Details are available
for the PopCAANZ conference which is currently taking place at Auckland University of Technology. This year there are lots of papers on romance and I'll include excerpts from
their abstracts. The conference continues tomorrow, and I'll add links to Twitter threads as they appear.
Donna Maree Hanson - Popular romance fiction: flirting with feminism
popular romance fiction regularly depicts feminist social issues. In this sense, the
concept of Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’ applies
—
‘this partly unconscious “taking in” of rules,
values and dispositions...’ (Webb, Schirato, & Dahanher, 2002, p. 44). Contemporary
popular
romance novels are set in the everyday context and as such cannot but help portray the
world in which the authors and their characters exist, including social issues present in the
mind of the author, whether consciously or unconsciously. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s
and since, the woman’s movement has been politically active and
concepts of feminism
have entered into everyday discourse. [...] research indicates that writers
as well as readers of popular romance fiction have no issue reconciling their concept of
feminism with writing and reading in the genre.
Lucy Sheerman - “Exempt from all affection and from all
contempt”: necessary evil and the figure of
the Byronic hero in romance novels
Two hundred
years since his first appearance in print, the Byronic anti-hero
-
‘that man of
loneliness and mystery, / Scarce seen to smile, and seldom heard to sigh’
-
is a figure who
continues to define representations of the hero in romance novels.
The influence of
this angry and defiant fallen angel on the writing of the Brontës has been
well documented. In my paper I will consider four Governess novels, published by Mills &
Boon in 2016 as a homage to Charlotte Brontë’s iconic romance novel
Jane Eyre, and the
Byronic traces of the heroes who feature in them.
The romance novel’s continued preoccupation with the Byronic anti-hero is central to the
genre’s staged encounters with otherness and its exploration of emotional affect. The
literary device of the anti-hero shaped the development of romance tropes such as plot,
conflict and point of view, and also (as I will argue) gave rise to the Byronic anti-heroine.
Kathrina Haji Mohd Daud -
Cross-cultural romance, feminism and
femininity in Southeast Asian fiction
In this paper, I explore how the
negotiation of cross-cultural romance also elicits a particular Southeast Asian feminism in
three texts: Zen Cho’s
The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo
(2012, Malaysian), Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan’s
Sarong Party Girls
(2016, Singaporean) and Ayisha Malik’s
Jewel
(2017, Bruneian). [...] I argue in this paper that these novels construct a feminist femininity
that
allows the heroines to remain connected to and sanctioned by their individually patriarchal
heritages, while also allowing them to critique and expand existing expectations of feminine
identity through the negotiation of cross-cultural relationships.
Jodi McAlister's tweeted
a thread on Hanson, Sheerman and Daud's papers.
Ellen Carter - What’s in a romance hero/ine’s name? a
corpus study of gay and straight romance
character names
The first names parents give to their female versus male children have different
phonological (sound) characteristics. My work extends this from the real to the fictional
world, studying names given by authors to their romance heroes
–
gay and straight
–
as well
as to straight heroines. My corpus contains 2,536 contemporary romance novels: 1,668 with
a male/female pairing and 868 with a male/male couple, resulting in 3,404 heroes (1,668
straight; 1,736 gay) and 1,668 (straight) heroines. My results demonstrate that the
phonological characteristics of names given to gay heroes are statistically significantly less
masculine/more feminine than the names of straight heroes. Given that gay romance is a
fast-growing
romance sub-genre predominantly written and read by straight women, I
explore possible cultural implications of this finding and how it may feed stereotypes and
shape perceptions within (straight and queer) societies.
Eden French - Loving invisible bodies: transgender
representation in popular romance
The few novels that do feature trans heroines and heroes
—
niche
even in small
LGBTQ presses
—
are hailed as daring simply for permitting trans protagonists
to be plausible subjects of love and desire. [...] romance’s historically
heteronormative politics of gender has constrained writers and even scholars from treating
transgender themes; mainstream discussion around trans bodies still manifests routinely in
fetishistic and dehumanising ways. Moreover questions of embodiment (for example, the
politics of gender-affirming surgery) remain contested even in the trans community.
Speaking as a scholar and writer, I will discuss existing examples of trans embodiment in
romance, and outline possible reconciliations for the challenge of bringing trans love into
the mainstream.
Francesca Pierini
- “He looks like he’s stepped out of a
painting”: The idealization and
appropriation of Italian timelessness
through the experience of romantic love
Marina Fiorato’s
The Glassblower of Murano
(2008) tells the story of Eleonora, a young
woman who travels to Venice in search of her genealogical past and existential roots.
Coming from London, Eleonora incarnates a “modern” outlook on what she assumes to be
the timeless life and culture of Venice.
At one point in the novel, admiring the old houses on
the Canal Grande, Eleonora is “on fire with enthusiasm for this culture where the houses
and the people kept their genetic essence so pure for millennia that they look the same now
as in the Renaissance” (2008, 15). [...] Within narratives centred on this notion, “falling in love in Italy”
occasions the appropriation of a privileged relation with history and the past, often
contrasted with the displacement and rootlessness that seem to characterize the modern
places, people and lifestyles of England and North America. Through a discussion of
two
Anglo-American historical popular novels set in Italy, this paper proposes an exploration of
the notion of romantic love as a force reconnecting displaced and fragmented souls with a
supposedly timeless and unbroken society; a society perceived as holding a privileged
relation with ancient traditions and the past.
Pierini has a paper
freely available online which is quite similar, though lacking the focus on romantic love.
Jodi McAlister's tweeted
a thread about Carter, French and Pierini's papers.
Maria Ramos-Garcia - This is not a romance novel but a telenovela”: metafiction
and bilingualism in
Jane the Virgin
Jane the Virgin, based on a Venezuelan telenovela, is at the same time a parody and an
homage to the popular Latin American
television genre. Among the many unusual features
that contribute to the originality and success of this TV series are an omniscient narrator, a
metafictional discourse, a bilingual and bicultural setting and an unapologetic, unabashed,
and explicit use and abuse of the conventions of the soap-opera, with a touch of Latin
American magical realism. [...] This paper will
provide an overview of
the series, concentrating both on the Latino socio-cultural aspects that rarely make it into
mainstream US television, and on the metafictional discussions of the telenovela and the
romance novel
—
both as genres and as philosophies of love
—
that permeate the narrative.
Angela Hart - Combating the romance genre stigma: reading romance in
the digital age
Avid readers of the romance genre can find their voices in the online sphere using social
media platforms such as Twitter, utilizing the hashtags #amreadingromance and
#romancelandia. Romance readers utilize the technological affordances of the platform to
form groups, post about novels, and find relevant information on their specific genre. By
using anonymous user login information,
unidentifiable profile pictures, and unique
hashtags, romance readers are turning to Twitter.
Jodi McAlister tweeted
a thread about Ramos-Garcia and Hart's papers before stopping so she could present her own.
Jodi McAlister
- Not quite YA, not yet adult: the short
but complex history of
“New Adult” fiction
This paper will trace the history of the new adult genre category, using the notion of the
“genre world,” as theorised by Lisa Fletcher, Beth Driscoll, and Kim Wilkins (2018). [...] this paper will explore the generic roots of new adult fiction in young adult
fiction, popular romance fiction, and fan fiction, and how these parent genres have given
shape to popular forms and structures of the new adult category. It will provide a much-needed scholarly framework for understanding this emergent genre category, its gradual
formation, and its complex place at the borders of several different genre worlds.
Eric Selinger - Disenchantment and its discontents: Weber, Illouz, and
popular romance
fiction
Modernity and romantic love make uncomfortable bedfellows. As Max Weber explains,
modernity is marked by “disenchantment,” not just of the natural world, but also of the
inner life and of interpersonal relations. Building on Weber, Eva Illouz argues that we now
live in an “ironic structure of romantic feeling, which marks the move from an ‘enchanted’
to a disenchanted cultural definition of love” (Why Love Hurts). This talk will look at how
several contemporary authors negotiate and resist “disenchantment.”
Of particular interest
will be Ayisha Malik’s
Sofia Khan is Not Obliged
and
The Other Side of Happiness, a pair of
“hijabi chick-lit” novels that take both sides in this great debate, Courtney Milan’s
Hold Me,
which casts a cool, modern eye on romantic love without yielding to the irony that Illouz
describes, and/or Alexis Hall’s
Glitterland, which deploys religious discourse to redeem
both love and popular media culture.
Nattie Golubov - The surveillant gaze in FBI romance
This paper is my first effort at thinking through several issues recurrent in the subgenre of
the romance police procedural: the configuration of the spaces of home, homeland and
nation as domestic territories, besieged not by a foreign but a home grown threat that
violates the integrity of the boundaries between private and public, interior and exterior;
the role of individual trauma as a mark of the vulnerability of the self and the foundation of
an affective investment in the protection of national territory; the "Americanness" of the
values and practices that govern social dynamics in the workplace, the self-chosen family
and the couple. National character is defined in opposition to the rendering of the
criminalised enemy and, together with collective, institutional agency and cooperation, is
also the best safeguard against social disorder. Eventually I intend to show that this
romance subgenre mediates and manages social fears and anxieties by highlighting the
strengths of a systemic framework and ignoring the negative aspects of surveillance: anxiety
and fear lie at the heart of romantic relationships and the novels offer a means of managing
them with the emotional investment in family and trust in law enforcement.
Jodi McAlister's tweeted
a thread about Selinger and Golubov's papers.
Kecia Ali - Writing while white: black martyrs as “Magical Negroes” in
Nora Roberts’ novels
Roberts’ heroes and heroines are nearly always white; occasional
Black characters are typically what Ikard (2017:94) describes as “magical negroes ... whose
raison d’être in white redemption narratives is to support/heal/enlighten/inspire the white
character(s) in crisis.” This paper explores four Roberts’ novels
in which the violent murder
of a Black character serves as the catalyst for vital emotional developments between a
white couple or among a team of white characters [...] the single-title adventure romance
Hot Ice
(1987), the category romance
Convincing Alex
(1994), the stand-alone mystical
romance
Three Fates
(2002), and
Morrigan’s Cross
(2006), the first installment of a
paranormal romance trilogy.
