal to readers? Or is the key thing just to give a general
"historical" feel so that the reader can easily identify which romance
subgenre the book's in?
The PhD thesis has various parts. Since this is a PhD in creative writing, the first part is a novel. This is followed by analysis, drawing on the following corpus:
Nobody’s Baby But Mine by Susan Elizabeth Phillips (1997) Blue Dahlia by Nora Roberts (2004) Daisy’s Back in Town by Rachel Gibson (2004) Shelter Mountain by Robyn Carr (2007) Maid For Love by Marie Force (2011) Somebody to Love by Kristan Higgins (2012) Along Came Trouble by Ruthie Knox (2013) Can’t Help Falling in Love by Bella Andre (2013) A Single Kiss by Grace Burrowes (2015) Stand By You by Sharon Sala (2015)
Some of these are discussed in more detail than others. The criteria shaping the corpus were publication within the past 20 years, the authors' US and New York Times bestseller status and the presence of a single mother heroine in the text. Dryden's analysis of the feminism in the texts focuses on single mothers and family law:
I explore the issue of female oppression and empowerment via the figure
of the single mother heroine in the contemporary American romance novel.
The situation of a lone woman raising a child on her own automatically
brings to the fore questions surrounding gender roles, ideas of the
family, and equality between the sexes. Referencing a corpus of ten
contemporary romance novels, I investigate how these single-mother
heroines are portrayed, and ask whether these depictions can be
considered either empowering or oppressive to women. A granular analysis
of the corpus revealed the ideological inconsistency of the genre.
There were novels that provided a direct protest against patriarchal
oppression by dramatizing the injustices a patriarchal society inflicts
upon a single-mother heroine, while others subscribed fiercely to
traditional gender roles and models, and in some cases there were novels
that did both, highlighting the genre’s complexity. My research
demonstrates that, while the romance genre is too big and unwieldy to be
called either feminist or anti-feminist, it is possible for individual
romance novels to incorporate a feminist ethos.
Finally, Dryden describes her own writing process and how it was changed by reflecting on this issues she'd uncovered in the previous section. She realised that in her published work she'd written "books that, politically, I do not agree
with" (384). This she ascribes to the fact that
Writing a book is not a straightforward linear process. As a young
writer (young in terms of how long I had been published) my focus was
firmly fixed on writing novels that had an internal logic that held them
together. That is, stories with strong conflicts, that were suitably
romantic, and that incorporated heroines and heroes that readers could
relate to and sympathise with. (384)
Bearing this in mind, she wrote her novel and then "reworked and edited The Valentine Wars in an attempt to create a complex feminist novel". Given the way romances sometimes have rather fantastic medical and legal situations (e.g. amnesia and wills that seem to be affected more by plotting requirements than realism), I was interested to see that realism did require adjustments to Dryden's plot:
I wanted to balance the fantasy elements of my novel with a realistic situation and set-up. After reviewing the legislation pertaining to family law in the state of Pennsylvania, it quickly became evident that the scenario I had created—one in which Ellen feared that her daughter’s paternal grandmother would sue and win custod—proved highly unlikely. Even though Ellen has few financial resources and Myra has the financial means to hire the most expensive lawyers money can buy, such a scenario is so improbable as to be almost laughable. (390)
The whole thesis can be downloaded here.Therese's website as Michelle Douglas, which gives details about her novels, is here.
As some of you may have noticed, the Romance Wiki, which includes the Romance Scholarship bibliography, has been offline for over a month. If you go to https://romancewiki.com/ there is currently a message saying "The RomanceWiki is currently offline while we look for a new home. If you’re interested in adopting the wiki, please get in touch."
Jessica Lyn Van Slooten recently gave a TED talk about romance:
Many people think romance novels are trashy, formulaic, and
anti-feminist smut. In this passionate talk, Jessica Lyn Van Slooten
challenges negative stereotypes about romance novels. She argues that
many of today’s authors are modeling a more inclusive, equitable, and
feminist world through romance novels.
Jonathan A. Allan's latest book will be published shortly (it's due on 15th November). Men, Masculinities and Popular Romance
seeks to open a lively and
accessible discussion between critical studies of men and masculinities
and popular romance studies, especially its continued interest in what
Janice Radway has called "the purity of his maleness."
Bowling Green State University Libraries announced that Elizabeth
Brownlow, a Ph.D. student in American Culture Studies, has been named as
the 2019 recipient of The Roberta Gellis Memorial Paper Award.
Brownlow’s paper “Distinguishing Feminist Readerships and Shaping Genre
in the Online Community Romance Novels for Feminists” explores
the ways in which “community members resist the image of the “typical”
romance reader and the stigma attached to it by engaging with the genre
through feminist critique and the sharing of personal experience to
“save face” in a world that tells them one cannot be both feminist and a
romance reader.”
The Roberta Gellis Memorial Award honors the best graduate and
undergraduate papers written using the resources of the Ray & Pat
Browne Library for Popular Culture Studies and pertaining to the fields
of science fiction, fantasy, mystery, or romance fiction.
Brownlow gave a paper at last year's BGSU conference on researching the romance. It was on a related topic, and here's the abstract:
How do online spaces allow feminist romance readers to define and
negotiate feminism for themselves? How do these readers define which
romance novels are feminist, and which are not? In this case study, I
will look at the popular romance review blog, Romance Novels for
Feminists (RNFF). In 2009, Jackie C. Horne, a romance novelist, former
children’s book editor, and literary scholar, established RNFF to review
and comment on romance novels in all subgenres. RNFF does not
explicitly state criteria for book selection, only stating that it
“strives to review only books that in its opinion espouse and/or
encourage feminist value.” RNFF’s reviews of feminist romance novels are
based on a no-grading system intended to open up conversations about
feminism and fiction. The reviews on RNFF allow for dialogue amongst
readers, responding to both the books themselves and to Horne’s reading
of them. This paper will explore the traits that Horne homes in on for
her selection of “feminist romance” criteria as well as the traits that
blog responders find most important. I will focus particularly on claims
of sexist and feminist contradictions in these reviews. Moments of
agreement and disagreement between reviewer and responders suggest
romance readers are using online spaces such as RNFF to determine what
feminism means to them as well as to form and articulate opinions on
what does and does not count as feminist in the genre.
that Kathleen Kollman, a Ph.D. student in American Culture Studies, has
been named as the inaugural recipient of The Roberta Gellis Memorial
Paper Award. Kollman’s paper, titled “Contemporary Paranormal Romance:
Theories and Development of the Genre’s Feminism (Or Lack Thereof)” was
written for a seminar on romance novels taught in the Spring 2018
semester by Dr. Kristin Rudisill in the Department of Popular Culture,
and was also presented at the Researching the Romance conference
sponsored by the Library in April 2018.
An abstract of the paper and a link to download it as a pdf are available here.
Details are available for the PopCAANZ conference which is currently taking place at Auckland University of Technology. This year there are lots of papers on romance and I'll include excerpts from their abstracts. The conference continues tomorrow, and I'll add links to Twitter threads as they appear.
popular romance fiction regularly depicts feminist social issues. In this sense, the
concept of Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’ applies
—
‘this partly unconscious “taking in” of rules,
values and dispositions...’ (Webb, Schirato, & Dahanher, 2002, p. 44). Contemporary
popular
romance novels are set in the everyday context and as such cannot but help portray the
world in which the authors and their characters exist, including social issues present in the
mind of the author, whether consciously or unconsciously. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s
and since, the woman’s movement has been politically active and
concepts of feminism
have entered into everyday discourse. [...] research indicates that writers
as well as readers of popular romance fiction have no issue reconciling their concept of
feminism with writing and reading in the genre.
Lucy Sheerman - “Exempt from all affection and from all
contempt”: necessary evil and the figure of
the Byronic hero in romance novels
Two hundred
years since his first appearance in print, the Byronic anti-hero
-
‘that man of
loneliness and mystery, / Scarce seen to smile, and seldom heard to sigh’
-
is a figure who
continues to define representations of the hero in romance novels.
The influence of
this angry and defiant fallen angel on the writing of the Brontës has been
well documented. In my paper I will consider four Governess novels, published by Mills &
Boon in 2016 as a homage to Charlotte Brontë’s iconic romance novel
Jane Eyre, and the
Byronic traces of the heroes who feature in them.
The romance novel’s continued preoccupation with the Byronic anti-hero is central to the
genre’s staged encounters with otherness and its exploration of emotional affect. The
literary device of the anti-hero shaped the development of romance tropes such as plot,
conflict and point of view, and also (as I will argue) gave rise to the Byronic anti-heroine.
Kathrina Haji Mohd Daud -
Cross-cultural romance, feminism and
femininity in Southeast Asian fiction
In this paper, I explore how the
negotiation of cross-cultural romance also elicits a particular Southeast Asian feminism in
three texts: Zen Cho’s
The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo
(2012, Malaysian), Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan’s
Sarong Party Girls
(2016, Singaporean) and Ayisha Malik’s
Jewel
(2017, Bruneian). [...] I argue in this paper that these novels construct a feminist femininity
that
allows the heroines to remain connected to and sanctioned by their individually patriarchal
heritages, while also allowing them to critique and expand existing expectations of feminine
identity through the negotiation of cross-cultural relationships.
Ellen Carter - What’s in a romance hero/ine’s name? a
corpus study of gay and straight romance
character names
The first names parents give to their female versus male children have different
phonological (sound) characteristics. My work extends this from the real to the fictional
world, studying names given by authors to their romance heroes
–
gay and straight
–
as well
as to straight heroines. My corpus contains 2,536 contemporary romance novels: 1,668 with
a male/female pairing and 868 with a male/male couple, resulting in 3,404 heroes (1,668
straight; 1,736 gay) and 1,668 (straight) heroines. My results demonstrate that the
phonological characteristics of names given to gay heroes are statistically significantly less
masculine/more feminine than the names of straight heroes. Given that gay romance is a
fast-growing
romance sub-genre predominantly written and read by straight women, I
explore possible cultural implications of this finding and how it may feed stereotypes and
shape perceptions within (straight and queer) societies.
Carter: striking result - male characters much more likely to have names with /k/ sounds, especially male characters in M/F romance. #popcaanz18
Eden French - Loving invisible bodies: transgender
representation in popular romance
The few novels that do feature trans heroines and heroes
—
niche
even in small
LGBTQ presses
—
are hailed as daring simply for permitting trans protagonists
to be plausible subjects of love and desire. [...] romance’s historically
heteronormative politics of gender has constrained writers and even scholars from treating
transgender themes; mainstream discussion around trans bodies still manifests routinely in
fetishistic and dehumanising ways. Moreover questions of embodiment (for example, the
politics of gender-affirming surgery) remain contested even in the trans community.
Speaking as a scholar and writer, I will discuss existing examples of trans embodiment in
romance, and outline possible reconciliations for the challenge of bringing trans love into
the mainstream.
French has found disclaimers and disavowals in some of her corpus which make it clear that the assumed readership is entirely cis. #popcaanz18
Francesca Pierini
- “He looks like he’s stepped out of a
painting”: The idealization and
appropriation of Italian timelessness
through the experience of romantic love
Marina Fiorato’s
The Glassblower of Murano
(2008) tells the story of Eleonora, a young
woman who travels to Venice in search of her genealogical past and existential roots.
Coming from London, Eleonora incarnates a “modern” outlook on what she assumes to be
the timeless life and culture of Venice.
At one point in the novel, admiring the old houses on
the Canal Grande, Eleonora is “on fire with enthusiasm for this culture where the houses
and the people kept their genetic essence so pure for millennia that they look the same now
as in the Renaissance” (2008, 15). [...] Within narratives centred on this notion, “falling in love in Italy”
occasions the appropriation of a privileged relation with history and the past, often
contrasted with the displacement and rootlessness that seem to characterize the modern
places, people and lifestyles of England and North America. Through a discussion of
two
Anglo-American historical popular novels set in Italy, this paper proposes an exploration of
the notion of romantic love as a force reconnecting displaced and fragmented souls with a
supposedly timeless and unbroken society; a society perceived as holding a privileged
relation with ancient traditions and the past.
Pierini has a paper freely available online which is quite similar, though lacking the focus on romantic love.
Maria Ramos-Garcia - This is not a romance novel but a telenovela”: metafiction
and bilingualism in Jane the Virgin
Jane the Virgin, based on a Venezuelan telenovela, is at the same time a parody and an
homage to the popular Latin American
television genre. Among the many unusual features
that contribute to the originality and success of this TV series are an omniscient narrator, a
metafictional discourse, a bilingual and bicultural setting and an unapologetic, unabashed,
and explicit use and abuse of the conventions of the soap-opera, with a touch of Latin
American magical realism. [...] This paper will
provide an overview of
the series, concentrating both on the Latino socio-cultural aspects that rarely make it into
mainstream US television, and on the metafictional discussions of the telenovela and the
romance novel
—
both as genres and as philosophies of love
—
that permeate the narrative.
Angela Hart - Combating the romance genre stigma: reading romance in
the digital age
Avid readers of the romance genre can find their voices in the online sphere using social
media platforms such as Twitter, utilizing the hashtags #amreadingromance and
#romancelandia. Romance readers utilize the technological affordances of the platform to
form groups, post about novels, and find relevant information on their specific genre. By
using anonymous user login information,
unidentifiable profile pictures, and unique
hashtags, romance readers are turning to Twitter.
Jodi McAlister
- Not quite YA, not yet adult: the short
but complex history of
“New Adult” fiction
This paper will trace the history of the new adult genre category, using the notion of the
“genre world,” as theorised by Lisa Fletcher, Beth Driscoll, and Kim Wilkins (2018). [...] this paper will explore the generic roots of new adult fiction in young adult
fiction, popular romance fiction, and fan fiction, and how these parent genres have given
shape to popular forms and structures of the new adult category. It will provide a much-needed scholarly framework for understanding this emergent genre category, its gradual
formation, and its complex place at the borders of several different genre worlds.
Eric Selinger - Disenchantment and its discontents: Weber, Illouz, and
popular romance
fiction
Modernity and romantic love make uncomfortable bedfellows. As Max Weber explains,
modernity is marked by “disenchantment,” not just of the natural world, but also of the
inner life and of interpersonal relations. Building on Weber, Eva Illouz argues that we now
live in an “ironic structure of romantic feeling, which marks the move from an ‘enchanted’
to a disenchanted cultural definition of love” (Why Love Hurts). This talk will look at how
several contemporary authors negotiate and resist “disenchantment.”
Of particular interest
will be Ayisha Malik’s
Sofia Khan is Not Obliged
and
The Other Side of Happiness, a pair of
“hijabi chick-lit” novels that take both sides in this great debate, Courtney Milan’s
Hold Me,
which casts a cool, modern eye on romantic love without yielding to the irony that Illouz
describes, and/or Alexis Hall’s
Glitterland, which deploys religious discourse to redeem
both love and popular media culture.
This paper is my first effort at thinking through several issues recurrent in the subgenre of
the romance police procedural: the configuration of the spaces of home, homeland and
nation as domestic territories, besieged not by a foreign but a home grown threat that
violates the integrity of the boundaries between private and public, interior and exterior;
the role of individual trauma as a mark of the vulnerability of the self and the foundation of
an affective investment in the protection of national territory; the "Americanness" of the
values and practices that govern social dynamics in the workplace, the self-chosen family
and the couple. National character is defined in opposition to the rendering of the
criminalised enemy and, together with collective, institutional agency and cooperation, is
also the best safeguard against social disorder. Eventually I intend to show that this
romance subgenre mediates and manages social fears and anxieties by highlighting the
strengths of a systemic framework and ignoring the negative aspects of surveillance: anxiety
and fear lie at the heart of romantic relationships and the novels offer a means of managing
them with the emotional investment in family and trust in law enforcement.
Kecia Ali - Writing while white: black martyrs as “Magical Negroes” in
Nora Roberts’ novels
Roberts’ heroes and heroines are nearly always white; occasional
Black characters are typically what Ikard (2017:94) describes as “magical negroes ... whose
raison d’être in white redemption narratives is to support/heal/enlighten/inspire the white
character(s) in crisis.” This paper explores four Roberts’ novels
in which the violent murder
of a Black character serves as the catalyst for vital emotional developments between a
white couple or among a team of white characters [...] the single-title adventure romance
Hot Ice
(1987), the category romance
Convincing Alex
(1994), the stand-alone mystical
romance
Three Fates
(2002), and
Morrigan’s Cross
(2006), the first installment of a
paranormal romance trilogy.
As I mentioned in my last post, more details about the conference, which is being held on April 13-14, can be found here and you can follow events as they happen on Twitter, via #bgsuromcon18.
Today's papers are:
Contemporary Paranormal Romance: Theories and Development of the Genre’s Feminism (Or Lack Thereof)
Kathleen Kollman, Bowling Green State University
Paranormal romance is a contentious subgenre that some critics have
castigated as being anti-feminist. Linda J. Lee writes that this
subgenre features “male protagonists [who often] come from a cultural
background in which men are dominant over women” (61), and Sandra Booth
argues that paranormal romances featuring a monstrous hero and angelic
heroine hearken back to highly patriarchal forms of gender roles,
including consensual sex that reads like violent rape (96-99). However,
as the genre proliferated beyond its initial surge in popularity in the
1990s, it—like romance novels generally—matured beyond its beginnings
and manifested more complex ideologies. As Lee Tobin-McClain writes, the
concept of “collective authorship” of romance causes it to be even more
influenced by audience expectations than other literary genres (296),
resulting in the need for heightened levels of feminist relationships in
popular titles. In this essay, I will be exploring Tobin-McClain’s
thesis, along with positioning paranormal romance as a twin heredity
form sharing more features of horror and urban fantasy than may
initially be apparent. As data points, I will be examining contemporary
paranormal romance in the vampire subgenre, specifically Dead Until Dark (Charlaine Harris, 2001), A Quick Bite (Lynsay Sands, 2005), A Shade of Vampire (Bella Forrest, 2012), Immortal Faith (Shelley Adina, 2013), The Art of Loving a Vampire (Jaye Wells, 2013), and Bite Mark
(Lily Harlem, 2016). Each of these six books represents an even more
specific subgenre within vampire paranormal romance (urban fantasy,
family saga, young adult, Amish romance, mystery, and ménage,
respectively), and each was first published within the past two decades.
By taking into account the scholarly genealogy of paranormal romance
pre-2000, I will be seeking to assess whether the work written since
that point continues to reflect those themes or if, in fact, several
popular exemplars of the genre have grown to exhibit a more overtly
feminist sensibility.
Love in the Time of Twitter: Identity, Relationships, and Fantasy in Modern Young Adult Romance Patricia Ennis, Bowling Green State University
Social media has become pervasive in our society over the last 10 years.
It has transformed the way we communicate and interact, has turned
strangers into friends, and has allowed us to maintain a multitude of
personalities, specifically curated for the platform in question. Who we
are online is different than who we are in public which is itself
different from who we are in private. Online we can be whoever we want
to be. We can be idealized versions of ourselves. We can accept parts of
ourselves we might otherwise deny or hide away those parts we — or
others — might find objectionable. As the popularity of social media has
increased, and as the internet has become less frightening and more
widely seen as a tool of communication, so too has it become much more
prevalent as a facet of young adult romantic fiction. In this paper, I
analyze a number of recent novels in which social media and the internet
plays a vital role and look critically at the way we construct identity
and relationships online and the concerns, hopes, and anxieties modern
teenagers face in these interactions.
Not Cosplaying Around
Nicole Drew, Bowling Green State University
Novels like Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell have begun bringing
fandom to the forefront of the romance genre. Cosplay, as a part of
fandom, is also becoming more relevant in romance novels, but the
depiction of the hobby is not always favorable. The goal of this paper
is to compare the depiction of cosplay in romance novels from kink to
hobby and to examine the treatment of cosplay in the romance industry
and what impact it could have on those who actually participate in the
hobby. I will use novels like Don’t Cosplay with my Heart by Cecil Castelucci (2018), Waiting for Clark by Annabeth Albert (20150, and A Different Kind of Cosplay
by Lucy Felthouse (2015), as well as synopses for other novels like
these with cosplay as an important part of the plot (or lack thereof). I
will be comparing the way each novel addresses, utilizes, and treats
cosplay and whether it is an accurate depiction of the cosplay community
as a whole. There is plenty of study on the way audiences receive the
content of romance novels; this paper will repurpose those studies for
this particular subgenre to decide whether the portrayals could result
in a fancified idea of those who participate in cosplay, including
Stewart Hall’s audience reception theory and Ann Snitow’s example of
literary analysis. I argue that most depictions are not accurate to
actual cosplayers and that readers come away with false expectations of
what cosplay is and how it operates.
Seriously Becky Don’t You Know Hallmark Christmas Movies are Just Romance Novels on Film?
Alexander Lester, Bowling Green State University
According, to Pamela Regis the conventions of Romance Novels are Simple
and Finite. Each romance novel has eight essential elements that
permeate throughout its plot. In this paper, I look at the correlation
between two Hallmark Christmas Movies that were adapted from romance
novels The Christmas Cottage, A Bramble House Christmas and compare them
to Hallmark's made for TV movie Fir Crazy. I argue that the 8 essential
elements are seen in made for TV Hallmark Christmas Movies as well as
novels adapted for film thus making them Romance Novels are written for
television.
I Found Romance at the Spinner Rack: The History & Evolution of Romance Comics Charles Coletta
Following World War II, comic book publishers soon realized that sales
of their superhero titles were starting to decline as the once-prominent
genre was diminishing in popularity. To retain their readers’ interest,
the publishers cancelled many of the superhero titles and diversified
into other genres, such as science fiction, war, Westerns, crime,
horror, and romance. Young Romance #1 (1947), which was created
by the legendary team of Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, is widely regarded
as the first romance comic. The pair produced and oversaw numerous
romance comics for twelve years until Kirby left and transitioned to
Marvel Comics. Young Romace gained great popularity and spawned
numerous other titles featuring work by some of the industry’s top
writers and artists. Aimed primarily at teen girl readers, the romance
comics genre remained vital until the mid-1970s when the rise of the
women’s liberation movement and sexual revolution caused the comics to
seem overly innocent, bland, and accepting of traditional patriarchal
concepts of women’s behavior and gender roles. This presentation will
offer a history of the romance comics genre from the 1940s to the 1970s
by looking at its creators, themes, and readership; it will also include
an in-depth examination of the Kirby-Simon stories that helped
establish the genre.
Romance covers in Brazil: online interactions between fandom and publishing houses Giovana Santana Carlos, DePaul University
Book covers are very important for romance fandom (RODALE, 2015). They
express the stories and the genre through images and design
(MCKNIGHT-TRONTZ, 2002) becoming an important factor for the readers
when buying a book. But not always the fan is content with the cover.
While is possible to observe that sometimes the writer does not have
power of decision related to the covers (GREENFELD-BENOVITZ, 2012), it
becomes more complicated when the book is published in foreigner
countries, depending on contracts between publishers. In Brazil the
romance book market is formed by most of international titles and
writers translated to Portuguese. Not always the books can have the same
cover as the original, so they are adapted or completely changed.
However, as Brazilian romance fans follow their favorite writers and
know how the original cover was published, they use social network
websites to express their opinion and interact with the publishing
houses. These companies also have learned the importance of covers to
fans and interact with the readers (JENKINS, 2008). Thus, in this
presentation I intend to show cases of online interactions on Facebook
between fandom and publishers in Brazil that depict two perspectives:
first, covers changed after fan complains and, second, publishing houses
posting options of cover for fan voting. The collected data on Facebook
regards books from Megan Maxwell, J. R. Ward and Leisa Rayven. These
interactions present the importance of fandom for the development and
establishment of romance book market in Brazil.
She’s an Athlete, but Don’t Worry, She’s Still Beautiful; Images of Female American Football Players on Romance Novel Covers Joanna Line, Bowling Green State University
This paper analyzes the portrayal of female American football players on
the covers of the three romance novels in The Cleveland Clash Series
from Crimson Romance and compares these covers to two Crimson Romance
novels that portray male American football players, to explore
similarities and differences between how female and male athleticism are
depicted. While the storylines of The Cleveland Clash novels provide a
space to challenge the American cultural ideology that femininity and
athleticism are conflicting concepts, the covers of the romance novels
affirm the femininity of the female athletes while indications of their
athleticism are absent. On the other hand, the portrayal of male
athletes affirms the association of masculinity with athleticism. The
relationship between gender performance, athleticism, and visual
portrayal will be explored through Butler’s concept of gender
performativity, Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze, Duncan’s theory of
discourse within sport photography, and Goffman’s framing theory to
assert that the portrayal of female American football players on the
covers of The Cleveland Clash Series demonstrate the conflicting
ideology of femininity and female athleticism.
Wherefore Art Thou Fabio? 50 Years of Romance Novel Cover Design Andrea J. Briggs, McDaniel College
The art of the romance novel cover is just as important in reflecting
consumer desires as the material contained within its pages. This
presentation provides a comprehensive look at cover art trends and
tropes of popular romance novels ranging from the 1960s to today, as
publishers have adapted to the changing market of readers, visually
differentiating and defining subgenres of popular romance literature.
How Amazon has shaped the future of the Self-Published Author Constance M. Phillips, MVRAI Published Author
Not that long ago self-publishing was looked down upon and referred
to as vanity publishing, insinuating the author had more ego than
talent. All that has changed over the last decade. When Amazon launched
the Kindle, they made ebooks easily assessible to everyone. The
voracious appetite of the avid reader created a high demand and savvy
authors began looking at independent publishing.
This turned the traditional publishing industry on it’s ear and
created a new business model for the independent and hybrid authors.
In this presentation I will look at how Amazon, and the success of
their Kindle ereader, has forever changed the publishing
industry—especially in the romance genre. I will also examine the
lasting effects these changes have had on traditional romance publishing
companies.
Researching Contemporary Settings without Traveling Jill Kemerer
Authors don’t always have the option of researching a setting in
person. Time, financial and physical constraints prevent many writers
from heading out west or spending weeks in Paris. A novel’s setting
shapes the story and influences the characters’ thoughts and actions.
Readers want to experience the mountains or city where the book takes
place, and extra care must be taken to get the details right.
One way to get an overall impression of an area is to read a memoir
of someone who lived there. Another method is to use online tools such
as Google Earth, weather data sites, cost of living comparison tools,
historical websites and visitor guides. For sensory details and local
flavor, social media networks can connect writers with people who reside
in the area. For instance, Google+ has groups for photographers in many
states. They’re generous with their knowledge and share great pictures.
With modern technology, memoirs and help from people who live there,
any setting can come alive, and readers will feel transported to another
place.
Romance Law School is Now In Session
Jill A. Smith, Georgetown University Law Center
Plotting a murder, divorce, or even a trip to traffic court for your
novel’s characters? Do you know how to make that realistic? You already
know what state your characters are in, but do you know what
jurisdiction you’re dealing with? State? Federal? Is this a criminal
matter? If so, has your character committed every element necessary to
successfully charge them with a crime? Are you sure the law that you know about in your home state is the same as the state where you’ve set your book?
If these questions are making you panic, never fear, you need to
consult a law librarian. But you should also be prepared for that
encounter.
In this session, Georgetown Law Librarian Jill Smith (a.k.a. romance
novelist Adele Buck) will teach you how to structure your research
queries, both for research on your own and for interacting effectively
and efficiently with law librarians (and how to find those sometimes
elusive creatures so you can ask for their assistance). She will show
you some free legal resources available on the internet and how to begin
to navigate them. She will also cover common pitfalls and
misunderstandings about how the law and civil and criminal court systems
operate to ensure that your manuscript is lawyer-ready and
librarian-approved.
The value of wearing two hats: Reflections of a romance writer by night/feminist media scholar by day Jessica Birthisel, Bridgewater State University
By night, I’m likely to be tucked behind my computer, writing the spicy
passages of my next contemporary romance novel under my pen name. By
day, I’m likely to be teaching, analyzing or researching similar content
as a professor of media studies and a feminist media scholar at a
public university in New England. In this session, I’ll wear both hats,
sharing my experiences of hopping across this line between producer and
fan, between author and media critic, and how I’ve found these unique
perspectives to inform one another in essential ways. First, I’ll share
how my academic training in feminist media analysis has prepared me to
join a vibrant (and growing) community of romance authors writing
feminist, intersectional, women-centered and diversity-conscious
romances, which I argue play a vital role within our current social and
political climate. I’ll also discuss my process – and rationale – for
applying a feminist critique to my own works-in-progress. Conversely,
I’ll share how my experiences as a romance author and as an active
member in the professional romance writing community (including the
Romance Writers of America) have shaped my academic media scholarship in
important and positive ways. Key considerations of the session include:
the role of self-publishing in the diversification of the romance
genre, romance’s potential for subverting social and cultural norms, and
the increasingly blurred lines between production and reception.
Keynote- Dr. Kate Brown, Huntington University Kate Brown, Huntington University
Originally from a suburb of Buffalo, New York, Dr. Kate Elizabeth
Brown received her Bachelor of Science in Applied Economics and
Management from Cornell University in 2004 and her Ph.D. in American
History from the University of Virginia in 2015.
She specializes in American legal and constitutional history,
politics in the colonial, early republic, and antebellum eras, as well
as English legal history.
Dr. Brown was a 2017 recipient of an academic research grant from the
Romance Writers of America for a project which explores how English
common law and constitutionalism give fundamental structure and
substance to the historical romance genre. She will be discussing her
work and research.
Guest of Honor- Beverly Jenkins
Beverly Jenkins is the recipient of the 2017 Romance
Writers of America Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as
the 2016 Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award for historical romance.
She has been nominated for the NAACP Image Award in Literature, was
featured both in the documentary “Love Between the Covers” and on CBS
Sunday Morning.Since the publication of Night Song in 1994, she
has been leading the charge for multicultural romance, and has been a
constant darling of reviewers, fans, and her peers alike, garnering
accolades for her work from the likes of The Wall Street Journal, People Magazine, and NPR.
More details about the conference, which is being held on April 13-14, can be found here and you can follow events as they happen on Twitter, via #bgsuromcon18 and some can also be found on #BGSURomCom18 .
The guest of honor for the conference will be 2017 RWA Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award Recipient Beverly Jenkins,
who has published more than 30 novels and is well-known for the level
of detailed research she puts into each of her books – making her the
perfect guest for this conference. She will be speaking and signing
books Saturday afternoon at the Wood County District Public Library.
On the Friday there are presentations on a range of academic topics, including pedagogy, librarianship, masculinity, horror, feminism, research, race/ethnicity/nationality and history:
Romancelandia on Twitter: Designing a Digital Humanities Research Assignment for First-Year Writing Students
Heather M. Schell, George Washington University Ann K. G. Brown, George Washington University
In Heather’s first-year writing class, Love and American Culture, in the
primary goal is to introduce students to academic writing and research.
Part of this entails helping students experience the excitement of
writing a research paper when the topic is new and the questions are
motivated by genuine interest. Heather has been collaborating with Ann, a
research librarian, to develop an assignment sequence around original
research on romance authors’ public social networks. The project uses
Social Feed Manager and textual analysis tools to give students the
opportunity to shape their own research questions and study the Twitter
feed of the romance author of their choice.
The Category Romance Project: First-year Students Researching Romance Jen Wofford, Ithaca College
“Vintage” category romances – commercial romance novels published
twenty years old and older – can provide a fascinating data set for
“community inquiry” (CoI), and a novel way to introduce students of
writing to textual analysis.
In its third iteration, my Ithaca College course Reading Popular Romance, is a writing-intensive first-year seminar taught using a Community of Inquiry (CoI) approach to instruction.
Where are all the Fun Books: Popular Romance and Science Fiction Novels in Academic Libraries Sarah Sheehan, Manhattan College
Academic libraries have an uneven record of collecting popular
contemporary literature (genre fiction). Due to this unevenness,
colleges and universities that offer courses about particular genres or
collect works devoted to the study of genre fiction may not actually own
the primary texts. This study examines the extent to which
award-winning novels in two popular genres—romance and science
fiction—are included in the libraries of 114 major research universities
(the Association of Research Libraries) and 80 prominent liberal arts
colleges (the Oberlin Group).
Fantasies of Black Manhood: Black Masculinities in Brenda Jackson’s Westmoreland Series
Kelly L. Choyke, Ohio University - Main Campus Kay-Anne P. Darlington PhD, University of Rio Grande
Popular romance is truly one of the few communities and forms of media
where the male point of view is not catered to. While the romance genre
is the most profitable and least respected literary genre, romance
novels have nevertheless become a safe space to explore marginalized
identities. Our study focuses on the representation of black
masculinities in Brenda Jackson’s Westmoreland Series, published as
category romances via Harlequin.
Happily Ever After …. And After: time travel, history and romance in the novels of Susanna Kearsley Sarah H. Ficke, Marymount University
[...] place often plays a central role in romance
fiction. A perfectly-decorated seaside cottage, like a gorgeous silk
gown, can be materialistic wish fulfillment for a reader who has neither
gown nor cottage. However, place can also be deeply emotional, creating
and shaping the conditions for relationships. In this presentation, I
will be exploring the intersection between romance, place, and history
in three novels by Susanna Kearsley: The Winter Sea, The Rose Garden, and Mariana.
[...] Although they range across time, each of these novels is
anchored by its setting, which plays a crucial role in the emotional
development of the characters and their relationships. [...] I will argue that these
novels provide a framework that can help us understand the simultaneous
specificity of romance – a series of intimate moments between people –
and our urge to view it as a timeless emotion.
True Love and Real Terror: Romance and Horror in Megan Hart’s The Darkest Embrace and Reawakened Passions David Aldrich, Bowling Green State University
The Darkest Embrace and Reawakened Passions are
romances that take place alongside a horror plot. Using Pamela Regis’s
outline of essential elements of the romance, I will chart how both
novellas fit the formula of a romance novel in a relatively short amount
of pages. I will also make comparisons between Hart’s work and other
short works of contemporary horror fiction produced online. This paper
will show that the romance genre can be combined with the horror genre
in a way that satisfies the expectations and conventions of both romance
and horror, all in a short fiction format for a online audience.
Finding the Fairy Tale in Popular Romance Linda J. Lee, University of Pennsylvania
Some novels retell specific well-known fairy tales, like “Cinderella” and “Beauty and the Beast” [...],
while others incorporate a variety of fairy tale motifs without
retelling a specific tale type [...]. Fairy tale intertextual references appear in just about every romance
novel sub-genre [...]. Despite the almost
ubiquity of fairy tale intertexts in romance, there are few scholarly
considerations of the relationship between these narrative forms. Part
of the difficulty is the misalignment between fairy tale theories and
methods and the form of the romance novel. Jennifer Crusie’s “This Is
Not Your Mother’s Cinderella: The Romance Novel as Feminist Fairy Tale”
demonstrates some of the difficulties encountered when applying fairy
tale theory to romance novels. Disciplinary boundaries and lack of
familiarity with discipline-specific research methodologies and tools is
another research challenge. In this paper proposes using Michael Dylan
Foster and Jeffrey Tolbert’s concept of “the folkloresque” as a way to
interrogate the use of fairy tales within popular romance novels.
Laboring for Love: Authorial Emotional Labor as Feminist Project in the Romance Novel Outlander Emma Elizabeth Niehaus, Bowling Green State University
I argue that the common reception of the romance novel is yet another
example of women’s emotional labor being regarded as frivolously
sentimental when in actuality it is impactful social excavation. My
project uses an analysis of emotional work to argue for the romance
genre as a feminist project. Though the romance novel has been widely
disputed as a viable feminist project, an in depth examination of the
emotional labor of characters and writer has been widely overlooked in
this argument. As example, I examine the romance novel Outlander, and the emotional labor performed by author Diana Gabaldon for the story’s heroine, Claire Randall.
Researching the Romance Writers' Research
Caryn Radick, Rutgers University - New Brunswick/Piscataway
In this presentation, an archivist discusses her outreach to romance
writers to learn more about their research behaviors, particularly their
interest in and use of archives for writing their works. The results of
this outreach led to the presenter’s article “Romance Writers’ Use of
Archives,” published in Archivaria in 2016. It also led the
presenter to invite two romance authors, Piper Huguley and Jennifer
McQuiston, to the Society of American Archivists 2016 annual meeting to
participate in a panel discussion on the role of research in their work.
The presenter will share data gathered as part of a survey of romance
writers about their research and discuss how the conversation at the
panel session provided insight on how archivists might better serve the
romance community and why it would be beneficial to do so.
Use Heart in Your (Re)Search: The Invitations of Popular Romance Eric Murphy Selinger, DePaul University
Romance writers do research—but what about romance readers? If they do,
what does their “research” look like? In this talk, I will explore the
kinds of learning that previous scholars have said (and, sometimes,
worried) might be inspired by romance fiction, with an eye to how these
relate to the teaching and learning at work in other popular genres.
(Thomas Roberts’s argument that all popular fiction invites us
to “Think With Tired Brains” about serious and interesting topics will
be central to this discussion; his Aesthetics of Junk Fiction has
been central to my romance pedagogy for the past four or five years.) I
will then compare these critical accounts with the actual learning and
research that my students and I engage in as we grapple with romance
novels in English courses at DePaul: both multi-author / subgenre
surveys and 10-week courses focused on individual texts. One of those
narrowly-focused seminars, on Sherry Thomas’s My Beautiful Enemy,
will be underway during the conference, and I will describe what we are
doing in it and why. (A clue from the heroine’s quest for ancient
treasure in that novel, “use heart in your search,” gives my talk its title.) Rather than ask what romance novels do or don’t teach readers in general,
I want to detail about what a few individual novels invite us to go and
learn, about how they extend those invitations, and about what we find
when we take up their offers, whether in or out of school.
History's Been Hijacked: How To Combat White Supremacy Through Popular Literature Elizabeth Kingston
At the 2017 rally in Charlottesville, white supremacists carried
banners covered in medieval heraldry alongside their Confederate flags,
laying claim to the Middle Ages as a white, Christian utopia. This
whitewashing of history and construction of a “white race” began during
the Age of Enlightenment, and continued through the 19th century – which just happens to be the most popular setting for Historical Romance.
Often seen as providing harmless escapism, the persistent fabrication
of an all-white, all-Christian universe has resulted in an ignorance so
extreme that many readers of Historical Romance reject the historical
validity of non-white characters, or question the possibility that any
non-white character could have a “happily ever after” in a
white-dominated world. While this attitude has a dismaying effect on the
genre, the wider implications of creating a popular fantasy world based
on white supremacist ideology – and presenting is as actual history –
are chilling.
For better or worse, our understanding of history largely comes from
portrayals in pop culture, from Game of Thrones to Downton Abbey.
Writers in the wildly popular genre of Romance have an opportunity to
shape the perceptions of readers to more closely match the historical
reality, and to prevent racially motivated hate groups from co-opting
centuries of European history for their own purposes.
Romance Novels for Feminists: What Does That Mean? Elizabeth Brownlow, Bowling Green State University
How do online spaces allow feminist romance readers to define and
negotiate feminism for themselves? How do these readers define which
romance novels are feminist, and which are not? In this case study, I
will look at the popular romance review blog, Romance Novels for
Feminists (RNFF). In 2009, Jackie C. Horne, a romance novelist, former
children’s book editor, and literary scholar, established RNFF to review
and comment on romance novels in all subgenres. RNFF does not
explicitly state criteria for book selection, only stating that it
“strives to review only books that in its opinion espouse and/or
encourage feminist value.” RNFF’s reviews of feminist romance novels are
based on a no-grading system intended to open up conversations about
feminism and fiction. The reviews on RNFF allow for dialogue amongst
readers, responding to both the books themselves and to Horne’s reading
of them. This paper will explore the traits that Horne homes in on for
her selection of “feminist romance” criteria as well as the traits that
blog responders find most important. I will focus particularly on claims
of sexist and feminist contradictions in these reviews. Moments of
agreement and disagreement between reviewer and responders suggest
romance readers are using online spaces such as RNFF to determine what
feminism means to them as well as to form and articulate opinions on
what does and does not count as feminist in the genre.
Romance Vs. Realism: How Critical Battles over Postwar Teen Romance
Novels Led to the Emergence of Canonical Young Adult Literature Amanda Allen, Eastern Michigan University
In 1942, Maureen Daly published Seventeenth Summer, the
wellspring text for a new genre of American romance novels aimed at a
freshly-minted teenage reading audience. Called the “junior novels,”
this genre was comprised of romance novels—often series texts— that
focused on a girl’s first love experience. Although they quickly became
the main stock of emerging teen library sections, the scholarship
surrounding them became a site of contention, polarized into two
opposing—and gendered—camps: (female) librarians, and (male) academics
housed in English and English Education departments.
This paper uses the lens of Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of cultural
production to examine not the junior novels themselves, but their
reception by critics—a reception based on early Cold War values
regarding what constituted “good” literature for girl readers (and, as a
corollary, what constituted “good girls”). Thus, although librarian
critics valued these romance novels for their use in girls’
socialization, most post-secondary academic critics opposed them,
placing value on their view of literary quality. This use versus quality
dichotomy, moreover, masked an underlying—and gendered—struggle over
defining “realism” as specifically antithetical to “romance.”
An examination of the junior novel critics’ scholarship thus
demonstrates a hidden, historical battle regarding who had the right—and
ability—to define what constituted “value” in literature for girls, and
illustrates how American postwar teen romance novels led to the
creation and sanctioning of canonical young adult literature.
Stigmatizing the Romance Genre: Reading Romance in the Digital Age Angela Hart, American University, Washington D.C.
The romance genre emerged as a counterpublic; a way for women to write
books about women for women. Originally, the romance genre was not
viewed as gender specific; but after World War II, and the return of men
from the battlefields, women went back to their traditional roles, i.e.
at home with their families. Romance novels have become a way to place
female protagonists at the center of a story. Heroines across the genre
are justified in their wants and desires, placing emphasis on the female
experience and viewpoint. Today, romance readers face stigmatization
due to their literary interests. Rather than celebrate a genre by women
for women, readers and writers face marginalization. Avid readers of the
romance genre find their voices in the online sphere; for instance,
posting reviews or blog articles anonymously. On one hand, the online
sphere should be commended for its ability to foster freedom of
expression. Yet, on the other hand, it should be noted that the stigma
surrounding the romance genre creates the need for ongoing anonymity.
While readers are able to vocalize their thoughts, they may only feel
comfortable doing so in an anonymous setting, unintentionally fostering
the ongoing stigma of romance. The growth, accessibility, and
affordability of e-books has also created a method for combating the
genre’s stigma. Readers can make their literary purchases in the privacy
of their own homes and privately read books on their electronic devices
without preying eyes on recognizable romance book covers. The digital
landscape is redefining romance and how readers discus the genre.
An Articulation of Modern Indian Values in the Romance of Sandhya Sridhar Kristen Rudisill, Bowling Green State University
In 2009, avid romance reader Sandhya Sridhar quit her job at a newspaper
in Chennai, India, and started her own company, Pageturn Publisher,
which included the Red Romance Series, to publish English-language
novels that she billed as “full blooded desi romance.” She
sensed a need for romance novels more relatable to Indian readers than
the imported Mills and Boons she grew up with. I argue elsewhere that
desi romance can be considered a subgenre of romance, with the novels
marked as Indian in a variety of ways that include language, content,
and cultural values. Sridhar has written three books in the series, two
in its first year (2010) and one in 2012. In this paper, I argue that
Sridhar’s books have functioned as yardsticks for other authors and
model the goals of this new subgenre. Through close readings of Heartbeats, Endless Time, and 31 Somnath Street, I
address questions about family involvement in romance, acceptable
erotic language, issues of consent, and an articulation of modern Indian
values regarding sex and marriage.These values include
respect for elders’ input, the inherent desirability of marriage and
children, the prioritizing of the family over the individual, the
importance of consent when it comes to intimate relationships, respect
for all women, and women’s control over their own bodies and sexuality.
These values reflect to readers Red’s ideas about of identity,
self-realization, and romance in a post-colonial world.
Bringing Sexy Back: Asian/Asian-American Men as Romantic Leads Trinidad Linares, Bowling Green State University
Although the image of an Asian/Asian-American woman has been a
hypersexualized one, the Asian/Asian-American man has been a
desexualized figure in American history. In contrast to Black or Latinx
men, Asian/Asian American men have been represented as asexual or gay.
They are the Other who does not pose a sexual threat to the white man
because they lack sexual power or prowess. These stereotypes have
created an imbalance in what minimal representations exist for
Asian/Asian Americans in American culture, including romance novels. As a
result, there are often more representations of Asian/Asian American
women in interracial relationships with white men than there are of
strictly Asian/Asian American couples. My presentation focuses on the
history behind the sexless Asian/Asian American man stereotype and how
trends in American popular culture towards Asian/Asian American men may
be changing perspectives of them, which may be impacting the romance
industry and could also be impacted by the romance industry. I will
provide examples of how author ethnicities and audience reaction to
Asian/Asian American men may be catapulting Asian/Asian American men to
lead roles in romance novels for the American market. These Asian/Asian
American leading men present a new option for masculinity, where sexual
attractiveness and ability are not reliant on the abuse of the power
dynamic between men and women because there are comparable oppressions
(interracial coupling between a white woman and an Asian/Asian American
man) or whiteness is decentralized (Asian/Asian American couple or an
Asian/Asian American man with a woman of color).
Outlandish romance: Fan and author navigation of romance genre boundaries
Spring Duvall, Salem College
When the first novel in the international bestselling Outlander
series debuted in 1991, it was marketed as a quintessential historical
romance - complete with a highly stylized cover - and shelved in the
romance genre sections of bookstores and libraries. Cementing its status
as a romance novel, Outlander won the Romance Writers of
America's RITA Award for Best Romance of 1991. Yet, even though author
Diana Gabaldon courted romance fans and accepted the community’s awards,
she also insisted that her novels were not just romance novels and struggled for years to have her books moved into general fiction sections and to be recognized as more than just a romance writer.
This in-depth critical analysis of Gabaldon’s body of work examines
her uneasy position within the romance genre and the tensions among her
critics and fans who seek to define her as a romance writer or establish
her as a general fiction writer. This presentation will discuss a
textual analysis of the Outlander books and the television
adaptation of the series, as well as a critical analysis of online fan
communities and media critics who review the books and television
series. In this research, I position myself as both a feminist media
scholar who studies and teaches scholarship on romance novels and as a
long-term fan of Gabaldon’s work who is deeply familiar with the Outlander fan community.
Paranormal Romance: A History Maria T. Ramos-Garcia, South Dakota State University
Paranormal Romance was a term coined in the 1990’s, but during that
decade, this subgenre was very marginal. The genre, which was all but
disappearing by the year 2000 started to take off at the beginning of
the 21st Century. September 11th triggered a new
interest in romances with paranormal elements that allowed both writers
and readers to delve on issues too painful or controversial to confront
directly at the time. In the early years after the attack there was a
preponderance of novels portraying the shock of discovering magical (and
menacing) elements irrupting in our everyday reality. Later on series
tended to develop fictional worlds in which the paranormal elements were
a given, abandoning the discovery narratives. They either reflect a
dystopian reality, or the realistic world becomes a backdrop for the
action, but not an essential element of it. Over time, the superficially
apolitical nature of the paranormal romance has been eroded with more
openly ideological discourses emerging often. This evolution parallels
the trajectory of other non-romance genres, especially urban fantasy.
This paper will offer an overview of the history of the genre,
emphasizing the connections between romance, culture, and history. While
romance as a reflection of the changing gender roles of women over time
has been frequently observed by critics, there is a scarcity of a more
systematic evaluation of romance as a dynamic genre intimately connected
with its historical moment. This paper will challenge this perspective
offering a new reading of this subgenre.
Christian Romance Novels through the Eyes of West African Women Philomena Archibong Offiong, Bowling Green State University
The romance novel has been a source of ridicule and criticism ever since
its inception and most especially due to its consumption by women.
Scholars such as Tania Modleski and Janice Radway arguing that it
actually empowers women of which African women are included. However,
there exists little or no scholarship on African Romance novels or even
Romance novels based on Africa. My paper, therefore, seeks to address
the scarcity of African romance novels which special attention to West
African women. It is interesting to find out that mostly Christian
authors have been able to combine these two powerful themes into a novel
that entertain while evangelizing to people. The West African woman
like every other in the Western world enjoy romance novels, however,
there exist very literature on African Romance novels. My paper seeks to
determine if the few African romance novels are written and published
by African press follow the romance formula and most importantly, do
these books be used by feminists to empower more women or are these
novels in tune with the African cultures and religious beliefs that
endorses patriarchal rule. My paper will use the use the novel of Unoma
Nwankwor’s “An Unexpected Blessing” and Lynn Neal’s “Romancing God”
since the novel falls under Christian romance and African women are
noted to be religious; thus shedding more light on the relevance of this
little-recognized issue.
Fantasies of Masculinity in Male/Male Popular Romance Jonathan Allan, Brandon University
In her book, Hard-Core Romance: Fifty Shades of Grey, Best-Sellers, and Society,
Eva Illouz asks: “why is traditional masculinity pleasurable in
fantasy?” (58) To answer this question, I focus on the rise of the
male/male popular romance novel, and think through why these novels are
pleasurable. To these ends, I draw on Lucy Neville’s work on gay
pornography, which she argues “subverts the patriarchal order by
challenging masculinist values, providing a protected space for
non-conformist, non-reproductive, non-familiar sexuality, and encourages
many sex-positive values” (204). While this may be true of gay
pornography, can we say the same is true of the male/male popular
romance? Does the male/male popular romance novel really subvert the
“patriarchal order”? Does it provide a space that “encourages many
sex-positive values”? As such, this paper attends to a close reading of
texts alongside theoretical work coming out of queer theory and the
critical study of men and masculinities. Ultimately, I argue that the
male/male popular romance novel remains an important site of analysis
for studies of masculinity, but that, at bottom, we are still left with
“traditional masculinity” as noted by Illouz, and, in many ways, the
“profoundly bourgeois" (207) values central to the romance narrative
that Pamela Regis noted in A Natural History of the Romance Novel. As such, I argue that these novels are not as subversive as we might hope for.
Queer Evolution: A Biocultural Investigation of Gay Romance Fiction Nicholas B. Clark, Bowling Green State University
Literary Darwinism and biocultural theories of literature have seemingly
ignored queer identities in their studies of literature, film, and
popular culture. This study attempts to begin the integration of
biocultural theories and queer theories by analyzing a collection of
stories from Japanese BL (boys love), bara manga, and Western
romance novels. These three unique genres are selected to give attention
to narratives written by both straight and gay writers. The
implications of generic format and the identities of the writers will be
discussed as well. By comparing and contrasting these genres, this
study seeks to establish the biocultural implications homosexual
identities function within these texts. Specific attention will be paid
to homosexual courtship and evolutionary theories of homosexuality, and
how these texts conform to or deny specific theories. In addition to the
traditional biocultural theories, attention will be given to the
specific Japanese understandings of homosexuality and same-sex
relationships and the country’s history of homosexuality and homosexual
identities. In doing so, this study hopes to begin understanding queer
identities within a Literary Darwinist framework, for just as fiction
has be used to explore philosophy, so to can fiction be used to explore
evolutionary psychology.
Revenge of the Romance: How romance novels transform the nerd stereotype Robin Hershkowitz, Bowling Green State University
The character of the ‘nerd’ has been prevalent in popular culture,
usually represented as a man whose intelligence and lack of social
skills keep him from achieving his ultimate desire: obtaining an
attractive girlfriend. Since the early 21st century, the
concept of the nerd has expanded to discussions of toxic masculinity and
entitlement, often seen in such arenas as the culture of the tech
industry and the Gamer Gate phenomenon. My paper addresses the central
question of how the modern romance genre includes these character
archetypes and incorporates them into the romance genre. Specifically,
in my paper, I will use the scholarship of Carol Thurston, Jennifer
Crusie-Smith, Lynn Coddington, and representations of masculinity to
analyze the nerd character in the contemporary romance novels Romancing the Nerd by Leah Rae Miller (2016) and Nerd in Shining Armor
by Vicki Lewis Thompson (2003). I will use these case studies to
illustrate how a feminist reading of romance novels interprets and
redefines the highly gendered concept of the nerd, how the genre
provides a space for character transformation, how these texts redefine
the concept of the ‘nerd’ in terms of the self, and to examine how the
nerd character is a product of gender performance.
Consuming Agency and Desire in Romance: Stories of Love, Laughter, and Empowerment. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington. Excerpt
I'm not the only person who adds entries to the Romance Wiki's Academic Bibliography. Christina Martinez has recently added the following:
Neuhaus, Jessamyn and John Neuhaus. 2015.
"'Sometimes It Feels More Like a Commune Than a Town': Envisioning
Utopian Possibilities in Robyn Carr's Virgin River Romance Novels." Studies in Popular Culture, vol. 37, no. 2, 2015, pp. 25-42. Excerpt
Stafford, Jane. 2016.
"Romance in the Backblocks in New Zealand Popular Fiction, 1930–1950: Mary Scott's Barbara Stories." Popular Fiction and Spatiality: Reading Genre Settings, Lisa (ed. and introd.) Fletcher, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 63-78.
