New Publications and Blog Update: Definitions, Canons and more (but probably less in future)

Twitter's been an important source of information for me in finding links and keeping up with what's been happening in the romance world, but with all the upheaval there, I've decided it's time to leave. Unfortunately, that means I'll lose an important source of content for this blog and there will probably be far fewer, maybe even no, notifications of calls for papers. I'll still be posting updates about items added to the Romance Scholarship Database, though.

The last thing I've been present for in online "Romancelandia" is a heated debate about the definition of "romance." I'm not the arbiter of that: my work's about romance as it has been defined, not as it will be. But I am the arbiter of what I add to the database, and so I've added an "About page" to give a brief explanation. I'm using the definition of "romance" given by the editors of The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction. [Incidentally one of the new items listed below takes a very interesting, in-depth look at debates about the definition of romance - see Michelson.]

Another contentious topic (which has not, as far as I know, been provoking controversy recently online), is that of a "canon." There's a trio of short articles about the "romance canon" (would it be helpful? is the concept intrinsically flawed?) in the Journal of Popular Romance Studies:

• Cant and Canonicity
  Eric Murphy Selinger
• Response to Eric Selinger’s “Cant and Canonicity”
  Julie E. Moody-Freeman
• Isn’t It Iconic: Canonical Logics and the Romance Genre
  Jodi McAlister

Other new publications are:

Burge, Amy (2022). "Beyond Outlander: Annie S. Swan and the Scottish popular romance novel." Scottish Literary Review. [This is still forthcoming, but a pre-print is available for free via the University of Birmingham.]

Grinnell, Natalie (2022). "The Challenge to Dominance Theory in Patricia Brigg's and Carrie Vaughn's Paranormal Romance Novels." Femspec 22.2:40-65. [Abstract]

Hua, Shaoqi and Chengli Xiao (2023). "What shapes a parasocial relationship in RVGs? The effects of avatar images, avatar identification, and romantic jealousy among potential, casual, and core players." Computers in Human Behavior 139. [Abstract and excerpt]

Konle, Leonard and Fotis Jannidis (2022). "Modeling Plots of Narrative Texts as Temporal Graphs." CHR 2022: Computational Humanities Research Conference, December 12 – 14, 2022, Antwerp, Belgium :318-336.

Michelson, Anna (2022). Redefining the Romance: Classification and Community in a Popular Fiction Genre. PhD thesis, Northwestern University. https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-4tj1-6567

Sharma, Vishal, Kirsten E. Bray, Neha Kumar, Rebecca E. Grinter (2022). “Romancing the Algorithm: Navigating Constantly, Frequently, and Silently Changing Algorithms for Digital Work.” Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery on Human-Computer Interaction.Volume 6, Issue CSCW:1–29. https://doi.org/10.1145/3555651

One last item, which I'm not adding to the database because it only mentions romance in passing, is a thesis by Leon Kooijmans titled "Christianity after the Death of God: Christian Atheism and the Materiality of Absence." In it Kooijmans observes that, "Since the 1990s, an increasing amount of (post-)evangelical Christians in North America and Europe sought to form communities in creative and innovative ways [...]. One notable group associated with this Emerging Church Movement is called ‘Ikon’, a small collective of artists and disillusioned Christians, agnostics and atheists located in Belfast, Northern Ireland that was active from 2001 to 2013." The connection with romance is that at one of their first meetings (on the topic of the prodigal son), "Around the room dozens of Mills and Boon novels that we had purchased in a second-hand bookshop have been scattered around the various surfaces" (18) and "As the service draws to a close everyone is invited to take away a Mills and Boon book as a reminder of the evening’s theme" (21).

New Publications: an around the world edition

Farooqui, Javaria (2022). "Romance, Austen, and English-Medium Schooling in Pakistan " Language, Education, and Identity: Medium in South Asia. Ed. Chaise LaDousa, Christina P. Davis. Routledge. [Excerpt available via Google Books.]

Izharuddin, Alicia (2021). “Reading the Digital Muslim Romance.” CyberOrient 15.1: 146-171.

Kołodziej, Gaja (2021). "Unforgettably in love: uses of the amnesia trope in contemporary romance." PhD thesis in creative writing, Massey University. [Embargoed until 2023 but the abstract is available.]

Leetsch, Jennifer (2021). Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women’s Writing: Making Love, Making Worlds. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. [See the chapter on "Routes of Desire: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie" (details here).]

Long, Eileen M. (2021). Modern Love: Reading, Writing, and Publishing the Romance Novel. Master's Thesis, Purdue University.

Mäkelä, Veera (2021). "Reading Response in Mary Balogh: A Critical Engagement." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 10.

Ngoshi, Hazel Tafadzwa (2021). "Repression, Literary Dissent and the Paradox of Censorship in Zimbabwe." Journal of Southern African Studies. Online first. [Abstract and excerpt here.]

Sinha, Mona (2022). "Reading Mills and Boon in India From the Post-Colonial to the Millennial Experience." Indian Popular Fiction: Redefining the Canon, ed. Gitanjali Chawla and Sangeeta Mittal. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Sujaya, I. M., Suarka, I. N., & Sudewa, I. K. (2021). "Representation of Balinese Exoticism: Analysis of Inter-ethnic Relations Novels in Pre-independence Period." The International Journal of Language and Cultural (TIJOLAC), 3(2), 46–56.

Zibrak, Arielle (2021). Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures. New York: New York University Press. [The first chapter is about bodice-rippers, shame/guilt and "the dark hero." Excerpt available via Google Books.]

Update on the RWA Controversy: Genocide and Book Awards

I've been adding updates to the end of my previous post but it was getting very long and there's been another important development.

The RWA Board has now issued a statement saying that

We understand the concerns regarding the Romance with Religious and Spiritual Elements category. As a Board, we learned of the winner at the VIVIAN Ceremony, along with the rest of the membership. The board has held an emergency meeting and are in agreement that the proper remedy is to rescind the VIVIAN award for "At Love's Command."

When they write that they "learned of the winner" this presumably means that they were unaware that the book had won in its category. It probably can't be taken to mean that no-one on the Board  knew of the concerns that had been raised about the book because, as mentioned in my last post, concerns were raised publicly in April, after the book was announced as a finalist.

I'm having deja vu. On top of racism being a problem, we had also previously established that the staff was a problem and could not be left to make desciosns without oversight. RWA literally learned *NOTHING*. https://t.co/XXHVBbgnJA

— Isobel Carr (@IsobelCarr) August 3, 2021

As Isobel Carr observes, there have been serious concerns in the past about staff acting without the oversight of the Board. Therefore it is concerning if, as Jenny Hartwell reported, it had been decided that "since board members had entered the contest, they could not be involved at all once it began. It was up to staff to run it & respond to formal complaints (& there weren’t any)." Was nobody available to respond to informal concerns? Given that many of the people raising concerns are, presumably, ex-members, they're not necessarily going to be able to send "formal complaints."

The Board continue:

In 2020, RWA took on the enormous task of creating a welcoming and open atmosphere from an organization that had institutionalized barriers and prejudices. In just one year, RWA has made huge strides. We have updated our bylaws to put inclusion at the forefront of membership. We are in the process of implementing an organization-wide DEIA program. We have created mentorships and outreach to marginalized authors through an Own Voices Program and have implemented a Pen to Paper Program to assist new writers in completing their first romance novel.
 
The retirement of the RITA Award and the introduction of the new VIVIANS added a new judging rubric aimed toward making decisions based on the quality of the work and limiting bias. The 2021 inaugural Vivian finalists were the most diverse class in the history of RWA awards. 17% were marginalized authors in comparison to 4% in the last RITA Awards. As this is the contest's first year, we already had planned a post-award analysis of the Vivian contest framework, looking at a systematic review of the judging, the rubric and the outreach.  

RWA is in full support of First Amendment rights; however, as an organization that continually strives to improve our support of marginalized authors, we cannot in good conscience uphold the decision of the judges in voting to celebrate a book that depicts the inhumane treatment of indigenous people and romanticizes real world tragedies that still affect people to this day. RWA is rescinding the Vivian awarded to the book finalist "At Love's Command." 

---

I don’t understand. So now they are rescinding the award for that book, but nothing about the redeeming arc of “crimes against humanity.” https://t.co/Gc5cGoFNLz

— Red L. Jameson (@RedLJameson) August 3, 2021

Lacking from the RWA Board's latest statement, is anything that addresses the fact that the RWA President's statement, issued only yesterday, normalised the depiction of protagonists who commit genocide. It is not clear if the President consulted the Board before issuing yesterday's definition of "Romance with Religious or Spiritual Elements":

Romance with Religious or Spiritual Elements, as a subgenre of romance, requires a redemptive arc as a genre convention. Essentially, the character can’t be redeemed by human means; only through their spiritual/religious awakening can they find redemption for their moral failings and or crimes against humanity.

---

LaQuette's statement is still up--both with the 'crimes against humanity' and the exclusively Christian redemption arc.
The fuzziness of the judging rubric has not been addressed.
Neither has the nebulous 'contact staff' instead of "here's where you raise flags for this entry".

— azteclady (@HerHandsMyHands) August 3, 2021

As AztecLady notes, also unaddressed in the latest statement is the fact that (as discussed in my previous post) this definition is heavily rooted in Christian theology and therefore implicitly excludes romances with religious or spiritual elements which draw on other faith traditions.

--Updated to add

Re the claim that "The 2021 inaugural Vivian finalists were the most diverse class in the history of RWA awards. 17% were marginalized authors in comparison to 4% in the last RITA Awards", this may not be, as Claire Willett suggests, something RWA should be boasting about since

"marginalized" means, I'm assuming, anything and everything

lumping together queer authors, authors of color, authors with disabilities, basically anyone who isn't a cishet white lady

and STILL, 17% of the total submissions was the best they could do???

---Updated to add that, as noted below by Bronwyn Parry, the 17% refers to finalists, not total submission. Bronwyn also states that "As a judge, I was pleased that my packets were the most diverse that I've ever had. However, I emailed the president yesterday in dismay and requested that my book be withdrawn as a finalist as I no longer had faith that the contest was judged fairly and without bias."

Bronwyn's full statement about this can be found on her website.

I've also noticed that the Internet Archive's archived copies of RWA pages are visible but then hidden due to some issue with cookies (presumably on the RWA site). I've already excerpted most of the text in this post and the previous one, but I'll attach screenshots below of the pages as they were yesterday (3 August) when I referred to them and left the tabs open on my computer. I do not have a screenshot of the original page containing the list of finalists or of the original page announcing the winners in each category.

Here's LaQuette's "Statement on 2021 VIVIAN Awards"

Here's the "Important News Regarding the 2021 VIVIAN Awards" which was subsequently released by the Board.

Here's the list of "The Vivian Contest Categories".

--Edited on 10 August to add some news coverage:

4 August

from Alyssa Shotwell at The Mary Sue, "Romance Writers of America Continues to Celebrate Racist Conversion Stories: Warcrimes are apparently okay, if you find Jesus after."

6 August 

from Kelly Faircloth at Jezebel, "The RWA Rescinds Award For Novel That Treats Wounded Knee Massacre as a Backdrop for White Redemption." 

from Hillel Italie at ABC News and USA Today: "Romance fiction award withdrawn for novel about war veteran" and here.

7 August

from Harmeet Kaur at CNN, "A romance writing group gave an award to a book criticized for romanticizing the killing of Native people. Then it took it back."

Deadline Extended: Francis Award ($250 USD + Publication)

The International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR) is has extended the deadline for the Conseula Francis Award for the best unpublished essay on popular romance media and / or the logics, institutions, and social practices of romantic love in global popular culture. Submissions must now be received by Friday, January 6, 2017.  The winning essay will receive a $250 USD cash prize and be published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Popular Romance Studies, pending any needed revision according to the judges’ comments.

Essays submitted for the Francis Award may focus on work in any medium (e.g., fiction, film, TV, music, comics, or advice literature) or on topics related to real-world courtship, dating, relationships, and love. Conseula Francis’s work on popular romance fiction focused on African American authors and representations of Black love, and priority for the Francis Award will be given to manuscripts that address the diversity of, and diversities within, popular romance and romantic love culture: e.g., diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, class, sexuality, disability, or age.

All submissions should be sent to Erin Young, Managing Editor of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies, at managing.editor@jprstudies.org. Please put “Francis Award” in your subject line. All submissions must be Microsoft Word documents, with citations in MLA format; in keeping with JPRS publication guidelines we will consider essays of 5000 to ~10,000 words in length. Please remove your name or the name of any co-authors from the submitted manuscript; in your cover-letter email, please provide your contact information (address, phone number, e-mail address) and a 150-200 word abstract of the submission.

The judges for the Francis Award will be a mix of established and emerging scholars in the field of Popular Romance Studies, chosen by IASPR. The award winner will be announced in April, 2017; each year’s winner will be invited to join the panel of judges for the following year.

Something Old, Something New (Romance Teaching 2/2)

--Eric Selinger

Quick Recap: the "old" is me, the "new" is the set of texts I just finished teaching in a summer romance class.  I blogged about three of those in part 1--Maya Rodale's Dangerous Books for Girls, Laura Florand's The Chocolate Thief, and A Bollywood Affair by Sonali Dev--and now I'll post about the rest, in the order I taught them.

Book #4: Sherry Thomas, My Beautiful Enemy.  I had heard great things about this novel for months, but hadn't read it, so I put it on my summer syllabus.  It's a historical novel set partly in China and partly in England, and it moves around chronologically between the 1881 and the early 1890s; it's also, as Thomas has said, an homage to the wuxia martial arts fiction and film that the author grew up on, which I take to be an instance of "Romance" (in Northrop Frye's sense) from a non-Western tradition.

• What Went Well:  I find this a beautiful, haunting novel: one of those romances I keep thinking about long after I've finished it.  We had a great discussion of the heroine, and of what Thomas does (and does not do) with her biracial heritage; we had a great time discussing the hero and contrasting him with those of our first two novels, using and then complicating the "alpha" and "beta" terminology that you find in romance reviews.  The tone and structure of the novel were sharp contrasts as well, so students began to glimpse the variety available within the genre. Wonderful discussion of the novel's allusions to other narratives and texts, especially to the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl, which comes up a few times, and to The Heart Sutra, an engraving of which turns out to be central to the plot.  (I'm a sucker for allusions.) One Chinese student offered some great observations about how the novel deals with its paired generic inheritance (wuxia and Western romance fiction); unfortunately, due to medical issues, she was only there for a portion of the discussion, and we didn't really finish it.
• What Went Less Well:  I'd originally had students order both My Beautiful Enemy and its non-romance prequel, The Hidden Blade. When it became clear that students were falling behind in the reading, I dropped the prequel, but simply knowing there was one threw some students off, and they struggled to see My Beautiful Enemy as a stand-alone text. Others found the novel's structure, which loops around between two time-frames, difficult to follow when reading quickly for class.  None was prepared for our allusion discussion, but that didn't really surprise me.  It's not as though the Heart Sutra is an easy text to think through, no matter the context!
• What I'd Do Differently Next Time:  I'd really like to teach the pair of novels, as originally planned, and I want to find some way to think through and set up the Buddhist side of the novel more effectively, the way I do with Christian / Biblical contexts for other novels.

5) Alex Beecroft, Blue-Eyed Stranger.  I've been teaching British novelist Alex Beecroft more or less continuously since 2009, when her first novel, the historical m/m romance False Colors, was published.  Blue-Eyed Stranger is one of her new trilogy of contemporary novels, also m/m romances, and like the other two, it deals a lot with issues of difference: in this case, racial difference (one of the heroes is of Sudanese descent; the other is white) and disability (one of the heroes is bipolar). One hero does historical re-enactments of Vikings, the other is a Morris dancer, so the novel offers not only some interesting meditations on history and diversity, but also the chance to learn something about Morris dancing and folk music, as the books before it in the syllabus offered us the chance to learn about wuxia and Bollywood film.

• What Went Well:  Great discussion of the novel's problematic packaging, which does not offer any image of the black hero, Martin; great discussion of the novel's themes and politics, which students thought stood in sharp contrast with that packaging.  Several students in the class deal with depression or bipolar disorder, and they were fascinated by the text, although one was quite wary until she read that the author was fictionalizing her own experience; several students were fascinated by the differences between how this British novel dealt with race and homosexuality vs. what they'd have expected from an American interracial m/m romance.  Beecroft's blog posts about folk culture were helpful in giving context to the novel and in thinking about the ways the novel might be framing popular romance writing as similar to folk culture practices (rather than commercial / luxury culture practices, as in the Florand novel). We had fun watching YouTube clips of Morris dancing, too.
• What Went Less Well:  Blue-Eyed Stranger works well both as a love story and as a novel of ideas, a book about historical romance as a genre (albeit refracted through discussions of historical re-enactment, Morris dancing, and folk music sessions).  I put it on the syllabus before Beverly Jenkins's historical novel Captured to set up and give us terms to talk about the Jenkins, but in retrospect, it might have worked better afterwards, since it ended up preempting some of the things students might have said about that book.  
• What I'd Do Differently Next Time:  In the fall I'm going to teach the first book from Beecroft's new trilogy, Trowchester Blues, and in the winter I'll probably try the third one.  Nothing jumps out at me as a different approach to try for this one, other than perhaps to assemble a better set of audio-visual supplements (dancing and music and Vikings) to show my students.  It might also be interesting to teach all three books together at some point--I've thought about doing that with Victoria Dahl's Talk Me Down, Start Me Up, and Lead Me On, which work well together and would teach well together, too.

6) Beverly Jenkins, Captured.  In the ten years I've been teaching romance, almost every survey class I've done has featured a novel by Beverly Jenkins.  Usually it's been Something Like Love, which was the first novel I read by her, and which teaches beautifully, because a version of what the novel is doing with history (filling us in, revising our sense of the past) takes place within the text itself, as characters use stray bits of knowledge to make things happen in their fictional world.  I tried Captured when it first came out, but then went back to Somethig Like Love; this year I decided to try Captured again, because I was trying to play up the armchair travel settings of my course, and it's a pirate romance set in the Caribbean during the American revolution.

• What Went Well:  a great discussion of the novel's cover and back-cover copy, which use genre tropes in ways that the novel itself often avoids or varies; good comparison / contrast work in terms of the hero, the heroine, the barriers, and other elements; a very interesting discussion of the romance novel (this particular one and the genre more generally) as alternative historiography. 
• What Went Less Well:  the cover discussion was fascinating, but when it started again the second day, things began to drag; several extravagant moments in the novel's plot drew skepticism from students, and here (as elsewhere) I found myself wondering whether this novel wouldn't teach better if I had it paired with another pirate romance, so that the particular tropes of that subgenre were more visible as conventions which Jenkins then plays with.
• What I'd Do Differently Next Time:  Captured is the third Jenkins novel I've taught, and for my students I'd have to say that it taught almost as well as Something Like Love, and better than Topaz.  There are several others I'd like to try--Indigo, which has been re-released as an e-book, and The Taming of Jessie Rose, which has also come back out now--and I'd also like to begin pairing Jenkins's African American historical romances with some of the new voices in that subgenre.  (I'm thinking here especially of Piper Huguley's Migrations of the Heart series, and of the Brightest Day anthology.)  Since the discussion of romance as historiography went so well, I'd like to try assigning my students Hsu-Ming Teo's essay on that topic, from the New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction anthology, even though it focuses on a novel from a different author and time-period, Bertrice Small's The Kadin.  
• Note to Self:  Try teaching The Kadin sometime alongside Magnificent Century, the Turkish soap opera.  

7) Meljean Brook, Riveted.  Although my students split on many of our novels--some liking the book, some wary or resistant or simply disengaged--there was unanimous enthusiasm for our last novel, the steampunk romance Riveted.  Students loved the world-building, the characters, and the politics of the novel; they were both fascinated by it and emotionally caught up in it.  

• What Went Well:  great discussion of gender in the novel, especially its construction of masculinity; interesting discussion of disability and sexual politics; the genre-hybridity of the book, which nods to the history and conventions of "scientific romance" (as science fiction used to be called) as well as to the popular romance novel.  
• What Went Less Well:  nothing, really.  A win all around.
• What I'd Do Differently Next Time:  I'm teaching this novel in the fall, actually, in a unit on romance and SF/Fantasy.  I'll be teaching it between Alexis Hall's Prosperity , a "queer steampunk western set in a city in the sky," and The Midnight Hunt, a lesbian werewolf romance by L. A. Raand (AKA Len Barot / Radclyffe).  My only concern is that one week might not be enough time to do the book justice, but we'll see how it goes!

That's the lot of them, folks!  Six novels and one work of criticism; of the new books in the group, I'd say two (My Beautiful Enemy and Riveted) are on my list of novels to teach again as soon as I get the chance, and others will likely come round again once I've had the opportunity to test drive some other recent romances, too.  My syllabus had grown a little stagnant since 2009-10, which worked for me as a teacher but not so well for me as a scholar, trying to keep up with the current state of the genre, and my students were beginning to wonder why I would talk about a book from six or seven years ago as a "new" book.  As I try new texts, I'll try to note them here.

Jo Beverley interviews Catherine Roach

Laura Vivanco

If you haven't already seen it, you might like to take a look at Jo Beverley's interview with "Dr. Catherine Roach [...] Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Alabama." They discuss feminism, defining features of the romance genre, historical romance and more.

Here's an excerpt:

Catherine, your next point is "Romance entails faith in love as a positive force for the good in many people's lives. In this sense, love functions as religion." I'll confess that I'm not comfortable with the word '"religion." Could it be stated as hope?

Catherine: Yes, you could rephrase to say that romantic love offers hope. My point is that the romance story believes there is an answer to existential problems of loneliness and suffering and that the answer is love. Romance is a hopeful and optimistic form of fiction that stakes its claim on the belief that the world is a good place. Despite all of life’s injustice, both love and love stories make the world a better place. The genre is life affirming.

I see. Yes, there is a necessary belief, and I have it. It's one reason I write romance.
(Reader -- are you a believer? Is it part of why you love to read romance?)

 You can read the rest over at The Word Wenches blog.

Noted with Excitement: Glitterland as a Christian Romance?

When I wrote the current sketch of my monograph on popular romance fiction earlier last summer, I included plans for a chapter that I call "Redeeming Love."  Here's the paragraph description:

Chapter 3:  Redeeming Love.  Popular romance novels draw on the long post-Christian tradition of thought about romantic love as a source of transcendent meaning, purpose, and value in life: an “erotic faith,” in Robert Polhemus’s phrase, that true love unites sacred and secular desires, erotic and matrimonial relationships, and, fundamentally, body and soul.  Some novels engage with this faith tradition in particularly self-conscious and artful ways, whether by questioning the psychological risks that we run as “erotic faith” shades into idolatry or by asserting the power of “erotic faith” to trump social prejudice (for example, against same-sex love) and intellectual prejudice (for example, against redemptive love as a banal or déclassé ideal).  This chapter will look closely at the ways three romance novels think through ideas about love and erotic faith:  Francine Rivers’s conservative Christian inspirational romance, Redeeming Love; Alex Beecroft’s progressive Christian m/m romance, False Colors; and Alexis Hall’s ostensibly secular m/m novel Glitterland, which invokes Roland Barthes as it struggles to redeem love itself as an ideal. 

I called Glitterland "ostensibly secular" because of the novel's many religious, and specifically Christian, overtones, not least of which is the title of a novel by the narrator / protagonist, Ash:  Through a Glass Darkly.  (That's borrowed from 1 Corinthians 13:12, "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known," a verse from the long disquisition on faith, hope, and love (or charity, depending on the translation) that gets quoted at so many weddings.)  

I note with excitement, then, two recent posts at Cooking Up Romance:  "Religion and Romance: a Non-Theoretical Perspective" and "Glitterland Cottage Pie." They're not explicitly theorizing Glitterland as a Christian romance, but they hint at the connection, and there's a lot of thoughtful commentary on religion and romance in the posts themselves and in the comments.  A key quote from the former: 

I don't read romance as a political or religious statement. I read it because I like stories with happy endings about people falling in love. I also don't belong to my church for political or religious reasons. I do it because life, especially life in America in the early 21st century is isolating and selfish and acquisitive and I'd rather not be like that. And so I'm a member of a community that encourages me to be otherwise. I'll be talking more specifically about Glitterland next Thursday and the following Monday, but for now, just know that in Ash I recognized myself in my brokenness and desperation and in Darian, I recognized Christ as I know Him. If I'm honest, I'm unable to process that story any other way. I can tone it down. I can use non-Christian, non-theological terms to express what I thought about it and how I felt about it. I've been doing it for a week, in fact: talking about mental illness, intellectual snobbery and class differences. But that was the intellectual taking over. The gut-level reaction was a relieved sigh: that love and redemption is offered to everyone, even the most messed up and selfish of us. 

There's a lot to be said about all of this, and I can't tell you the joy I felt when I saw this post and found my classroom discussion of the text confirmed by an outside evaluation.  When I write about the novel, and when I teach it next, I'll certainly draw on these posts, and I hope that others will, too.

One question this conjunction raises for me, however:  am I reading a secular book as a Christian romance?  Or is it more that both the blogger, a Christian, and I--not at all a Christian--are reading Christianity as a romance plot:  a not-inevitable though certainly plausible interpretation of Christianity?  Plenty to think about here, and if you need a topic for your next romance essay, please have at it!

Noted with Interest: The Creed of Romance?

At the 2014 IASPR conference, Catherine Roach proposed that there were nine essential claims being made by popular romance novels--or, since her thinking draws primarily on recent novels by American authors, we might say "being made by recent American popular romance novels," allowing the claims to be historicized and treated comparatively.  Obviously her list plays off of Pamela Regis's list of eight essential elements, but as the shift in nouns suggests, these aren't narrative elements, but rather parts of an implicit creed or belief system that underwrites the genre.

In a guest post for another blog, Roach posted her list for comment--but since they're of such potential use for scholars and teachers of the genre, I thought that it might be useful to repost and archive them right here at Teach Me Tonight. She invited comments at the other blog, and I'm sure she'd welcome them here as well; I plan to blog about them individually as the weeks go by.

Here, then, is Catherine Roach's "provisional list" of the "nine central claims made by the romance narrative":

1. It is hard to be alone. We are social animals. Most people need and want love, of some kind. Amid all the possibilities for love as philia (friendship) and agape (spiritual or selfless love), the culture often holds up eros or romantic partner love as an apex of all that love can be and do.
2. It is a man’s world. Women generally have less power, fewer choices, and suffer from vulnerability and double standards. They often get stuck looking after men or being overlooked by men.
3. Romance is a religion of love. Romance entails belief in the power of love as a positive orienting force. Love functions as religion, as that which has ultimate meaning in people’s lives.
4. Romance involves risk. Love doesn’t always work out. Desire can be a source of personal knowledge and power but also of deception and danger. Romance fiction is the safe, imaginative play space to explore the meaning and shape of this landscape.
5. Romance requires hard work. Baring the true self, making oneself vulnerable to another is hard. Giving up individuality for coupledom requires sacrifice.
6. Romance facilitates healing. Partner love leads to maturity. Love heals all wounds. Love conquers all.
7. Romance leads to great sex, especially for women. Women in romance novels are always sexually satisfied. Romance reading can connect women to their sexuality in positive way.
8. Romance makes you happy. The problematic version of this claim is that you need to be in a romantic relationship for full happiness. Here, romance fiction can be oppressive if it mandates coupledom for everyone.
9. Romance levels the playing field for women. The heroine always wins. By the end, she is happy, secure, well loved, sexually satisfied, and set up for a fulfilling life. The romance story is a woman-centred fantasy about how to make this man’s world work for her.

It might be useful to compare these nine elements to the claims about love made by romance author and Episcopal priest Amber Belldene in her recent essay "The Secret Sermon in Every Romance Novel." There are some fascinating passages in it, and I'll come back to them in some later posts here; for now, let this serve as the "money quote," in Andrew Sullivan's phrase:

I’m coming to think of each romance novel as a sort of sermon, shining new light onto a familiar truth, deepening our appreciation of it and our ability to live it out in our own lives. Those faithful readers of the trope-heavy category romances remind me of devoted church goers, longing for the comforting ritual of being told again in fresh words their most dear truth–that love heals, or that mistakes can be redeemed, that an ugly duckling is secretly a lovable swan, just as a seasoned preacher will tell you everyone needs to hear God loves them every Sunday.

In her mind, romance authors are "all preaching. Not the Christian gospel, or the Buddha’s four noble truths, but Romance with a capital R."

More on this, and other thoughts, anon.

New Publication: Thrill of the Chaste

Laura Vivanco

Weaver-Zercher, Valerie. 2013. Thrill of the Chaste: the Allure of Amish Romance Novels. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

According to Johns Hopkins University Press

Valerie Weaver-Zercher combines research and interviews with devoted readers, publishers, and authors to produce a lively and provocative examination of the Amish romance novel. She discusses strategies that literary agents and booksellers use to drive the genre's popularity. By asking questions about authenticity, cultural appropriation, and commodification, Thrill of the Chaste also considers Amish fiction's effects on Amish and non-Amish audiences alike.

Weaver-Zercher is a Mennonite and as she writes in The Mennonite,

I wrote myself and my Mennonite identity into the book. I needed readers to know that I had some skin in the game, so to speak, and that I felt a strange blend of flattery and revulsion as I watched the burgeoning size and commercial strength of the genre.

I'd wager that many North American Menno­nites feel a flicker of pride in our theological and historical connection to the group that has become the buggy-driving superstars of popular culture. [....] Maybe all the Amish hoopla in popular Christian and secular cultures signals that there really is something excellent about this faith to which we belong. [...]

Yet as I read Amish novel after Amish novel, I felt a niggling sense of annoyance, too. It had something to do with the borrowing and benefiting at work in the fact that 60 non-Anabaptist novelists are advancing careers by locating their stories in Amish country. [...] I wondered whether readers were learning anything about Anabaptism's communitarian ethics, nonresistant commitments and history of persecution. The near absence of references to nonresistance in the books made me suspicious. Although I hesitated to blame romance novels for offering a partial view of a complicated and centuries-old religious tradition, I [...] wondered whether these gentle narratives of marriage and family and neighbor and land did more to illuminate or obscure the identity of a complex culture. 

Those of you interested in virginity in romance may be intrigued by her suggestion that "the Amish are seen as premodern virgins":

Chastity descends from the Latin term castus, meaning a state of being “morally pure” or “holy,” and this concept fuels the genre in several ways. The Amish, who reject public grid electricity, phones inside homes, and car ownership, are often viewed as chaste residents of an otherwise defiled larger culture. Like the mythic virgins of literature and lore, whose rejection of sex earned them respect and even beatification, the Amish are frequently imbued with power commensurate with their ability to abstain from what many view as essential intercourses of a technological age: driving cars, flipping light switches, using a laptop, owning a cell phone.  (Excerpt adapted for First Things)

You can read another excerpt here.

Love and Religion (John Lennon Edition)

--Eric Selinger

Last week the Popular Romance Project posted a little piece by me about love and religion--or, to be more specific, about love as religion, the religion of romantic love.

We have a Call for Papers on this topic over at the Journal of Popular Romance Studies, and I hope that you (whoever you are) will spread the word or submit something.  As you'll see from the CFP, "texts from all traditions, media, and periods are welcome," and we have a particular interest in pieces about

• Sacred love stories retold in popular culture
• Hymns, love songs, and the porous boundary between them
• Romantic love as a surrogate or secular religion, and debates over this
• Crossover texts and figures:  Rumi, the Song of Songs, etc.
• Representations of interfaith romance
• Love and religion in popular culture from before the 20^th century, and from indigenous and other non-hegemonic religious traditions (Candomblé, Wicca, etc.)

That covers a lot of ground, and if you have a topic in mind, feel free to shoot me a message and ask.

Sometimes the intersection of love and religion involves seeing the beloved as a divine (or quasi-divine) figure--love as worship, or love as idolatry, I suppose--and sometimes it involves seeing something "of God" in the person you love, as Laura mentioned in a comment to one of my earlier posts.

Another way to think about romantic love and religion, though, is less theological than functionalist.  That is, love or marriage could function in someone's life the way religion does:  as a source of meaning and purpose and value; as a structure in which other parts of a life must take their place; as a priority that determines other actions and beliefs, etc.  I think this is part of what Robert Polhemus is getting at in his idea of "erotic faith":  an idea that comes from his book of that title, and one that's been put to good use in the context of popular romance fiction by Catherine Roach, in her essay "Getting a Good Man to Love."

There's no need to invoke divinity at all in this functionalist context, I suspect.  Love (or marriage, or the relationship) could be what you "believe in," even if you're an unshakable atheist in any other context, just as you might "believe in" your country or The Revolution or some other cause.

In the classroom, the functionalist idea of religion is often hard for my students to take in, probably because their sense of what religion is (or isn't) has been so profoundly shaped by conservative evangelical discourse here in the US.  There's a haunting British text, though, that seems to clarify the concept for them in a quick and memorable way:  John Lennon's song "God," from his first solo album, John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band (1970).

The crucial turn in the song comes in the penultimate verse, when Lennon pivots from what sounds like a purely existentialist or individualist credo ("I just believe in me") to something else, which I take as a revision, a clarification, of what he just said--and not, as the folks at Wikipedia have it, a second, separate article of faith.  Take a listen, and you'll see what I mean.  I don't want to give too many spoilers.

It's quite a song.  Maybe we'll publish an essay on it, in that "Love and Religion" issue?  (Hint, hint.)

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

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

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

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

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

More details here. 

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

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

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

More details here.

Quick Quotes: Faith, Hope and Love

Laura Vivanco

When writing her 2010 article for the Journal of Popular Romance Studies, Catherine Roach took as her

jumping off point [...] Robert Polhemus’s powerful study of nineteenth-century British novels of love and romance, Erotic Faith: Being in Love from Jane Austen to D.H. Lawrence (1990). In his analysis of these novels that stand as high literary precursors to twentieth-century popular romance fiction, his key concept of “erotic faith” provides a reading of the emotional dynamic that the romance narrative then turns into story. Erotic faith, he writes, is “an emotional conviction, ultimately religious in nature, that meaning, value, hope, and even transcendence can be found through love—erotically focused love” (1). Erotic faith is the belief “that people complete themselves and fulfill their destinies only with another … that in the quest for lasting love and the experience of being in love men and women find their real worth and character” (27). John Keats, for example, in a recent movie dramatization, proclaims, “There is a holiness to the heart’s affection” (Bright Star 2009). Polhemus’s point is that we have faith in love, a reverence for it. Starting in the late eighteenth century with the growth of secularism springing from the Enlightenment, in the art and in the marriages of  western Europe and North America, people increasingly fell in love with the idea of being in love. This faith in love has become a new form of faith, to “augment or substitute for orthodox religious visions” (4), but with such close psychological functionality between the two forms of faith that “religious feeling and eroticism run close together” (10) and “love and theology may be surrogates for each other” (19).

I was reminded of this while reading Jo Beverley's The Stanforth Secrets:

"Do you know how dreadful it is, my darling, to lie in my bed at night and know you are so close? A few steps to heaven. It is sacrilegious to ignore what we have here."
[...] "That is a highly irreligious statement."
He kissed the tip of her nose. "You are my religion, my goddess."
Chloe used all her willpower. "Profanity too," she said, moving out of his arms.
[...] "Not in my religion," he said lightly [...]. "There, the only sin is denial of love." (255-56)

-------

• Beverley, Jo. The Stanforth Secrets. Waterville, Maine: Thorndike, 2011.
• Roach, Catherine. "Getting a Good Man to Love: Popular Romance Fiction and the Problem of Patriarchy." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 1.1 (2010).

CFP: Love and Religion

Laura Vivanco

The Journal of Popular Romance Studies is looking for essays, interviews, and pedagogical materials on love and religion in global popular culture, for a special issue guest-edited by Lynn S. Neal (Romancing God: Evangelical Women and Inspirational Fiction). How do film, fiction, popular music, and other media represent the complex relationships between love and religion? How do these representations compare across national, cultural, and theological divides, and what happens when they cross those boundaries? How have they changed over time? What can a sophisticated understanding of love in religious discourse—from whatever tradition—teach us about individual songs, films, novels, or other popular texts?

Topics of particular interest include:

• Theologies of love in popular song: Leonard Cohen, U2, Richard Thompson, Al Green, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Niyaz, Shye Ben-Tzur, etc.
• Sacred and secular love in popular culture: drawing boundaries, blurring distinctions
• Interfaith romance (Jewish / Christian, Hindu / Muslim, etc.) in popular culture
• Love, Religion, and Politics in popular culture
• Romance vs. Religion: warnings, advice literature, debates over idolatry, etc.
• Romantic love as a surrogate or secular religion
• Christian inspirational romance fiction, and its non-Christian equivalents: studies of individual novels, publishing lines, reader behavior, etc.
• Crossover texts and figures: Rumi, the Song of Songs, etc.
• God as lover and beloved in popular culture
• Sacred love stories in popular culture (Krishna / Radha, Majnun / Layla, Adam / Eve, etc.)
• One Love, or many? Rastafari, Wiccan, and other traditions of love in popular culture

Published by the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR), the peer-reviewed Journal of Popular Romance Studies is the first academic journal to focus exclusively on representations of romantic love across national and disciplinary boundaries. Our editorial board includes representatives from English, Comparative Literature, Ethnomusicology, History, Religious Studies, African American Studies, and other fields. JPRS is available without subscription at http://jprstudies.org.

Please submit scholarly papers of no more than 10,000 words by June 1, 2012, to An Goris, Managing Editor managing(dot)editor(at) jprstudies(dot)org. Longer manuscripts of particular interest will be considered on a case-by-case basis. Submissions should be Microsoft Word documents, with citations in MLA format.



The text came from Lynn S. Neal and JPRS. The images etc have been added by me. The YouTube video contains a song, "Who is the Loved One" by Sami Yusuf. The photo of Jewish Rhapsodies for Those In Love came from Flikr via The Contemporary Jewish Museum. The image of Kamadeva came from Wikimedia Commons, as did the photo of Sue McFarlane's tombstone, which was taken by Alan Walker. It reads

HI. I'M SUE MCFARLANE (NEE LILLEY) BORN 26.8.1956 PASSED OVER 24.10.1995 THANK YOU FOR COMING HERE TODAY. MY SPIRIT IS WITH YOU AND I LOOK FORWARD TO MEETING UP AGAIN IN A WONDERFUL HEAVEN. I LOVE YOU ALL BE HAPPY AND MAY GOD BE WITH YOU. THERE ARE THREE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS; FAITH, HOPE AND LOVE BUT THE MOST IMPORTANT IS LOVE. AMEN. TO MY FAMILY X X X

Paper Topics, part 2

Eric again!

A few days ago I posted the first round of paper topics for ENG 386, my current course on popular romance fiction. Those topics focused on our first two novels, Jennifer Crusie's Welcome to Temptation and Victoria Dahl's Talk Me Down. The second round of paper topics focused on the next three novels in the mix, each of which dealt in some way with the relationships between romance and religion. (No, we didn't read Frye's The Secular Scripture. One of these days.)

My other concern with these topics, as you'll see, was to make sure that my students did some close textual analysis. A number of the first set of papers found it hard to work closely with the works they chose, as though it were difficult for students to bring their usual novel-reading skills to bear on a popular text. Easier--all too easy--to paint characters or scenes in broad strokes, but in so doing, students often wrote papers without the nuance or insight that they clearly are capable of in other contexts.

Anyway, here are the topics.

1. In class, we spent some time discussing the epigraphs in Francine Rivers’ Redeeming Love: those brief quotations from Shakespeare, the Bible, various poets, and other sources that open the book and then each chapter in it. Why are these there? What uses do they serve? Choose three of these epigraphs and write an essay about the relevance or importance of that epigraph to the chapter that it opens, or to how we read the book as a whole. Please note that to do this, you may need to look up the original context of the quoted passage, or think about its author and source.

2. One of the most striking passages in Redeeming Love comes at the end of chapter 30, when Sarah has a dream / vision and finally finds faith. Write an essay that gives a “close reading” of this passage, attending both to the details of her dream and to their sequence: what happens first, second, third, and last. What meanings and implications—about her character, about theology, about her relationship with Michael, or about the romance novel itself—can you tease out of those details? How successful is this passage emotionally and / or aesthetically, and why?

3) As we discussed in class, the world of False Colors is filled with violence and dehumanization: bodies and souls that are wounded, tortured, killed, or stunted by lack of love. There are many ways that we can understand all this violence, for example politically, as an expression of what patriarchy does to bodies, both female and male, philosophically, as a denial of victims’ humanity, psychologically, as an expression of repressed sexual desires, or even theologically, as an expression of fallen human cruelty, as opposed to divine grace or love. Write an essay on the novel that explores violence and its opposite—love and tenderness—from at least one of these perspectives. Be sure to focus, at least in part, on the final chapters of the novel, in which we see forgiveness, love, and sexual pleasure in action. Be sure to discuss passages in detail, attending to language and imagery, rather than simply discussing plot twists.

4) In a recent set of comments at the Teach Me Tonight blog (following the post "Are You a Ruthless Woman?"), a commenter named Angel observed that “there's discussion in fandom about how slash fiction written by women often focuses more on penis-in-anus penetrative sex, forgetting that gay men have a variety of sexual practices, and that some men simply don't like anal. I think maybe that's a byproduct of the cultural messages surrounding penis-in-vagina sex.” For this paper, go and read the comment thread (following useful links as necessary), and then bring the ideas from it about the symbolic meanings attached to various sexual practices to bear on ONE of the following topics:

• the sequencing of sex scenes in False Colors, with particular attention to the final chapter; OR
• the variety of sex scenes, sexual practices, and sexual orientations on display in Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander; OR
• a comparison and contrast of the two novels.

Remember, if you choose this topic, that you’re not simply trying to find and list the scenes themselves. Rather, you’re trying to use ideas from the comment thread to interpret the scenes and their importance in the novels, teasing out the symbolic (or other) implications of them. Feel free to disagree with the ideas you find in your on-line reading, and to bring up alternative sources or interpretations as needed.

5) As we saw in class, Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander quotes, cites, and echoes a variety of precursors, including material from Shakespeare, the Bible, and Jane Austen (among others). Choose a small number of these earlier texts—a single allusion, the various sonnets, the closing Biblical passage from Proverbs—and write an essay on its importance to the scene in which it appears and / or to the novel as a whole. You may need to think about both the cited / quoted material itself, and about the cultural reputation of the source.

6) One of the structural features we have noticed about popular romance novels—it may show up in other genres as well—is the deployment of repetition and variation. Scenes and motifs, phrases or images recur, and the differences between the first and second (or even third) iterations of the material can be used to mark the evolution of a character, a relationship, or an idea in the text. Choose ONE of our three most recent novels where you notice a repeated / variety scene or motif, and write an essay on how the author uses repetition and variation in this artful way. What does she dramatize or enact for us, as readers, through her use of this device?

Paper Topics, part 1

Eric here!

I'm currently teaching an upper-division (advanced undergraduate) course on popular romance fiction at DePaul: my 20th course on the genre, or something like that. We're reading a half-dozen novels over the quarter, loosely grouped under three broad topics: "Romance and Patriarchy," "Romance and Religion," and "Romance and Aesthetics." The novels, in order, are:

Jennifer Crusie, Welcome to Temptation
Victoria Dahl, Talk Me Down
Francine Rivers, Redeeming Love
Alex Beecroft, False Colors
Ann Herendeen, Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander
Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Natural Born Charmer

I've taught all of these before, except for the Rivers--which was, I should say, a huge hit in the classroom, teaching extremely well in conjunction with Lynn Neal's book Romancing God: Evangelical Women and Inspirational Fiction and with Catherine Roach's essay, "Getting a Good Man to Love," published in the first issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies.

I thought it might be interesting for those of you not taking the class to see the sorts of paper topics my students have to grapple with.

In my next post, I'll give you the topics for paper #2, which focused on Rivers, Beecroft, or Herendeen. The first set of paper topics were focused on our first pair of novels--the Crusie and the Dahl. The paper was to be 6-8 pages long, double-spaced, in 11 or 12 point type, "with a clear line of argument throughout" (heh). Here are the options I offered:

1. As we discussed in class, Jennifer Crusie’s novel Welcome to Temptation can be read as a response to claims by first-generation romance scholars about the romance genre. Ideas from Janice Radway, in particular, seem to appear in the narrative; it may be that ideas from other early critics, like Tania Modleski and Ann Barr Snitow, can be seen there as well. Write an essay on Welcome to Temptation as a response to one or more of these critics. Does it offer a counter-theory of its own, perhaps connected to Crusie’s own ideas about the genre? Be sure to draw on specific passages from both the primary and secondary texts to make your case.

2. Starting in the the late 1990s, Jennifer Crusie set about defending the romance genre in a variety of academic and popular venues. Read the essays on the genre gathered on her website, and write an essay on Welcome to Temptation that shows how this novel illustrates (or does not illustrate, in some interesting way) this romance author’s theory of her genre, both as art and as feminist practice.

3. As we noticed in class discussion, Welcome to Temptation is a pervasively allusive and citational text. Crusie’s characters (and perhaps her narrator as well) quote from, mention, or echo movies, Dusty Springfield songs, and other material from popular culture; the novel also echoes or invokes canonical texts, including the Bible and, arguably, such 19th-century authors of American “romance” as Hawthorne and Poe. For your paper, please choose one of these sets of allusions and explore its importance to and implications for our reading the novel. OR, if you prefer, write an essay on what this pervasive citational quality suggests about the ideas that this novel embodies about romance fiction, romance reading, and / or romantic love.

4. In her essay, “Getting a Good Man to Love: Popular Romance Fiction and the Problem of Patriarchy,” Catherine Roach discusses popular romance novels as, among other things, the promulgators of “erotic faith.” With her essay in mind, consider the dialogue with Christianity that we found in Welcome to Temptation, particularly the novel’s revisions of such topoi as temptation, the fall, the devil, knowledge (of good and evil, or of something else). Don’t forget the characters’ names! What exactly is the theology of this novel of “erotic faith”? How does it compare to or contrast with the ideas articulated by Roach?

5. In our early discussions of Wendell and Tan's Beyond Heaving Bosoms, many of you were interested in the recurring hero and heroine character types to be found in popular romance fiction. Choosing either Welcome to Temptation or Talk Me Down—or, if you prefer, working by comparison and contrast—discuss how Crusie and / or Dahl work with these conventions to construct either the romance hero or the romance heroine. Feel free to think about how the male or female lead of the novel is set off by contrasting characters; for example, how might Molly and Brenda compare to the heroine / villainess pairs found in “old-school” romance novels, in the BHB description?

6. As we discussed in class, both Welcome to Temptation and Talk Me Down can be read as metafiction: romance novels about popular romance fiction, its readers, its effects on readers, and its reputation. What, though, does this reading illuminate in each novel, either as idea or as artistry? How can we use this approach to make each novel as interesting as possible? Choose one novel and read it through this lens; or, if you prefer, compare and contrast the novels as metafiction, with an eye to their differences at the levels of idea and / or artistry.

7. As we discussed in class, both Welcome to Temptation and Talk Me Down are concerned with the shifting, complex relationships between the world of our desires—fantasy, fiction, hope, romance—and the world of “reality,” which is often (though perhaps not always) a grimmer, more frightening, more frustrating, more disappointing place. Several scholars and defenders of the genre, including Tania Modleski, Janice Radway, and Catherine Roach, have discussed it in terms of “wish-fulfillment,” a “reparation fantasy,” a “safe space” in which anxieties and ambivalent feelings can be assuaged or healed; others, including Jennifer Crusie, have insisted that “romance fiction is reality fiction.” Choose one of the two novels and trace the evolving relationships between fantasy and reality in the book, with an eye to how these may shift from the start of the novel to the end. If you wish, you may try to extrapolate a theory about the genre more generally from your text; however, you do not need to do so.

8. Some of our most interesting discussions so far have circled back to the enduring debate over what it might mean to talk about romance fiction as “porn for women”: a debate that is re-opened rather explicitly (no pun intended) by each of our first two novels. Drawing on Snitow’s original essay, on Berlant and Warner’s essay “Sex in Public,” on contemporary debates about porn culture, “sex-positive feminism,” and feminist porn (did you know there are “Feminist Porn Awards”), write an essay on one or both of our first two novels. What do Crusie and / or Dahl suggest about the status of popular romance fiction as “porn for women,” or about what is at stake in the debate itself? How might ideas from outside the romance / romance scholarship community (i.e., the discussions of heteronormativity in Berlant or others) illuminate the explorations and the “policing” of female desire and sexuality in one or both of these novels?

9. E-Curious variation: using the same texts and topics, compare and contrast Dahl’s Talk Me Down, published in print by HQN, with The Wicked West, published only in ebook form and written at a double remove (by Dahl as Molly as Holly). How do the explorations and limitations differ when Dahl steps into the (perhaps) more open genre of “erotic romance” and into the (perhaps) more open arena of electronic publishing? How do the texts differ in their negotiations with heteronormativity?

10. Having read two romance novels, several of you wanted to discuss the differences that you saw between Crusie and Dahl in terms of literary complexity, writing style, “fun,” and other aesthetic categories. For this essay, use your subjective response to these contrasting authors to explore their contrasting aesthetics. Rather than rank the novels against some ostensibly neutral or objective rubric—good writing does X; good books do Y; good authors don’t (but I do)—try to identify the contrasting goals or projects of the two texts, and describe the way each author’s style and / or structure helps her achieve that goal. (For example, if you notice one or both of these authors using stock language or trying to provoke stock responses in the reader, don’t assume that these are always bad things, as creative writing workshop leaders often suggest. Rather, think about how and why each author might deploy them, in the particular context, and what that might tell us about the text.)

11. One of the topics that quite interested a few of you in the first few days of class was the Smart Bitches’ account of the sexual education—and miseducation—provided by popular romance novels. Each of the novels we have read so far might be read as a didactic text, one that aims to correct earlier romance pedagogy and teach its own sexual curriculum. Looking closely at one or both of our novels, what exactly does this didactic project look like in practice? What corrections to previous romance tropes do we find? What lessons are taught, either explicitly or implicitly? Given the themes of the novel, why might we see precisely these scenes of instruction, in this order? Feel free to move from this specifically sexual topic into a broader consideration of the novel (or novels) as didactic art. What else does the text seem bent on teaching its readers, and how is that lesson conveyed?

Are You A Ruthless Woman?

The hero of Michelle Reid's The Italian's Future Bride (2007) makes his views clear. Tumperkin and Jessica make clear their views of him.

Bollywood Romance

Laura Vivanco

Eric's at Romancing the Blog today, discussing and recommending some Bollywood movies:

A few years ago, as I was wrapping up my first class on romance fiction, an Indian American student told me that she had loved these novels partly because they reminded her of Bollywood movies. When I told her that I’d never seen one, she was shocked [...]

Om Shanti Om, whose reincarnation / mystery / revenge / love story plot and echoes of older movies reminds me [...] contributed lots of catch phrases to our family lexicon, including [...] the movie’s big quotable motto: “If it isn’t a happy ending, then the movie isn’t over yet.”

Our latest favorite is a movie set in Amristar, the Punjabi city you might have seen in Bride and Prejudice. It’s called Rab Ne Bana di Jodi, which means something like “A Couple Made by God,” and its plot draws on all sorts of tropes familiar to romance readers : the abrupt marriage of convenience (in this case, to please a father); courtship under a secret identity; healing and redemption through love. Again there’s the mix of sentiment and humor, subtle and broad; again there are lots of winks and inside jokes that I’m actually starting to get. What really wows me in the movie, though, is that it’s a version of Inspirational romance, but with a very different version of religious faith and its relationship to romantic love. My favorite song in the movie, “Tujh Mein Rab Dikhta Hai” (”In You I See God / Oh, What Shall I Do?”), features our hero by turns in a temple (Hindu? Sikh? I’m not sure), then a church, then a mosque, singing a hymn to his wife the whole time. I don’t know if that’s anything special to an Indian viewer–there’s a similar ecumenical theme in another film I liked, the historical epic Jodha Akhbar–but I’ll tell you, it blew me away and has been haunting me ever since.

Please join Eric over there to read the rest of his post and join in the conversation.