I've now written up a series of posts at my blog about each of the essays in the collection. The first of them is here and it contains links to all of the others.
Monday, December 28, 2015
Update on "Women and Erotic Fiction" ed. Kristen Phillips
I've now written up a series of posts at my blog about each of the essays in the collection. The first of them is here and it contains links to all of the others.
Monday, December 14, 2015
CFP: PopCAANZ (Sydney, Australia) 2016 Conference
PopCAANZ 2016 Conference
Call for papers
PopCAANZ 7th Annual International Conference
29 June-1 July 2016
Sydney University Village, Sydney, Australia
Deadline for proposals: 1 March 2016
The full CFP can be found here. It invites
academics, professionals, cultural practitioners and those with a scholarly interest in popular culture to send a 150 word abstract and 100 word bio to the area chairsIn the case of popular romance that's:
Jodi McAlister: popularomance@popcaanz.comConference information is here.
Saturday, December 12, 2015
New to the Wiki: Women's Uses of Romance Novels (including m/m)
- Foster, Guy Mark, 2015.
- 'What To Do If Your Inner Tomboy Is a Homo: Straight Women, Bisexuality, and Pleasure in M/M Gay Romance Fictions', Journal of Bisexuality, Published online first. Abstract:
"Criticism [...] often argues that such narratives merely substitute two male bodies for a male/female pair without substantively altering the emotional and sexual dynamics of the relationship. Hence, the male lovers in such narratives are simply acting out a heterosexual fantasy of gay male intimacy. To challenge this view, this essay turns to revisions to Freudian understandings of bisexuality. In so doing, it attempts to relocate this pleasure in the repudiated male identities and homosexual object cathexes that all women are urged to give up in the pre-Oedipal phase as a condition of assuming (hetero)normative gender and sexual subjectivities."
- Moody, Stephanie, 2016.
- “Building Social Worlds: Examining Women’s Uses of Romance Novels.” Literacy in Practice: Writing in Private, Public and Working Lives. Eds. Patrick Thomas and Pamela Takayoshi. New York: Routledge. 32-45.
Sunday, November 22, 2015
New to the Wiki: Romance Fiction v. Real Life
- Iwai, Gaku, 2015.
- "Wartime Ideology in 'The Thimble': A Comparative Study of Popular Wartime Romance and the Anti-romance of D. H. Lawrence." Études Lawrenciennes 46.
- Kempf, Rachel Erin, 2015.
- "Dirty Words: The Writing Process of 'Smutshop'." The University of Texas at Austin, Master of Fine Arts. ["I worked at Siren-BookStop, Inc. for three years, cleaning up manuscripts and penning gay werewolf erotica [...] It was the best and worst job I’ve ever had — the best because I got paid to write and spend my workday making dirty jokes, and the worst because real sex isn’t porn sex, and real women aren’t romance heroines, and love and relationships are messy and complicated and when you spend all day boxing it into the confines of a highly formulaic genre, you’re bound to start getting some messed-up ideas about how your love life ought to be"]
- Meyer, Michaela D. E., 2015.
- "Living the Romance through Castle: Exploring Autoethnography, Popular Culture and Romantic Television Narratives". The Popular Culture Studies Journal 3.1&2: 245-269. [This includes a discussion of romance fiction, not just television romantic narratives]
- Moody, Stephanie, 2016.
- "Identification, Affect, and Escape: Theorizing Popular Romance Reading." Pedagogy 16.1: 105-123. Abstract
- Slušná, Zuzana, 2015.
- "Postfeminism, Post-romantic and New Patterns of Feminity [sic] in Popular Culture." European Journal of Science and Theology 11.6: 229-238.
Sunday, November 08, 2015
Romance Research in the Canary Islands and Australia
In the Canary Islands, Dr. María-Isabel González-Cruz (Associate Professor, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain) is leading a project on:
Discourse, Gender and Identity in a Corpus of Popular Romance Fiction Novels on the Canaries and Other Atlantic Islands [Discursos, género e identidad en un corpus de novela rosa inglesa ambientada en Canarias y otras islas atlánticas] (Reference FFI2014-53962-P)-----
The novels in this corpus are all set, wholly or partially, in the Atlantic islands (mostly the Canaries) and are written by English Harlequin/ Mills & Boon female authors. The project begins with a corpus of 20 novels set in the Canaries, while the corpus on Madeira and other islands has just begun to be built, including only 2 novels at the moment. The texts cover a time span of almost five decades, from 1958 to 2004, which allows for an analysis of the evolution of their discourse.
The protagonists are usually a native islander hero, or an Englishman with local ancestors, who falls in Jove with an English heroine who either visits or settles temporarily on one of the islands, which are typically described as a paradise with very different sociocultural traditions. Both the narrator and the characters are aware of the sociocultural and linguistic differences and often make reference to them. This provides an interesting framework and material to carry out a variety of analyses related to a number of challenging issues, including identity and otherness, paradise discourse, and intercultural and even linguistic contact, since the texts are written in English but interspersed with Spanish and Canarian (also Portuguese) terms and expressions. These words and phrases perform different communicative functions and reach a wide international readership who become familiar with them. This may contribute, to some extent, to their diffusion and eventual adoption by readers of English or other speech communities, as González-Cruz (2011b) has argued. [...]
In short, our purposes in this Research Projects are as follows:
- to carry out an interdisciplinary study of the texts we have compiled so far
- to keep searching for more books in order to enlarge both corpora, the main Canarian corpus and the one referring to other Atlantic islands,
- to make a comparative analysis of the novels set in this area.
I don't know which novels are included in the 20-book corpus. Can you think of any books you think should be included? I can pass on any suggestions.
-----
Dr Lisa Fletcher recently announced on the RomanceScholar listserv that she's
part of a research team just awarded a 3-year (2016-2018) Australia Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project grant of A$316,000 to study 21st-century Australian popular fiction, including romance. This interdisciplinary project brings together researchers from the University of Queensland (Kim Wilkins, David Carter), the University of Melbourne (Beth Driscoll), and the University of Tasmania (me).-----
Our project summary: This project intends to conduct a systematic examination of 21st-century Australian popular fiction, the most significant growth area in Australian trade publishing since the turn of the century. Its three areas of investigation are the publishing of Australian popular fiction; the interrelationships between Australian popular fiction and Australian genre communities; and the textual distinctiveness of Australian popular novels in relation to genre. Research is designed to centre on 30 novels across three genres, building a comprehensive picture of the practices and processes of Australian popular fiction through detailed examination of trade data, close reading of texts, and interviews with industry figures.
The maps of Australia and the Canary Islands came from Wikimedia Commons and are either in the public domain or made available under a Creative Commons licence.
Friday, October 23, 2015
New to the Wiki: The "Coming Soon" Edition
proffers innovative case studies on representations of cross-religious and cross-cultural romantic relationships in a selection of late medieval and twenty-first century Orientalist popular romances. Comparing the tropes, characterization and settings of these literary phenomena, and focusing on gender, religion, and ethnicity, the study exposes the historical roots of current romance representations of the east, advancing research in Orientalism, (neo)medievalism and medieval cultural studies. Fundamentally, Representing Difference invites a closer look at medieval and modern popular attitudes towards the east, as represented in romance, and the kinds of solutions proposed for its apparent problems.
- Morrissey, Katherine, 2015.
- “Steamy, Spicy, Sensual: Tracing the Cycles of Erotic Romance.” Women & Erotic Fiction: Critical Essays on Genres, Markets & Readers. Ed. Kristen Phillips. Jefferson: McFarland, 2015. 42-58.
- Veldman-Genz, Carole, 2015.
- "Selling Gay Sex to Women: The Romance of M/M and M/M/F Romantica." Women & Erotic Fiction: Critical Essays on Genres, Markets & Readers. Ed. Kristen Phillips. Jefferson: McFarland, 2015. 133-149.
I'd be grateful if anyone could let me know which of the other essays in the volume should also be included:
- Introduction: Shattering Releases (Kristen Phillips)
- From Black Lace to Shades of Grey: The Interpellation of the "Female Subject" into Erotic Discourse (Simon Hardy)
- Refiguring Penetration in Women’s Erotic Fiction (Amalia Ziv)
- Erotic Pleasure and Postsocialist Female Sexuality: Contemporary Female "Body Writing" in China (Eva Chen)
- Good Vibrations: Shaken Subjects and the Disintegrative Romance Heroine (Naomi Booth)
- On Not Reading Fifty Shades: Feminism and the Fantasy of Romantic Immunity (Tanya Serisier)
- Permissible Transgressions: Feminized Same-Sex Practice as Middle-Class Fantasy (Jude Elund)
- The Politics of Slash on the High Seas: Colonial Romance and Revolutionary Solidarity in Pirates Fan Fiction (Anne Kustritz)
- Male Homoerotic Fiction and Women’s Sexual Subjectivities: Yaoi and BL Fans in Indonesia and the Philippines (Tricia Abigail Santos Fermin)
- Selling Authentic Sex: Working Through Identity in Belle de Jour’s The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl (Victoria Ong)
- Sexing Education: Erotica in the Urban Classroom (Alyssa D. Niccolini)
Monday, October 12, 2015
RWA Academic Research Grant 2016
Every year the Romance Writers of America offer funding for research into the genre.
The objectives of the program are:Here are some more details of who's eligible to apply:
- To support theoretical and substantive academic research about genre romance texts and literacy practices.
- To encourage a well-informed public discourse about genre romance texts and literacy practices.
and
- Amount: up to $5,000. Funds will be calculated/awarded in U.S. dollars.
- Tenure: April 1, 2016 through March 31, 2017
- Completed applications to be submitted to RWA in both e-mail (RTF) and hard copy format.
- Decisions will be announced in March 2016.
The RWA Research Grant Program is open to faculty at accredited colleges and universities, independent scholars with significant publication records, and dissertation candidates who have completed all course work and qualifying exams. No candidate need be a member of the RWA.This is definitely not limited to academics in English literature:
Appropriate fields of specialization include but are not limited to: anthropology, communications, cultural studies, education, English language and literature, gender studies, linguistics, literacy studies, psychology, rhetoric, and sociology. Proposals in interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary studies are welcome. The ultimate goal of proposals should be significant publication in major journals or as a monograph from an academic press. RWA does not fund creative work (such as novels or films).There's more information on the RWA website.
Sunday, October 11, 2015
Romance in the Archives
On 2 October Sarah Wendell posted a podcast of her interview of
Caryn Radick, who is the Digital Archivist and the Special Collections and University Archives at Rutgers University [...] has a cool research project where she is investigating how romance writers use archives, and she’s also very interested in depictions of archivists in fiction from the romance genre and other genres as well.The transcript was put online on 4 October and I thought I'd pick out the bits most directly about Caryn's research.
Caryn: [...] I’ve been focusing on whether romance writers use archives when they’re writing their works, because when I was younger I started reading historical romances, and I learned quite a bit of history from them, so I figured somebody must be doing the research, and from what I understand, they do.
Sarah: So you’re looking at how romance writers use historical archives in their writing.
Caryn: Correct. [...] I constructed a survey which I was fortunate enough to be able to circulate through Romance Writers of America, and I got some really good responses. [...] Yeah, a lot of people who responded to the survey, a lot of them just really, said they really want to get those details of time and place correct, but they also like to get a voice that represents the time period or place that they’re looking at. One of the things I really appreciated was there was a certain amount of, of reverence and enthusiasm for using archival materials which reflects what it was like for me when I was first getting into the profession. The, the aspect of, wow, this is a diary that somebody wrote in the nineteenth century, and I can’t believe you’re letting me touch this.
Sarah: Yes!
Caryn: That’s fine! It, it’s great. Most indicated that they would really love it if there was more information available online, which wasn’t exactly a surprise, because I think the expectation these days is that things are online. People are a little surprised when you tell them that, no, actually, you’re going to have to come in to see that, or, you know, we can try to give you some information, but it, it’s not going to be available online. And another aspect that, that didn’t surprise me was that some people were very enthusiastic or wanted to know more about how to use archives, but they felt that they didn’t quite know how to get started, which is, which is pretty common. [...]
Caryn: [...] So, back in, I think it’s 2011, 2012, romance hit the archivists’ radar when Protected by the Prince by Annie West came to our attention, because the heroine of that book is an archivist, and, you know, being surprised that this –
Sarah: You guys must have been like, wait, what? Seriously? She’s us? Woohoo!
Caryn: Yes. She’s an archivist, and we’re, yay, there’s an archivist! Wait, oh. She’s wearing glasses. Oh, she’s kind of frumpy. [Laughs] [...] so it was kind of a moment of fun for, for the archives community, where suddenly, hey, there’s discussion about, there’s this book, it’s got an archivist heroine, probably a little bit making fun of the book and, and as I said, the stereotype of the archivist in it, and there was, there was even a, a blog had a contest to write your own archival romance, and there were a few other discussions, and then it kind of just went its own ways, as things do, but since I had read romance when I was younger and I, I’ve known some romance writers and I’ve gone to a couple of the events, it was in the back of my mind at the time that, you know, actually, now that I think about it, I know that romance writers that I’ve met seem to also be pretty detail-oriented and care about getting the, their novels right, and I started wondering if they use archives, and I suspected they did.
Saturday, October 10, 2015
New to the Wiki: The Canary Islands, Fatherhood, First World War Romance, Interracial Romance, Orphans, SEALS
- Items whose titles are hyperlinked are currently available free online in their entirety.
- Chelton, Mary K., 2015.
- "Readers' Advisory: There Seem to be More SEALs in Romance Fiction than in the US Navy, and if so, Why Does it Matter?" Reference & User Services Quarterly 55.1: 21-24. Abstract
- Edlins, Mariglynn.
- "Superhero, Sleeping Beauty, or Devil? The Making of Orphan Myths and Public Administration". [What stories exist that might influence how street-level bureaucrats think about children who are separated from their parents? [...] In this paper, I explore the narratives of superhero stories, romance novels, and horror films in order to identify the orphan archetypes they portray.]
- González-Cruz, Maria-Isabel. 2015.
- "Love in Paradise: Visions of the Canaries in a Corpus of Popular Romance Fiction Novels". Oceánide, Journal of the Spanish Society for the Study of Popular Culture SELICUP, vol. 7.
- Jagodzinski, Mallory, 2015.
- Love is (Color) Blind: Historical Romance Fiction and Interracial Relationships in the Twenty-First Century. PhD dissertation, Graduate College of Bowling Green State University. [This dissertation analyzes three historical romance novels — Secrets of a Scandalous Heiress by Theresa Romain (2015), The Duke of Shadows by Meredith Duran (2008) and The Heiress Effect by Courtney Milan (2013)]
- King, Laura, 2015
- ‘The Perfect Man: Fatherhood, Masculinity and Romance in Popular Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain’, in Love and Romance in Britain, 1918-1970, ed. Alana Harris and Timothy Willem Jones (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 41–60.
- Potter, Jane, 2015.
- "‘Khaki and Kisses’: Reading the Romance Novel in the Great War." Reading and the First World War: Readers, Texts, Archives. Ed. Shafquat Towheed and Edmund G. C. King. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 29-44. Excerpt
Wednesday, September 30, 2015
Teaching Romance at Ithaca College
Ithaca College's Jennifer Wofford will be teaching a seminar on romance this semester (fall 2015):
Reading Popular Romance
Jennifer Wofford
Theme: Inquiry, Imagination, and Innovation; Perspective: Social Sciences
CRN 24024 ICSM 10824-01, TR 04:00 PM-5:15 PM, M 12:00 PM-12:50 PM
U.S. Representative Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.) introduced a bill in 2014 proposing to prohibit the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) from funding any project relating to the research of love or romance (H.R.5155). Yet, popular romance is the highest selling book genre in the world today, representing the largest share of sales revenue in the industry. Moreover, 84% of romance readership are women. Popular romance is a women’s industry, perhaps the largest in the US. Yet a US legislator made a point of crafting a law against it. Why? This courses uses popular romance as both a cultural subject and as a vehicle of inquiry into readers and reading. It asks questions like: What is romance? Who are our heroines? What is a reader? Why are women reading and writing these stories? How have archetypes and plot lines changed since the 1960s, when mass market romance novels emerged, and what does that say about fans of the genre? What’s the relationship between literature and commerce? Should popular romance be studied? If so, for what purpose?
Saturday, September 26, 2015
Last Call: PCA Romance Proposals (Oct. 1 Deadline)
--Eric Selinger
In my young and dapper days (see above) I didn't worry much about conference deadlines, either from the proposal side--sure, sure, I'll get it done; don't bother me while I'm thinking--or from the side of the conference organizer. Older and wiser, I worry...but you can help!
Next Thursday, October 1, is the deadline for you to propose a talk for the PCA National Conference in Seattle, March 22-26. The Romance Area is looking for papers on love, romance, and the popular culture of romantic love: any medium, any period, anywhere in the world.
We have several special events lined up this year, including a panel on diversity in historical romance featuring authors Rose Lerner, Koko Brown, and Lori Witt (more may join them!) and a screening of the full, completed version of Love Between the Covers, the documentary film by Laurie Kahn.
Papers already accepted cover a wide range of topics and media: popular romance novels, queer readings of classic texts, masculinities and heroes, rape discourse and the discourse of desire, paranormal romance and urban fantasy, romance pedagogy, and more.
Please check out the Romance Area Call for Papers for more details and topic ideas, and if you have any questions about whether a topic would be appropriate, just ask!
Saturday, September 19, 2015
New to the Wiki: Genre Labels Affect Translation; Romance and PTSD
- Bianchi, Diana and Adele D'Arcangelo, 2015.
- 'Translating History or Romance? Historical Romantic Fiction and Its Translation in a Globalised Market', Linguistics and Literature Studies 3.5: 248-253.
- They look in particular at two translations into Italian of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander. The first, "At a paratextual level [...] was clearly interpreted as a romance" while the second seemed to indicate that the novel was historical fiction. The differences were not only external:
In particular, the several cuts, omissions and general manipulation of the first translation indicate that translating a book as a ‘romance’ authorizes radical interventions of a kind that are more typical in the most formulaic type of romantic fiction such as the Harlequin romances [...]. The second translation, on the contrary, does not present substantial cuts and remains, on the whole, fairly close to the source text. (251)
- Holden, Stacy E. and Charity Tabol, 2015.
- 'In Sickness and In Health: Representations of PTSD in Post-9/11 Romance Novels', albeit 2.1.
The novelists writing these tales do not craft a character with whom a veteran would identify, and this is in part because of what Johnson notes are the “parameters of the genre,” which demand a Happily Ever After. But, as we argue in this article, it is also because the American public is unwilling to accept disabled veterans whose lives—and basic dispositions—have been ineluctably changed by the US decision to go to war. Ultimately, romance novels that focus on disabled veterans who find healing in love reveal a widely held fantasy about PTSD. Although offering a simulacrum of the sequelae of combat trauma, a closer examination of the text reveals some misinformation about combat-related PTSD. And so, contemporary romances expose a general reluctance in the US to accept wounded warriors with chronic difficulties.
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