News, Commentary, Registration for IASPR 2023 and New Publications

The closing date for early-bird registration for the IASPR conference is 31 March. There's a hybrid as well as an in-person option.

The BBC has published an article with the annoying premise that, as the most formulaic genre of popular fiction, romance is presumably the most at risk of being produced by artificial intelligence. However, the article does also mention that

Last year, sales of romantic fiction in the US shot up by 52.4%, compared with an increase of just 8.5% for adult fiction overall.

Meanwhile, sales of the genre in the UK have increased more than two fold over the past three years.

Erin at The Smut Report explores the preponderance of penetrative sex in m/m romance and concludes that 

Sexual fantasy and wish fulfillment is all over the place in romance. But while wish fulfillment and smoothing out rough edges (I mean, is douching sexy? Apparently not, because—while showers are prolific—these guys never do it.) is one indisputable component of genre romance, it also often contributes to certain groups of readers feeling invisible. Fantasy is great and all, but sometimes it would be nice also to stop the barrage of input that maybe something’s broken because one hasn’t met one’s perfect Romance Novel Partner yet, and that’s why one struggles to orgasm / doesn’t enjoy penetration / doesn’t enjoy sex at all / fill in the blank.

And on the topic of inaccuracies/fantasies, Scientific American offers a reminder that wolves generally do not behave the way that shifter/werewolf romances imply they do: "The idea that wolf packs are led by a merciless dictator, or alpha wolf, comes from old studies of captive wolves. In the wild, wolf packs are simply families."

This year's issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies has begun to appear online, and includes:

• Genre-savvy Protagonists in Queer YA Rom-coms
  Alex Henderson
• Literary Fiction from the Perspective of Romance: Normal People
  Francesca Pierini

Other recently published works on romance are:

Burge, Amy (2022) "Beyond Outlander: Annie S. Swan and the Scottish popular romance novel." Scottish Literary Review 14.2:1-19 [I've linked to the entry at the Romance Scholarship Database as there's both an official version (behind a paywall) and a free, pre-print version.]

Cannon, Emanni N (2022). Contemporary Romance and the Question of Literary Value. Master of Arts in English Literature, San Francisco State University. 

Ghosh, Srijani (2023). "Diversity Sells: Uzma Jalaluddin’s Muslim Adaptation of Pride and Prejudice." English Studies. Online First. [Abstract]

Lindström Kruse, Miranda (2022). Pinsamma läsningar: En affektteoretisk studie av #SpicyBooks på TikTok. Masters thesis, Uppsala universitet. 

McDade, Monique (2023). California Dreams and American Contradictions: Women Writers and the Western Ideal. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. [There is a chapter on Eva Rutland, and though the focus is not on her romance novels, this is the first significant academic work about her. See the RSDB for more details.]

Pupipat, Apisak (2023). "Should a Book Be Judged by its Back Cover? Some Written/Formal Features as Observed in Happily- Ever-After Women’s Novel Blurbs." LEARN Journal: Language Education and Acquisition Research Network 16.1:604-630.

Rattanamathuwong, Bancha (2023). "Time Is on Our Side?: Homo Economicus in Time-Travel Romance." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. [Abstract]

Ghostwriting of Romance: An Issue for Romance Scholarship?

Courtney Milan gives details on her blog of why she was obliged to conclude "that Christiane Serruya has copied, word-for-word, multiple passages from my book The Duchess War" and it then emerged that more authors had had their works plagiarised too. This latest plagiarism scandal has, however, also led to revelations concerning ghostwriting in the genre.

Shiloh Walker has explained that:

there are any number of reasons why some works are written by ghosts.

#1 Well-known names like V.C. Andrews, who…well, kind of died just a few books into the successful series. The works & rights reverted to her family. The choice to use a GW here is pretty obvious. The Sweet Valley books about the Wakefield twins were largely written by ghosts.

But the worlds, characters, etc for both of these huge series wouldn’t have existed without the original author & creator. Ghosts made the worlds bigger and kept them going after death in Andrews’ case, and expanded them even more for the SV world, taking the girls down to junior high, onto college, etc in Pascal’s situation. The world is huge and has been widely enjoyed by so many and it wouldn’t have been possible without ghosts.

So…simply keeping a world going or expanding on an existing world or series is one reason to use a GW.

#2 One project I took early on was from an author who had the bare bones of a project already done, and I don’t just mean the outline. It was a solid piece and well done, but this client couldn’t quite finish it and wanted help fleshing it out so it could be published. The basic work, characters, world-building, story arc, character growth, resolution was done, but the client knew it needed more. I was hired to provide that and did so. My words helped fill in the story, but the story itself wasn’t mine. It belongs to that author.

#3 Other projects I’ve taken from a semi-regular client were series-based from a popular series that did well for a particular author but this author wanted to move on from that series and focus on a new one that was taking up a great deal of time.  Readers wanted the initial series to continue. Author wanted to write newer one which was also gaining traction. Author didn’t write fast enough to do both, plus some authors don’t shift gears well, going from one genre to the next, as easily as others and these were two vastly different genres. I was hired to GW the primary series. The series, the characters, the ideas were never mine. I wrote from rough outlines, using plot lines and already defined character profiles, providing stories that wouldn’t have existed without the author’s previously established work. Those worlds belong to that author.

#4 Majority of my projects come from one primary client, an already established author who had a presence long before I was hired. I’m given very thorough, chapter by chapter outlines, very thorough character backgrounds & profiles. I’ve written short stories that aren’t as long as the initial material provided to me by my main client.

I’ve also had several other projects from clients similar to this, people who have the ideas, even the character and storyline they want, but they want a GW to finish the book itself.  I’m paid by the hour, I research, and provide original content. When done, I return the project, knowing it’s not mine. It never was, because the ideas, the characters, the plotline, weren’t mine to begin with.

Like Kaetrin, I can't help wonder who the authors are who use ghostwriters:

It seems to me that this has implications for the study of popular romance, at very least when the focus is on an individual author and trying to understand the trajectory of their life's work. It could potentially affect other types of scholarship. For example, computer analysis of some romance novels suggested that "vocabulary decay is a result of progressive amounts of linguistic chunking—due to author fatigue or a desire to produce a more readable narrative" (Elliott). If one author starts a novel, writes an outline for the rest, and it is completed by a second author, that would obviously have implications for this kind of analysis.

More broadly, suspicions about ghostwriting in the genre aren't likely to help dispel widely-held beliefs that all romances are just mass-produced products rather than individual works of literature.

Edited to add: Nora Roberts has now written about her experiences of being plagiarised and she puts this case into a wider context:

So this plagiarist lifted lines, bits, chunks big and small, from a slew of authors and books, mashed them together then hired ghosts off a cheap labor site to cobble them into a book.

This was her MO.

She did this for–I think my information is–29 books, put them up on Amazon, used Kindle Unlimited for some. KU pays by the page read. The freaking page read.

This culture, this ugly underbelly of legitimate self-publishing is all about content. More, more, more, fast, fast, fast. Because that’s how it pays. Amazon’s–imo–deeply flawed system incentivizes the fast and more. It doesn’t have to be good, doesn’t have to be yours–as I’m learning hiring ghosts is not really rare. Those who live and work in this underbelly don’t care about the work, the creativity, the talent and effort and time it takes to craft a story. [...]

I’ll have a lot more to say about this, all of this. I’m not nearly done. Because the culture that fosters this ugly behavior has to be pulled out into the light and burned to cinders.

I hope things do indeed start to change. Another point which Robert makes also gives me hope: she observes that "it’s always a reader" who spots the plagiarism. That readers do spot it is an indication of readers' engagement with, and love for, individual books in the genre.

Literary Criticism Following its Heart, Teaching Twitter, Challenging Racism through Fiction, Archives and Reviews

Some of the papers from the Bowling Green State University's recent conference on romance are now available from them.

Eric Selinger's "Use Heart in Your (Re)Search: The Invitations of Popular Romance" suggests that the protagonists' four-step quest in Sherry Thomas’s neo-Victorian historical romance My Beautiful Enemy

offer[s] us a guide to the heartfelt thinking and learning to which many romance novels — not all, perhaps, but many -- invite us as scholars, as students, and as teachers of the genre, at least in a literary studies context 

The first step by the way, is to "Believe the Legend": "In the context of popular romance studies, believing the legend entails believing that romance novels offer something worth learning, treasures worth finding".

As discussed in "Romancelandia on Twitter: Designing a Digital Humanities Research Assignment for First-Year Writing Students" Heather M. Schell and Ann K. G. Brown have been collaborating

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. In-class activities will help students track down supplemental research and think through the ethical questions raised by studying individuals’ social media accounts. (from the abstract)

Elizabeth Kingston writes as an author of historical romance novels about how "History's Been Hijacked: How To Combat White Supremacy Through Popular Literature".

it is undeniable that the version of history taught by romance novels has made it far easier for white supremacist arguments to be accepted by otherwise intelligent, well - read people. To put it simply, the well is poisoned, and if you read historical romance, you are drinking from that well.

She's also posted (a very slightly shorter version of) the paper on her own website along with a follow-up piece, "Practical Advice: Expanded edition" which is exactly what its title states it is.

The Journal of Popular Romance Studies (JPRS) is going to publish on a rolling basis. The first few articles of issue 7 are now available:

"Romance Fiction in the Archives" by Kecia Ali.

Kecia describes a visit to the Ray and Pat Browne Popular Culture Library (PCL) at Bowling Green State University. They have a large and ever-expanding romance collection, so Kecia couldn't see more than a tiny proportion of her holdings. In fact, she was only looking at a small proportion of the Romance Writers of America (RWA) archives and:

I skimmed over or skipped past many tantalizing leads and materials. [...] Many projects might benefit from consulting the collection. In other cases, entire projects might be built around the archival material. This list is partial, idiosyncratic, and woefully incomplete, meant only to offer a starting point for thinking about drawing on the archives.

"Review: Heartthrobs: A History of Women and Desire, by Carol Dyhouse" by Jonathan A. Allan

"Review: Romance Fiction and American Culture: Love as the Practice of Freedom?, edited by William A. Gleason and Eric Murphy Selinger" by Victoria Kennedy

Romance Roundup: Spanish romance in English, Crime fiction wins in Scotland, Romance defended

Laura Vivanco

A new, English translation of a novel by Corín Tellado has been published:

In 1962, Unesco declared her the most-read Spanish author alongside Cervantes. [...] Mario Vargas Llosa [...] has supplied the prologue to the translation.

“[Tellado] was, in all likelihood, the most significant sociocultural phenomenon in the Spanish language since the Golden Age,” writes the Peruvian-born Nobel laureate. “What might ostensibly appear to be heresy – and from a qualitative perspective it is – ceases to be so if we begin to view things in quantitative terms. Borges, García Márquez, Ortega y Gasset, any of the most original thinkers and writers in my language that you might care to mention, none of them have reached as many readers or had so great an influence on the way in which people feel, speak, love, hate, understand life and human relations, than María del Socorro Tellado López, Socorrín to her friends.”

Duncan Wheeler, associate professor of Spanish studies at the University of Leeds, was researching the cultural politics of Spain’s post-Franco transition to democracy when he noticed that her readers had been ignominiously lumped in with fans of Julio Iglesias and his ilk.

After devouring 50 of her books bought for a euro each at Madrid’s El Rastro flea market four years ago, he began to look beyond the comparisons with Cartland and consider Tellado as a chronicler of Spanish society [...] the books offer a valuable overview of an evolving Spain. Not only do they reflect the changing status of women as the tourism boom allowed them to leave home to work in hotels and other service industries, they also depict the country’s nascent celebrity culture and its fascination with all things American. (The Guardian)

The details of the translation are:

Corín Tellado, Thursdays with Leila, trans. Duncan Wheeler, intro. Diana Holmes and Duncan Wheeler, prologue Mario Vargas Llosa (Cambridge: MHRA New Translations, 2016)

More details of the cost and how to obtain the volume are available from The Modern Humanities Research Association.

I've often seen romance referred as the best-selling genre of popular fiction but presumably that's in the US/North American market. At least, at the end of November the Scottish Book Trust revealed that

crime/thriller books are the single most popular type of fiction in Scotland.

In a recent Ipsos MORI Scotland survey of 1,000 adults, just over 1 in 4 Scots (27%) who read for enjoyment said that books which fictionalise crimes, their detection, criminals and their motives topped their choice of reading or listening genres. The next most popular genre were science fiction/fantasy and biography/autobiography, both at 10%, followed by historical fiction at 9%.

While the crime genre was the most popular among readers of all ages, the second most popular genre among young readers (aged 16-34) was science fiction/fantasy (15%), while readers aged 55 and over chose historical fiction as their second preference (14%). (Scottish Book Trust)

To end on a more positive note for romance, Val Derbyshire's been busy trying to change perceptions of popular romance. She's reviewed Jenna Kernan's The Shifter's Choice (Harlequin Mills & Boon) in Revenant's special issue on werewolves. It's good to see a romance novel reviewed (and the genre defended) in an academic journal:

this is a romance where the author is asking her readers to suspend disbelief quite a lot. However, like most Mills & Boon romances, it's not as empty-headed as literary critics would have you believe. The story raises several issues of interest to contemporary society, including such matters as the selfishness of our Western consumption-driven culture in which the gulf between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots' is ever widening.

Earlier this year she was on the BBC arguing that romance is feminist and a lot more of her thoughts on that and other issues in the genre can be found in this short booklet about Harlequin Mills & Boon romances. Among the most thought-provoking parts for me was the one on "defamiliarisation":

Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky coined the term 'defamiliarisation'. He used this to describe the capacity of art to invest the familiar with strangeness and thereby enhance perception.

'Defamiliarisation' is not simply a question of perception; it is the essence of literariness. Authors who 'bare the device' in literature and expose literature's artificiality, defamiliarise its tropes and render it into 'true art'.

Mills & Boons do this repeatedly.

this is a romance where the author is asking her readers to suspend disbelief quite a lot. However, like most Mills & Boon romances, it’s not as empty-headed as literary critics would have you believe. The story raises several issues of interest to contemporary society, including such matters as the selfishness of our Western consumption-driven culture in which the gulf between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ is ever widening. - See more at: http://www.revenantjournal.com/contents/the-shifters-choice-jenna-kernan/#sthash.Uw7pzzPj.b9eMPXVX.dpuf

this is a romance where the author is asking her readers to suspend disbelief quite a lot. However, like most Mills & Boon romances, it’s not as empty-headed as literary critics would have you believe. The story raises several issues of interest to contemporary society, including such matters as the selfishness of our Western consumption-driven culture in which the gulf between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ is ever widening. - See more at: http://www.revenantjournal.com/contents/the-shifters-choice-jenna-kernan/#sthash.Uw7pzzPj.b9eMPXVX.dpuf

this is a romance where the author is asking her readers to suspend disbelief quite a lot. However, like most Mills & Boon romances, it’s not as empty-headed as literary critics would have you believe. The story raises several issues of interest to contemporary society, including such matters as the selfishness of our Western consumption-driven culture in which the gulf between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ is ever widening. - See more at: http://www.revenantjournal.com/contents/the-shifters-choice-jenna-kernan/#sthash.Uw7pzzPj.b9eMPXVX.dpuf

CFP: Articles and Books

Laura Vivanco

Since there are so many of these, I've included hyperlinks in the list below:

• The Pleasures and Politics of Popular Erotic Fiction
• Literature and Pornography
• Literary Texts and the Popular Marketplace
• Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies (Special Edition on Neo-Victorianism)
• Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance

The Pleasures and Politics of Popular Erotic Fiction
(Edited Collection)

The publication of EL James’ Fifty Shades of Grey in 2011 marks a particularly visible moment in what appears to be a proliferation of erotic fiction, written by and for women, since the end of the twentieth century. More than just an instance of a particular genre of fiction, Fifty Shades has spawned considerable discussion of the significance of ‘women’s popular erotic fiction’ generally.  

The Pleasures and Politics of Popular Erotic Fiction seeks to explore this phenomenon, its social and textual origins and its attendant conceptual and political effects. In doing so, the book aims to examine the discursive regularities and popular debates framing the production and reception of women’s popular erotic fiction; the cultural anxieties and transformations such texts express; the ways in which they reinscribe and negotiate relations of gender, sexuality, race, and kinship. We are interested in exploring the ideological forces underpinning their development and visibility as both a ‘new’ and ‘popular’ form; the ever-growing proliferation of subgenres and their role in shaping popular ideas about romance, relationships, desire, and the erotic.

We invite proposals for contributions to an edited collection of critical research on the cultural significance of ‘women’s popular erotic fiction’. Possible areas of research include (though are not limited to):

• The cultural work of the different subgenres (BDSM, paranormal romance, erotic crime fiction, ménage a trois, ‘neighbour from hell’, sex confessionals) and the ways of speaking about, categorising and marketing these texts.


• The rise of independently published online erotic fiction (production and consumption) and the discourses surrounding it.


• Debates around originality and derivativeness.


• The continuities and departures of erotic fiction from its predecessors in romance fiction and chick lit, as well as those from more ‘respectable’ literary traditions.


• The role of popular erotic fiction in reinforcing and/or transgressing the hegemony of whiteness, heterosexuality, patriarchy, the family, etc.


• The role of this fiction in circumscribing an idea of ‘the West’, as well as the possibilities offered by non-western forms of popular erotic fiction.


• The pleasures of reader consumption and the discourses surrounding it.


• The function of romance in women’s erotic fiction.

Expressions of interest, including an abstract (250-300 words), a short author bio and list of recent publications, may be forwarded via email to the editors by 24 May, 2013. The anticipated due date for accepted contributions (6,500 –7,500) is 29 November, 2013. Dr Kristen Phillips, Claire Trevenen, Curtin University (Bentley, Western Australia) Contact email: k.phillips@curtin.edu.au, Claire.Trevenen@curtin.edu.au

Literature and Pornography

The dust may have begun to settle in the blogosphere, but M. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Gray novels continue to dominate the bestseller list, impervious to the literary outrage that greeted their remarkable success. In the wake of this phenomenon, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory invites essays on literary works that flirt with, dabble in, or wholly embrace the pornographic. We are interested in scholarly engagements with the history, theory, and politics of pornography, as well as studies of the popularity, reception, censorship, and “literariness” of texts considered pornographic. We welcome essays on both canonical and lesser-known works, from John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748) to Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934) to, yes, Fifty Shades of Gray. LIT welcomes essays that are theoretically grounded but also engaging and accessible. Contributions should be from 5,000-10,000 words in length.

LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory publishes critical essays that employ engaging, coherent theoretical perspectives and provide original, close readings of texts. Because LIT addresses a general literate audience, we encourage essays unburdened by excessive theoretical jargon. We do not restrict the journal's scope to specific periods, genres, or critical paradigms. Submissions must use MLA citation style. Please email an electronic version of your essay (as an MS Word document), along with a 100 word abstract, to litjourn@yahoo.com.

Deadline for submissions: March 17, 2013. Full details here.

Literary Texts and the Popular Marketplace

 (Series Editors: Kate Macdonald and Ann Rea)

In the past, critics and writers anxious to build the canon have often focused on the 'highbrow' or high culture dismissing other writers to the derogatory category of 'middlebrow' or 'popular' literature. Some writers and texts actively resisted such prejudices or embraced popular appeal through a willingness to address a wide audience. Other texts were dismissed from the canon because they were written by women, addressed women’s concerns, or because they appeared connected with strands of the middle- and working-class inimical to high culture.

This series offers monographs and edited collections of essays that examine the extents and effects of writing that resists the uncritical embrace of the highbrow. Crossing both cultural and geographic boundaries, it brings together studies of texts, writers, readers, producers and distributors. It will highlight current debates about the politics of mainstream readerships and media, about the designation of audiences and material methods of circulation and will address contemporary critical concerns. By attending to how these texts resist the 'high' cultural imperative it is possible to learn how culture is commodified for particular classes and the role that gender and social class play in the production of those categories.

We invite submissions from established scholars and first-time authors alike. Prospective authors should send a detailed proposal with a rationale, chapter outlines and at least two sample chapters alongside a brief author's biography and an anticipated submission date.

More details here.

Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies

(Special Edition on Neo-Victorianism)

The Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies (AJVS) invites submissions for a special edition on neo-Victorianism to be published in September 2013. AJVS is a fully refereed journal published by the Australasian Victorian Studies Association, with articles covering topics as diverse as archaeology, architecture, art, economics, history, literature, medicine, philosophy, print culture, psychology, science, sociology and theatre appearing in its pages.

The past decade has seen increasing scholarly interest in what Marie-Luise Kohlke, editor of Neo-Victorian Studies, calls "the afterlife of the nineteenth century in the cultural imaginary". This edition aims to contribute to the growing interdisciplinary dialogue about the ways in which the Victorian period is re-imagined in contemporary culture. The guest editor invites research papers on any aspect of the neo-Victorian, including, but not limited to:

• Neo-Victorian literature, popular fiction, graphic novels and comic books;
• Film, television and dramatic adaptations of Victorian literature;
• Steampunk fiction, art and fashion;
• Neo-Victorianism and cultural conservatism;
• Neo-Victorianism and its significance for Victorian Studies;
• Nostalgia and remembering;
• Gender, sexuality and class politics and neo-Victorianism.

Papers of no more than 7,000 words in length should be emailed as a Word document with an accompanying abstract of approximately 200 words to Dr Michelle Smith, msmith@unimelb.edu.au by 1 April 2013.

More details about submissions can be found here. The call for papers can be found here.

Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance (Essay Collection)

Eds. Nadine Farghaly and Margo Collins

Articles about urban fantasy and romance novels are invited for a new, multi-contributor collection.

During the last few decades, urban fantasy and paranormal romance novels have come to the forefront of the publishing world. Normative heroes and heroines have been joined by werewolves, vampires, mermaids, shape-shifters, centaurs and dragons, to name but a few. These magical creatures fill the pages of books and the screens of movie theaters in ever-increasing numbers.

Such a vast industry—one that generated at least 75 million readers in 2008 alone (and has been growing since)—deserves more study. This collection will offer critical examinations of both urban fantasy and paranormal romance.

The following categories suggest possibilities but are by no means exhaustive:

• Gender
• Race
• Sexuality
• Romance
• Desire
• Domesticity
• Power
• Monstrosity
• Witchcraft
• Fandom and/or Reception
• Transformation and/or Adaptation
• Vampires, Shapeshifters, and other Supernatural Creatures
• Hybridity
• Heroism
• Villainy
• Memory

What to Send: 300 - 500 word abstracts (or complete articles, if available) and CVs should be submitted by June 1, 2013. If an abstract is accepted for the collection, a full draft of the essay (5000 – 8000 words) will be required by December 1, 2013.

Abstracts and final articles should be submitted to: paranormalromance.urbanfantasy@gmail.com

The call for papers can be found here. Unfortunately, no further details are given about the editors or the publisher of the essay collection. If you have any more information about either of these matters, perhaps you could leave a comment?

Conferences Coming Up

Laura Vivanco

Given that

The American Comparative Literature Association’s 2012 Annual Meeting will take place at Brown University, Providence, RI from March 29th to April 1st, 2012

and

The 42nd Annual PCA/ACA [Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association] National Conference will be held at the Copley Marriott Hotel in Boston from April 11 to 14, 2012.

and I'm not going to be at either of them, I thought I'd share details of some of the papers which will be given at these conferences. I'll begin with the ACLA conference:

Jayashree Kamble, University of Minnesota

“Mermaid or Halibut? Crises of National Identity in Joanna Bourne's Historical Romance Novels”

Jayashree also has a post up today at the Popular Romance Project, about myth in Harlequin/Mills & Boon romances.

Eric Murphy Selinger, DePaul University
“After the Deaths of Love and Poetry: Romance, Cultural Capital, and the Novels of Eloisa James”

Eloisa James mentioned cultural capital when she gave the keynote address at the McDaniel conference (Sarah Frantz's tweets of the speech can be found here).

Martin Hipsky, Ohio Wesleyan University
“Eros and Danger in the Edwardian Romance Novel”

You may recall that Marty wrote a guest-blog-post for TMT about his new book, Modernism and the Women's Popular Romance in Britain, 1885-1925.

Angela Toscano, University of Utah
“Ravished, Raped, Rewarded: The Crisis and Catastrophe of Love in Popular Romance”

I very much enjoyed reading the paper Angela gave to the McDaniel conference, on "The Liturgy of Cliché: Ritual Speech and Genre Convention in Popular Romance."

Finally, although they don't specifically mention romance in their titles, I'm fairly sure these are about romance too:

Jonathan Andrew Allan, University of Toronto
“Loving, Talking, Curing”

Antonia Losano, Middlebury College
“Consummate Failure/Incomplete Bliss”

Thinking about Learning about Love

Laura Vivanco

In Everything I Know About Love I Learned from Romance Novels, Sarah Wendell argues that

Inside those stories is everything you need to have a happy, loving relationship. [...] And what better way to learn about relationships and how they start, fracture, and become stronger once repaired, than to read about those relationships in many, many permutations and variations? (4-5)

In her review of EIKALILFRN Jessica Miller, a romance reader and a philosopher who teaches at the University of Maine, suggests that there's something rather problematic about Wendell's line of argument:

Though Wendell is writing a “gift book,” not a work of theory or literary criticism, her specific claims deserve some scrutiny, particularly around the issue of reader engagement, which is central to her arguments on the genre’s behalf. How, for instance, do romance readers manage to glean the good stuff but not the bad? [...] Wendell relies on reader testimonials for her claim that romance readers learn the real lessons, but merely enjoy the fantasy, but then what do we do about readers who testify that romance has harmed them [...]? To her credit, Wendell includes a few comments from readers who claim they learned what not to expect by reading romance [...]

But if savvy readers come to the genre ready and able to suss out what’s just fantasy, what’s worth emulating, and what not to do, then romance novels aren’t actually teaching these readers anything new. Wendell herself admits that the lessons romance teaches are “things you likely learned as a child when you were taught how to treat other people.” In that case, it would be more accurate to say that romance novels reflect or deepen moral beliefs readers already hold. This makes sense—but then it follows that if a reader holds pernicious or delusional moral beliefs (however we define those), given the sheer size of the genre, she can probably find some reinforcing of those bad moral beliefs in romance novels, too.

Miller argues that

It’s time to stop evaluating romance novels in terms of their putative effects on (women) readers, and to pay more attention to their literary merit and ability to provide pure pleasure.

So I'll conclude with a reminder that the 2012 conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance takes as its subject "The Pleasures of Romance" and "asks one large question: What is the place of pleasure in popular romance?" The closing date for "proposals for individual papers, full panels, roundtables, interviews, or innovative presentations for peer-review consideration" is 1 May 2012.

---

• Miller, Jessica. "A Fine Romance." Open Letters Monthly. 1 Feb. 2012.
• Wendell, Sarah. Everything I Know About Love I Learned from Romance Novels. Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks Casablanca, 2011.

Teaching with "For Love and Money"

--by Eric Selinger

Six years ago I taught DePaul University’s first course exclusively devoted to popular romance fiction: a gen-ed (or “Liberal Studies”) course that ran from E.M. Hull’s The Sheik (1919) to Bet Me, by Jennifer Crusie (2004). I have since taught about twenty-five courses on the genre, from large undergraduate surveys to senior and graduate seminars. The novels I've taught range from Christian inspirational romance to BDSM and LGBT romances, often accompanied by some range of essays and chapters from popular romance scholarship.

This winter, I'm teaching two romance classes, both of which I'm going to start blogging about here at Teach Me Tonight. One of them is built around fresh scholarly resource: Laura's brand new book, For Love and Money: the Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills & Boon Romance. I suspect I'm the first person to teach with this book, and I want to give anyone out there who might be considering it, either for class or for pleasure reading, a sense of how it's working in this context.

Let's start with logistics. When I asked my university bookstore to order hard copies of the book from Lulu, they balked, unused to dealing with an e-published / POD volume. (Our bookstore is a Barnes & Noble, and the fact that For Love and Money was available as a Kindle book, but not a Nook book, may have factored in their decision.) I promptly emailed the students directly, giving them links to download the book or purchase the paperback, and they were utterly unfazed by the prospect. About 2/3, I'd say, bought the paperback; the rest seem to be reading it on netbooks, e-readers, or tablets in class.

Because I wasn't sure whether they'd all have the book by the first full day of class, however--a worry I won't have in the future--I assigned some other reading before it. This is an upper-division undergraduate course, and I wanted to get students up to speed on the history of popular romance scholarship, the various debates that have structured it since the 1970s, and so forth. We started with three things:

• The chapter on "Reading Romantic Fiction" from Joanne Hollows' book Feminism, Femininity and Popular Culture (2000), which gives an introductory overview of critical debates from the 70s-90s, grounding them in critiques of mass culture that date back to the 19th century;
• The introduction to New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction, which covers the same period from a slightly different angle, and which brings things forward to the present, more or less; and
• My own essay in New Approaches, "How to Read a Romance Novel (and Fall in Love with Popular Romance)," which talks about why it's been so hard for critics to invest in giving "close readings" of romance fiction--and then offers an example of what such reading might look like, working with Laura Kinsale's Flowers from the Storm.

Not much discussion that day, I'm sorry to say--I think I over-prepped, as I sometimes do when nervous. Instead, I talked my class through the critical history outlined in these three readings, so that they'd have a sense of the charges against and defenses of popular romance fiction in the contexts of 1) critiques of mass culture more generally (many of which are highly gendered, as Hollows shows); 2) feminist debates about the genre, including over whether it should be thought about as "pornography for women"; 3) the response of romance authors to these debates, primarily as gathered in the Dangerous Men, Adventurous Women anthology; and 4) the "new wave" of romance criticism that begins somewhere in the late 1990s, and picks up in the early 2000s, and includes Laura's book.

For the second day of class, I'd assigned the Introduction and first chapter ("Mimetic Modes") of Laura's book. Our conversation began, though, with an extended discussion of her dedication: "To every Harlequin Mills & Boon author who has ever been asked, 'When are you going to write a real novel?'" I had students brainstorm lists of the characteristics of the "real novel" and the "Harlequin Mills & Boon novel," drawing on the previous day's reading and on their own gut sense, as English majors, of what these differences might be.

This turned out to be a fabulous way to organize our thoughts, both in terms of the texts themselves and in terms of the ways they're written, published, marketed, and consumed, per student assumptions and as these get discussed in classes at our university. I kicked myself that I hadn't asked these students to read anything from Mark McGurl's The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction After Henry James, which has a wonderful discussion of how the high-art novel emerges (quite anxiously) from the sea of popular fiction during the later 19th century, but their exposure to a bit of that history via the Hollows chapter proved helpful in clarifying just how deeply they've been indoctrinated in some old, quite sketchy ideas about the distinction between "real" art (which is deliberate, and evidently created in pursuit of craft, social commentary, or inward spiritual necessity) as opposed to popular culture (filthy lucre!).

The key terms in Laura's title and subtitle, Love and Money and Literary Art, provided us with a useful frame of reference here, as did her introductory discussion of popular romance being "literature's Other" (thus Curthoys and Docker, qtd. 12) or being seen as the "degenerate" form of an older, more artistic genre. (This as opposed to the evolutionary metaphors commonly used for detective and science fiction, which is said to start as pulp fiction and then rise to the status of literature, at least in the hands of this or that author.) We talked about the denigration of HMB and of popular romance more generally—what had they seen, heard, etc. here at DePaul--and ended with Laura's comparison between HMB fiction and 15th century cancionero love poetry, which really struck a chord with several students.

By the end of class, they were ready to talk about reading romance novels as "real novels," which laid the foundation for our next go-round. I'll blog about that later this week, and then, at the end of the week, about our first attempts to read a particular romance novel, The Duke is Mine by Eloisa James, with Laura's study in mind. I chose the novel because it so prominently features a "mythos," in Northrop Frye's terms--in this case, the story of the Princess and the Pea--and Laura's second chapter is all about the ways that HMB romances deploy and revise and comment on recurring stories, or "mythoi." As it turns out, however, the first chapter of For Love and Money, about various fictional "modes" and the aesthetics of "modal counterpoint," also turned out to be quite helpful. Stay tuned!

Sisters and Husbands

Laura Vivanco

Laura Struve's "Sisters of Sorts: Reading Romantic Fiction and the Bonds among Female Readers" appeared in the most recent issue of the Journal of Popular Culture but its conclusion is not likely to come as any surprise to readers of this blog: "Romance readers not only fail to be oppressed by their reading, they also make it an occasion to participate in a female community" (1303). Struve points to the existence of active communities of romance readers, such as those who visit All About Romance, as evidence that "Contrary to the perception that readers are passive, isolated women hopelessly waiting for their prince to come, readers of romantic fiction are active and seek to form bonds among women" (1293) and argues that

When romance readers seek out other readers, they are seeking out other women, and when readers become writers, they identify themselves as writing within a female tradition. These connections are discussed using the rhetoric of familial relationships—kinship, sisterhood, and motherhood. Instead of being obsessed with unattainable heterosexual romantic relationships, romance readers seek out and desire sisterhood. [...] These readers are not trying to find “Mr. Right” or “Prince Charming” [...]. They are trying to find a fellow reader; they are trying to find a sister of sorts. (1297)

Since it's quite possible to have both a husband and a sister and, according to the Romance Writers of America, "Romance readers are more likely than the general population to be currently married or living with a partner," I wonder precisely what is meant by "unattainable heterosexual romantic relationships." Clearly many readers are in romantic relationships, so is Struve is suggesting that there is a particular type of "heterosexual romantic relationship" which is unattainable (i.e. one with a "prince")? Or does she think that many readers have no need to be "obsessed" about attaining a heterosexual romantic relationship because they already have one? Could it be that she has failed to consider the possibility that romance readers may have (or be obsessed with having) heterosexual romantic relationships and develop homosocial relationships based around romance-reading?

Early in the essay Struve states that

If romance novels are perceived to be poorly written, formulaic, and pornographic, then it is easy to characterize their readers as unintelligent, unsophisticated, and neurotic. The idea that “you are what you read” dominates many studies of romantic fiction, and the portrait of the reader that emerges is heavily influenced by the content of the novels.

If, however, one shifts the focus from content to the activities that surround the reading experience—the way romance readers talk about their reading, the way they talk to each other, their connections to writers and publishers, the way they use technology—a portrait of a different reader emerges, a reader who is an active participant in the genre’s production and reception as well as its consumption. Despite the genre’s conservative ideology, which focuses on heterosexual courtship and marriage, romance readers make connections with other women, and they use the Internet to help foster this community. (1289-90)

It is not entirely clear whether Struve herself perceives romance novels to be "poorly written, formulaic, and pornographic" [and I, as the author of a book subtitled "The Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills & Boon Romance" would, obviously, take issue with that view if she does hold it] but she certainly seems to accept that the genre has a "conservative ideology, which focuses on heterosexual courtship and marriage." While it is true that a great many romance novels do focus on heterosexual courtship and marriage, such a statement immediately makes me wonder if the author is aware of the existence of substantial numbers of lesbian and m/m romances or has considered the possibility that there might be significant variations in the depictions of "heterosexual courtship and marriage."¹ Furthermore, when female communities are contrasted with a "conservative ideology," I can't help but note that a group of women do not, by the mere fact of coming together to participate in leisure or other pursuits, automatically pose a challenge to conservative ideologies.

Whatever her view of the merits (or otherwise) of modern romance novels, Struve is very much aware that there are

similarities between the study of romantic fiction and the history of the novel and novel studies. The attacks on the romance reader today are similar to those leveled at novel readers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. [...] During the first half of the twentieth century [...] [s]cholars who wanted to expand the canon to include works by female authors faced accusations that literature written by women was frivolous because it focused primarily on domestic concerns such as courtship and marriage and that these works were poorly written. (1302)

She therefore concludes that

Scholars who are critical of this genre seem unaware of the history of their complaints and cultivate a certain blindness about the relationship between literature and popular culture and the act of reading. Literary scholars have already decided that a lifetime can be spent and a career made in talking about books and reading them, yet romance readers are criticized for being “addicted” to reading. (1303)

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Struve, Laura. “Sisters of Sorts: Reading Romantic Fiction and the Bonds Among Female Readers.” Journal of Popular Culture 44.6 (2011): 1289-1306.

Another woman-only social activity

1 Despite the inclusion of some bibliographical items dated 2011 there is a curiously retro feel about parts of this essay. For example, Struve writes that "All About Romance, features an interactive column, 'At the Back Fence' ” (1294) but I knew it had been discontinued some time ago. When I checked at AAR, I discovered that "The last ATBF column was published October 27, 2008" (AAR). Struve writes that:

In addition, romance novels have an extremely shortshelf span; Harlequin publishes c. thirty different titles every month. Readers must rely on word of mouth and recommendations in order to make their purchases before the books disappear from the shelvesand are replaced by new titles. (1294)

There is no acknowledgment here that many romance readers now buy ebooks, which do not have "an extremely short shelf span." Incidentally, this also seems a rather low estimate of Harlequin's monthly output: in December in the Harlequin Presents line alone I counted 10 new novels. I strongly suspect that the essay was first written prior to 27 October 2008 but was not published until this month due to the fact that at one point the Journal of Popular Culture had a massive backlog of articles accepted for publication.

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The image is of "Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. These two Church Amish women are engaged in quilting. Quilting bees are popular in this area." The photo was taken by Irving Rusinow and came from Wikimedia Commons which in turn acquired it from "the National Archives and Records Administration as part of a cooperation project. The National Archives and Records Administration provides images depicting American and global history which are public domain or licensed under a free license."

My New Book - For Love and Money: The Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills & Boon Romance

Laura Vivanco

I'm very, very pleased to be able to announce that my new book, For Love and Money: The Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills & Boon Romance is now available.

Since this isn't a time for modesty, I'll share my back-cover quotes:

"Laura Vivanco's For Love and Money is an impressive study of the popular fiction of Harlequin Mills and Boon that is a must read for any student of popular fiction and for those who write and love the genre" - Liz Fielding, author of over 50 Harlequin Mills & Boon romances.

"Deep learning, wide reading, and clear thinking are very much in evidence in Vivanco's exploration of HM&B. A welcome addition to popular romance criticism." - Professor Pamela Regis, author of A Natural History of the Romance Novel.

"Laura Vivanco’s For Love and Money is the book that scholars and fans have both been waiting for: a deft, attentive introduction to the Harlequin Mills & Boon romance novel as a work of art. [...] Vivanco traces the connections between these books and the classical myths and medieval romances they so often deliberately echo, and she shows how the novels use allusion and metatextual reflection to defend their genre. (“Scorn not the sonnet,” Wordsworth warned in a sonnet—Harlequin Mills & Boon novels have long taught readers to “scorn not the romance.”) Vivanco’s conversation with earlier critics, from the 1930s “Battle of the Brows” through 21^st century scholars like Pamela Regis, is lively, engaging, and good-humored, and she has a remarkable eye for the textual details that bring each novel to life. I am profoundly impressed." - Professor Eric M. Selinger, author of What Is It Then Between Us? Traditions of Love in American Poetry.

My publisher, Humanities Ebooks, is (as their name suggests), an academic e-press, and the book is available from their site as a pdf. This is a format that deals particularly well with footnotes. A Kindle edition is also available at Amazon .at .com .de .es .fr .it and .uk .

HEB has teamed up with Lulu so that paper copies can be printed on demand. Lulu's preview of the table of contents and the introduction is embedded below.



A brief summary of each of the chapters and a list of the HM&B romances cited, can be found at my website.

Art and Craft: Bachelor Dad on Her Doorstep (2)

Laura Vivanco

Michelle Douglas is a pseudonym used by Therese Michelle Dryden, who recently completed a Creative Writing Masters at the University of Newcastle (Australia). Her thesis has two parts. The first was Bachelor Dad on Her Doorstep; the second

discusses the conventions and constraints of the popular romance genre. It explores the challenges presented to a writer in creating and maintaining emotional intensity in a popular genre romance and the need to provide a satisfying and credible ending to that romance. Five well-known romance novels – Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Rebecca, The Grand Sophy, and The Republic of Love – are analysed for the manner in which they portray romantic love and for the narrative strategies that may be of use to the writer of category romance. Finally, the exegesis discusses how the conventions of the popular romance genre and the narrative strategies employed have combined to shape the creative work.

It can be downloaded from here. I'm very pleased that Therese has agreed to be interviewed at Teach Me Tonight.

Laura: You already had an undergraduate degree in English. According to the biography included in Bachelor Dad you "enrolled in an English master's program for the sole purpose of indulging [your] reading and writing habits further." I'm sure there would have been simpler ways to get indulge your "reading and writing habits"; why study for a Masters in Creative Writing?

Therese: I didn’t mean for that comment to sound quite so flippant. It certainly glosses over the hard work and angst involved in a Masters, but, that said, my Masters did allow me to indulge my love of reading and writing further, just in a more directed fashion. My undergraduate degree was 14 years prior to my enrolment in the Masters course and, as such, seemed like a whole lifetime ago.

But my reasons were bigger than that too. I had been submitting manuscripts to Mills & Boon on a fairly regular basis and, while said manuscripts were being rejected, I knew that I was getting closer and closer to being accepted for publication. But the process is so long and I started to wonder if I had the right voice and whether I was wasting my time etc. Enrolling in a Masters in Creative Writing seemed a good way to continue doing what I was doing while forcing me to spread my wings a little. Romance wasn’t actually my topic when I first enrolled (I wrote a loose and baggy monster of a novel), but when Mills & Boon bought my first book early in the second semester of my enrolment (February 2007) it seemed wise to focus all my energies on romance instead.

Laura: Re writing romance novels, you say that "The level of emotional intensity that needs to be generated quickly and maintained over the course of the story, and the credibility of the happy ending are two elements I find most difficult and challenging in my own practice" (193). I found that interesting because I recently read the following in a post by Magdalen, whose romance novels have not yet been published:

I don't know yet all the ways to convey emotion in my writing. If I'm managing to evoke emotion in my readers, it's a happy accident. That's why I'm off in January to coastal Maine to start an MFA program.

Yup, I'm committing two years and a lot of money to get a degree I don't need and won't likely use just so that I can write a scene that plays that most beguiling trick: it makes the reader feel.

Did studying for your MA help you perfect "that most beguiling trick"?

Therese: My initial response is to say no, as I still think the best instance of “that most beguiling trick” in my own work is in my first novel, which was written a good twelve months before I enrolled in my Masters. But that is too easy an answer. During my enrolment I was exposed to writers – excellent writers – whom I wouldn’t have studied otherwise and they have no doubt influenced me in untold ways.

More importantly, perhaps, I discovered other writers’ guidelines and maxims about writing that explained some of the techniques I was applying instinctively. A specific example being the idea that if you allow a character to cry in a story then the reader doesn’t have to. I knew that a particular scene in my debut novel worked well, but I’m not sure I could’ve satisfactorily explained why. Knowing the why is valuable because it gives a writer a place to look when an effect they are trying to create isn’t working.

Interestingly, though, I think the biggest benefit I’ve gained from my Masters has been the greater understanding I’ve developed for the romance genre. That has been invaluable.

Laura: Ken Gelder, whom you quote in your thesis, states that "The entwining of entertainment and information is a key feature of much popular fiction. Readers can quite literally learn from it" (62):

Crime fiction is often informational, and technical - although it is by no means the only genre of popular fiction that relies on the provision of often intensely researched details: even romance can do this. (Gelder 62)

In your thesis you focus on love and

the conflict romantic love seems to trigger between intellect and emotion. As Blaise Pascal declares: “the heart has its reasons whereof Reason knows nothing” (qtd. in Lewis, Amini, and Lannon 4). The internal discord this can engender in a heroine and/or hero can generate tension quickly within a story and help amplify the narrative elements of internal and external conflict while heightening the emotional tone of the story. (193)

Do you think readers can glean useful information, whether about relationships or about other topics, from romance novels?

Therese: Yes, I do, but I would also caution that romance novels are not self-help books or encyclopedias. I know the Smithton women in Janice Radway’s Reading The Romance cited facts and instruction as one of the benefits and enjoyments they found in reading romance, and while it’s true that, like them, I’ve learned interesting facts through the pages of a romance novel, it’s not one of the main reasons I read romance. Also, I don’t consider that passing on of information a romance novel’s primary goal, though it can certainly be an entertaining by-product.

I recently read Sarah Wendell’s Everything I know About Love I Learned From Romance Novels, which I enjoyed immensely. While I’m not sure I would make all the claims that she does, I do think romance novels generally portray characters who work through their fears and relationship problems and encourage each other to communicate, which I think has a positive import.

Laura: John G. Cawelti has suggested that

In earlier more homogeneous cultures religious ritual performed the important function of articulating and reaffirming the primary cultural values. Today, with cultures composed of a multiplicity of differing religious groups, the synthesis of values and their reaffirmation has become an increasingly important function of the mass media and the popular arts. (388)

Catherine Roach would appear to be in full agreement, at least with regards to the romance genre:

To the ancient and perennial question of how to define and live the good life, how to achieve happiness and fulfillment, American pop culture’s resounding answer is through the narrative of romance, sex, and love. [...]

I argue romance novels are so popular partly because they do deep and complicated work for the (mostly) women who read them—work that derives from the mythic or religious nature of the romance narrative that serves to engage readers in a “reparation fantasy” of healing in regards to male-female relations. Romance novels help women readers, especially heterosexual women, deal with their essentially paradoxical relationship toward men within a culture still marked by patriarchy and its component threat of violence toward women.

In Bachelor Dad you put a bookshop in conflict with a bakery. Jaz's mother, and then Jaz own the bookshop while "Mr Sears owned the '[...] bakery directly across the road" (11):

Mr Sears had never actually refused to serve Jaz and her mother in his 'baked fresh-daily' country bakery, but he'd let them know by his icy politeness, his curled lip, the placing of change on the counter instead of directly into their hands, what he'd thought of them.
Despite Jaz's pleas, her mother had insisted on shopping there. 'Best bread in town,' she'd say cheerfully. (12)

Is it entirely fanciful to think that this choice of shops might serve as a reminder that "Man shall not live by bread alone" (Matthew 4:4)? There's nothing overtly religious about the books Jaz sells, of course, but perhaps there's something of a spiritual nature to be learned from the fact that the conflict is removed because love overcomes hatred?

Therese: Oh, you have no idea how much I want to say that I intentionally did all that! My reasons for choosing a bookshop and a bakery were far more prosaic, I’m afraid. When I visited Leura, which is the inspiration for my fictitious town of Clara Falls, I fell in love with the bookshop there (Megalong Books if anyone is interested). So when I decided that I wanted to write a novel set in the Blue Mountains it only seemed natural that the bookshop would feature prominently. For plot reasons, I needed Mr Sears’ shop to be one that a person would go into on a regular basis. Hence, the bakery. However, the book does feature art and artists – in part to reflect the Blue Mountains which abounds with art galleries – and I wanted Mr Sears to be an artist in his own way as well (though, baking as art may indeed be fanciful). I wanted his art to hint at the fact that he could be redeemed (baking/bread = nurturing). Because a romance is focused so closely on the heroine and hero it wasn’t possible to show Mr Sears’ journey and I didn’t want his redemption coming completely out of left field (though I fear it probably still does).

That all said, though, this is a story that is primarily about forgiveness and redemption, and, of course, ideas of forgiveness and redemption do have significant religious overtones. I wanted echoes of Jaz and Connor’s journeys in the characters of Mr Sears, Mrs Lavendar and Boyd Longbottom too. I think that as a general rule romance novels do portray love as a much more positive emotion (ie, an emotion that can give one happiness) and a smarter choice than holding onto hatred, fear and prejudice. As Pamela Regis points out in A Natural History of the Romance Novel, the society defined at the beginning of a romance novel is flawed in some way. In Bachelor Dad, when the rifts are finally healed, old grudges settled, and Jaz and Connor are free to declare their love for each other, those fractures in the society are mended and that, hopefully, indicates not only a better future for Jaz and Connor, but for Clara Falls as well.

Laura: You write in your thesis that "Genre fictions are created for the purposes of enjoyment and pleasure" (219) while Ken Gelder suggests that

Two key words for understanding popular fiction are industry and entertainment, and they work firmly to distinguish popular fiction from the logics and practices of what I regard as its 'opposite', namely, literary fiction or Literature. Literary fiction is ambivalent at best about its industrial connections and likes to see itself as something more than 'just entertainment', but popular fiction generally speaking has no such reservations. (1)

In presenting Harlequin Mills & Boon romances as novels which are highly constrained by the publisher and emphasising their authors' wish to provide entertainment, do you accept that there is a great divide between Literature and popular fiction? And is this a question you meant to address in Bachelor Dad through the depiction of Jaz and Connor's art?

Therese: I don’t accept that there is such a great divide between Literature (with a capital L) and popular fiction. That seems to me too artificial. I think that Literature and popular fiction do privilege different things, but it doesn’t mean other elements are completely ignored. Literature often privileges truth, or beauty of expression in language, or experimentation with language and/or structure, but on its own head be it if it ignores a reader’s desire for entertainment and pleasure. Popular fiction privileges elements of fantasy, and romance novels idealize romantic love, but if there is no truth or honesty, or if it is poorly written, likewise, it won’t hold a reader’s attention for long. There are numerous works that are compelling, emotionally engaging, truthful and beautifully written in Literature and in popular fiction. I believe there are instances in which category romances are all these things too. Category romances are constrained, but that doesn’t mean there is no room for innovation, and within the form there is a wealth of diversity.

Can you tell that prior to writing Bachelor Dad I had been reading John Carey – specifically What Good Are the Arts, and The Intellectuals and the Masses? I do believe that Jaz’s tattoos and Connor’s wood-turned furniture are valid art forms – as valid as their drawings and paintings. I dislike any kind of art that attempts to deliberately exclude a large segment of the population. I come from a working class background so cultural elitism is an anathema to me. I don’t know if they were issues I deliberately meant to address in Bachelor Dad, but it is inevitable that a writer’s own prejudices and beliefs will make a mark on their fiction.

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• Cawelti, John G. "The Concept of Formula in the Study of Popular Literature." Journal of Popular Culture 3:3 (1969): 381-90.
• Douglas, Michelle. Bachelor Dad on Her Doorstep. Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2009.
• Dryden, Therese Michelle. Bachelor Dad on Her Doorstep. MA thesis. Faculty of Education and Arts, School of Humanities and Social Science
  University of Newcastle, Australia, March 2011.
• Gelder, Ken. Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2004.
• Roach, Catherine. "Getting a Good Man to Love: Popular Romance Fiction and the Problem of Patriarchy." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 1.1 (2010).

Art and Craft: Bachelor Dad on Her Doorstep (1)

Laura Vivanco

Michelle Douglas, the author of Bachelor Dad on Her Doorstep (2009), "made my heroine and hero, each in their own way, artists" and I was intrigued by the ways in which the novel touches on matters related to art and books and hints at possible similarities between them.

The novel is dedicated "To Varuna, The Writers' House" and, as Douglas has written, "The inspiration for Bachelor Dad On Her Doorstep came from a setting: the Australian Blue Mountains where I spent a week on a writers’ retreat," presumably at Varuna, which "is in the World Heritage Area, the Blue Mountains region of New South Wales, Australia." Since Douglas's "favourite place in the mountains is Leura – seriously cute, plus it has one of my all-time favourite bookshops [...] I based my fictitious town of Clara Falls on Leura."

Jaz Harper, Douglas's heroine, owns a bookshop on the "main street" (15) of Clara Falls, so the novel literally places books at the heart of the community. In the final chapter a book fair gives Clara Falls the chance to demonstrate that "In this town [...] we pull together" (267); there are "Oodles and oodles of people. All mingling and laughing out the front of her bookshop" (265) and "a cheer went up when the townsfolk saw her" (266). Like Jaz's biker friends, this chapter seems to suggest that "supporting independent bookshops is a good cause" (146).

Jaz, who also "mean[s] to open an art gallery" (164), brings together books and art when she decides to decorate the bookshop, formerly owned by her mother, with a mural of the dead Frieda:

She'd sketched in the top half of Frieda's face with a fine pencil and the detail stole his [Connor's] breath. [...] Beneath her fingers, her mother's eyes and brow came alive - so familiar and so ... vibrant.
Jaz had honed her skill, her talent, until it sang. The potential he'd recognised in her work eight years ago - the potential anyone who'd seen her work couldn't have failed to recognise - had come of age. (112)

Brief as this passage is, it seems to suggest that the production of the best art requires practice as well as raw talent and this lesson is emphasised later in the novel when Jaz encourages Connor Reed, the hero and Jaz's former boyfriend, to pick up some charcoals and try sketching for the first time in years:

He'd lost count of how many pictures he'd drawn. [...]
Jaz sighed and chuckled and teased him, just like she used to do. She pointed to one of the drawings and laughed. 'Is that supposed to be a bird?'
'I was trying to give the impression of time flying.'
'It needs work,' she said with a grin. [...] 'But look at how you've captured the way the light shines through the trees here. It's beautiful. [...] You can draw again, Connor.' (174-75)

Jaz forces him to draw because she wants him "to know its joys, its freedoms once more ... to bow to its demands and feel whole" (170). This perhaps describes the experience of creativity not just of visual artists, but also of those who are creative in other media, including writers.

In addition, it seemed to me that the novel explores what can be classified as "art." In their youth Jaz and Connor used to

take their charcoals and sketch pads to one of the lookouts.
She'd sit on a rock hunched over her pad, intent on capturing every single detail of the view spread out before her, concentrating fiercely on all she saw. Connor would lean back against a tree, his sketch pad propped against one knee, charcoal lightly clasped, eyes half-closed, and his fingers would play across the page with seemingly no effort at all.
Their high school art teacher had given them identical marks [...]. Connor's drawings had [...] captured an essence, the hidden potential of the thing. Connor had drawn the optimistic future. (50)

It is perhaps logical, given the nature of his talent, that Connor "hadn't picked up a stick of charcoal since" (42) Jaz left town and he no longer envisaged an "optimistic future" for himself; he

relinquished his dream of art school.
'I run a building contractor's business now here in Clara Falls.' (41)

However, although Jaz is led to believe that Connor has "given up his art" (52) and is now merely "Painting shop signs [...] All that potential wasted" (50-51), and despite the fact that he believes he has "turned his back on art to become a carpenter" (169), when Jaz sees the "handmade wood-turned furniture" (189) he has made, "She marvelled at their craftsmanship, at the attention paid to detail, at the absolute perfection of each piece" (189) and tells him that "you didn't give up your art. You just ... redirected it" (190).

For her part, Jaz is now "a world-class tattoo artist, if Frieda's boasts could be believed" (43) and despite the fact that she herself used to think that "Connor had more talent in his little finger than she possessed in her whole body. She merely drew what was there, copied what was in front of her eyes" (50), in fact when she creates a tattoo it

wasn't just any simple tattoo. It was an indelible photograph captured on this man's arm for ever.
It was a work of art. (152)

To the man who has been tattooed, however, it is "a memorial" (153) to his dead daughter. Thus, like Connor's carpentry, the tattoo is art which is very functional.

Art, this novel seems to suggest, is not limited to 'high' culture, but can be found in creations which might be described as 'craft,' or 'popular culture.' Indeed, one might even wish to add to that list the work of Mr Sears, the baker. His carrot cake "tasted divine" (101) and he certainly behaves as though he considers his creations to be special: "he placed each of the three cakes in a separate cardboard box with the same care and reverence mothers showed to newborn babies" (146).

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• Douglas, Michelle. Bachelor Dad on Her Doorstep. Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2009.