New Article: Sex, Power and Desire in the Romance Novel

Laura Vivanco

Maria Nilson's "From The Flame and the Flower to Fifty Shades of Grey: Sex, Power and Desire in the Romance Novel" has been published in Akademisk Kvarter/Academic Quarter 7 (2013): 119-131.

Reading these books [i.e. the Fifty Shades trilogy] mainly as romance, Nilson focuses on how James uses well known and established romance traits from, for example, the so-called “bodice-ripper” novel and chick lit, in order to create a hybrid. These traits are visible in both how James describes her protagonists and in how the relationship between them is portrayed. Nilson argues that the Fifty Shades trilogy is, rather than a new kind of romance, a compilation of well-established traits.

The article is available in full, for free, here.

CFP: Gender and Love Conference

Laura Vivanco

4th Global Conference: Gender and Love

Wednesday 24th September – Friday 26th September 2014

Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

Call for Presentations

The study of gender is an interdisciplinary field intertwined with feminism, queer studies, sexuality studies, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies (to name just some relevant fields). This project calls for the consideration of gender in relation to various kinds of love (with regard, for example, to self, spirit, religion, family, friendship, ethics, nation, globalisation, environment, and so on). How do the interactions of gender and love promote particular performances of gender; conceptions of individual and collective identity; formations of community; notions of the human; understandings of good and evil? These are just some of the questions that occupy this project. This conference welcomes research papers which seek to understand the interaction and interconnection between the concepts of love and gender; and whether, when, how and in what ways the two concepts conceive and construct each other.

Abstracts should be submitted by Friday 4th April 2014.

More information here.

CFP: Medical Narratives in Popular Culture

Laura Vivanco

Since medicals are a long-established sub-genre of popular romance, I thought this conference might be of interest:

Call for Papers: Medical Imaging II: Medical Narratives in Late Modern Popular Culture, September 11th/12th 2014, Ulm University

there is hardly any research on medical theory, history of medicine, medical ethics and ‘medical practice’ narratives in (still) marginal media such as computer games, comics, etc. Nevertheless, these media forms play an increasingly strong role in the shaping of a collective structure of cognition. Secondly, the interdependencies and exchange processes between Popular Culture and science – particularly with regard to biosciences and life sciences – are explored unsatisfactory.

Therefore, particularly contributions to the following research questions are of interest for the conference “Medical Imaging II: Medical Narratives in Late Modern Popular Culture”.

1. Theoretical research: Which (reciprocal) transfer processes occur between medical science and Popular Culture? What are the consequences of such exchange processes at the ontological, epistemological, scientific, social, aesthetic, narrative, etc. level?

2. Empirical research: Which trends of implementation of medical knowledge into Popular Culture can be observed since the 1950s? Which fictional and aesthetic changes are subject to this influence in movies, comics, computer games and popular science media?

To what extent can retroactive effects be determined, for example in the context of the development of medical imaging techniques, formations of medical education (keyword ‘gamification '), research (keyword ‘visualization of medical knowledge'), the placement of medical knowledge or the relationship between doctor and patient (keyword ,social networks')?

The conference language is English. Deadline for abstracts (450 words max.) is January 31st, 2014 (extended deadline). A publication of the contributions is intended.

More details here.

Beyond "the Defensive Crouch"?

--Eric 

Late in 2013, Noah Berlatsky, who writes for Salon and a number of other on-line publications, began reading and writing about popular romance fiction.  He's coming to the genre from a background in comics and other popular culture, and he's been very responsive--on Twitter and in comments--to suggestions from the romance author and romance scholar community.

Recently at The Hooded Utilitarian he posted some thoughts about Pamela Regis's A Natural History of the Romance Novel, and they've sparked a long discussion in the comments about the virtues and drawbacks of Pam's definition of the romance genre ("a work of prose fiction that tells the story of the courtship and betrothal of one or more heroines protagonists"), of the RWA's definition of the genre, really of the whole effort to define the romance novel, especially in terms of its ending.

Berlatsky is an American writer, but it's clear that his heart is with the Romantic Novelists Association, over in the UK:  that is, he thinks of the genre in terms of the central love story, and not in terms of a particular ending.  (You can read their discussion of the genre here.)  I'm comfortable having two different terms to distinguish the broad category (the "romantic novel") and the narrower one (the "romance novel"); he's not, and sees some potential drawbacks for both authors and readers.

Feel free to weigh in, there or here, on the topic--and keep an eye out for Berlatsky, who's bringing a fresh set of eyes to the genre and to our academic musings about it!

CFP: The Aesthetics of Love

Call for Papers Aesthetics 24:1 (June 2014)

Theme: The Aesthetics of Love

Aesthetics is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal published online. The journal is indexed through a wide number of scholarly indexing services. For the June 2014 issue, we are inviting papers that explore the theme of the aesthetics of love. This may include explorations of the aesthetic dimensions of love in the arts or in popular culture. Philosophical enquires into the nature and expression of love in culture, as well as papers addressing the social aesthetics of love (e.g., etiquettes) will also be welcomed. 

Contact Dr Zoe Alderton or Ms Vivien Cinque with expressions of interest and abstracts before January 9, 2014 at zoe.alderton@ssla.org.au or vivien.cinque@ssla.org.au. Manuscripts will be required by May 1, 2014. See below for a list of suggested research areas. You can view 2013 issues of Aesthetics online at http://ssla.org.au or the journal’s rationale at http://ssla.org.au/rationale.html.

Suggested research areas:

• The ontology of love
• Love and Eros
• Representations of love in the arts or popular culture
• Intimacy and love
• Love of the nation
• Love of the land
• Love of place
• The aesthetics of love magic
• Sexuality and love
• Filial love
• The aesthetics of absent love
• Love and death
• Cyber-based representations of love and intimacy
• Feminist readings of love
• Love of material culture

For information regarding submission guidelines go online to http://ssla.org.au/submissions.html.

CFP: PopCAANZ Annual Conference

Laura Vivanco

PopCAANZ (the Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand) is holding its 5th Annual International Conference from June 18 - June 20, 2014 in the Hotel Grand Chancellor, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. The deadline for abstracts is March 1, 2014. There isn't an area specifically for romance, but there is one for popular fiction. The call for papers can be found here.

New Article: Romance in South Africa

Laura Vivanco

Christopher Warnes begins his article on "Black Economic Empowerment and the South African Popular Romance" by explaining that:

Between 2010 and 2011 two new publishing enterprises appeared in South Africa: Sapphire Press, an imprint of Kwela Books, which is in turn owned by the giant NB Publishers, and Nollybooks, a small-scale entrant into the market. Between them, in the course of their first two years, these publishers brought out twenty-seven romance novels. Aimed explicitly at a black female readership, and written to a tightly prescriptive set of guidelines, these postapartheid romances are of identical length, have similar plots, characters, and themes, and are packaged and marketed in much the same way. They tell the stories of feisty, attractive young women, often from poor backgrounds, working their way up the ladder of professional success and falling in love with handsome, successful older men, often their bosses. Hero and heroine are always black, and the romantic attachment between the two is always the main theme. The progress of the romance is bound up with the overcoming of work-related obstacles, and the ending of each novel harmonizes the romantic and professional triumph of the heroine. (154)

I took a look at the guidelines given by Kwela and they do seem "tightly prescriptive" (though it's possible that as with Harlequin Mills & Boon, in practice, there's a bit more variation than one might guess from reading the guidelines):

Typical style of a Kwela romance

• Think Mills & Boon
• The story must be set in South Africa, preferably a big city like Johannesburg
• The story is told from the main female character’s perspective
• The story is told in the third person
• Both hero and heroine should be black South Africans.

The main female character (heroine)

The heroine is:
• an independent, spunky, smart woman;
• financially independent;
• in her mid-twenties to early thirties;
• extremely self-motivated;
• determined to achieve success; and
• committed to overcoming past hardships.

The heroine feels:
• financially responsible for her family.

The heroine has:
•  a strong spiritual base;
•  at least two girlfriends on whom she can rely for moral & emotional support; and
•  a modern outlook on life and on the role of woman in society.

The heroine likes to:
• visit local hotspots to see who’s who and to be seen.

The heroine should:
•  experience personal growth and self-discovery; and
•  realise her own worth and inner strength.

The main male character (hero)

The hero is:
• strong
• Intelligent
• good-looking
• slightly older than the heroine (late thirties to early forties)
• successful in his career
• more traditional in his outlook on life than the heroine (cause of tension).

The plot

The main plot-line:
•  revolves around the heroine & hero’s struggle to build a romantic relationship
•  outside forces (at work or in their communities) try to keep them apart
•  their own conflicting beliefs about modern society and the role of women also threaten to keep them apart

Keep sub-plots to a minimum:
• Only those that influence internal growth in the heroine should be developed.

Romantic tension should be built up until a satisfying conclusion is reached between the heroine & hero:
•  i.e. when all obstacles between them have been overcome and love triumphs.

One or two intimate scenes should be included (though only between the heroine and the hero – no other boyfriends/lovers).

Your target readers:
• All those thousands of people who love Mills & Boon!
• Upwardly mobile black female readers.
• In terms of typical South African readers, think of those who currently read True Love, Move and Drum.
• Age groups: from teenagers to 50+, i.e. quite a broad group

 Warnes states that

These novels represent, in a striking way, a new departure in South African writing: the arrival in prose form of the mass-produced fantasy for black women. This is not to say that the romance has not long been a major part of South African popular reading habits. Afrikaans-language publishers like LAPA, NB Publishers, and Tafelburg have well-developed series which regularly outsell more literary novels, and the presence of a "Mills and Boon in Afrikaans" publisher similarly speaks to the popularity of the genre for Afrikaans readers. In English, Mills and Boon titles and stalwarts of the genre like Danielle Steel routinely appear near or at the top of bestseller lists. (154)

The "new departure" has been made possible by changes in the political situation in South Africa:

Although popular fiction has long been part of the South African cultural landscape, it is only since the demise of formal apartheid that it could be said to have begun to flourish. During the apartheid years there was a strong critical perception that popular fiction abrogated the social and political mission to document injustice, challenge perceptions, and conscientize readers. The end of apartheid was interpreted as signalling the lifting of this literary-political injunction to be serious. The creative energies that have filled the void left by the departure of the "struggle aesthetic" in the years since 1994 have been most noticeable in the explosion of genres such as crime fiction, romance, chick lit, science fiction, gangster noir, and comedy. (156)

However, they are not wholly lacking in "serious" elements. Warnes examines a number of romances in order to show how they "negotiate anxieties around enigmatic male behavior, around the workplace, and around the broader national economic issues" (162) and he claims that "the popular romance performs a [...] specific empowerment function, articulating for its reader a clear vision of ideal working conditions" (166).

----

Warnes, Christopher. "Desired State: Black Economic Empowerment and the South African Popular Romance." Popular Culture in Africa: The Episteme of the Everyday. Ed. Stephanie Newell and Onookome Okome. New York: Routledge, 2014. 154-171. [Excerpt]

New Thesis: Translating Emotions

In her recently completed PhD thesis, "A Study on the Cultural Variations in the Verbalisation of Near-Universal Emotions: Translating Emotions from British English into Greek in Popular Bestseller Romances," Artemis Lamprinou compared six English-language romance novels with both their Greek translations and with six original Greek romances. She discovered

frequent shifts of intensity in the translations towards but not quite in line with the Greek norms, indicating that the translators are under the simultaneous influence of British and Greek norms. The results suggest, however, that the Greek norms exert a stronger influence on the translators, mostly in relation to anger and fear, an outcome that goes against the assumptions of Polysystem Theory that the more powerful literary system, in this case that of the UK, will exert the stronger influence. This outcome could be attributed to the commercial pressure of the market on publishers of the chosen genre of popular romance.

The rest of the abstract can be found here.

Sci-Fi Romance Quarterly

Laura Vivanco

The Sci-Fi Romance Quarterly was launched yesterday. It's not an academic publication but I thought I'd mention it anyway because

The Sci-Fi Romance Quarterly is an online magazine devoted to science fiction romance. Each issue includes news, reviews, opinion columns, and an original, exclusive short story–all for free!

New Publication: Translating and Adapting Romance Fiction

Laura Vivanco

Heather Schell has a new article out. It's "Bringing the Mid-West to the Middle-East: An Analysis of a Harlequin Romance in English and Turkish" and she's made it available via Academia. It's Chapter 17 of The Silk Road of Adaptation: Transformations across Disciplines and Cultures. Ed. Laurence Raw. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013.

Schell argues that

a translation could be considered a type of invisible adaptation. In fact, global economic enterprises may actually prefer to downplay the "new readings" wrought by translation [...]. It falls to us to question the supposed transparency of translation and appreciate instead the ways in which a translation adapts the source-text. (160)

Schell notes that cultural differences make

the social meaning of a novel's content inherently unstable. For example, because of differing cultural norms about adult children's relationship with their parents, the scene in which Cade defies his father for the sake of his wife might seem noteworthy to a Turkish reader but unremarkable to an American reader. In contrast, popular attitudes towards abortion are probably more conservative and conflicted in the United States than in the Republic of Turkey. (164)

What is certain is that "Arda Gedik, the force behind HQN's Turkish publications for nearly two decades [until his death in 2011], saw these books as providing progressive role models" (169).

The "source-text" Schell chooses to analyse is Shirley Jump's Back to Mr. and Mrs. (2007) which was published in Turkey in  "2010 as a 112-page novella" (162). The novel, like others chosen for translation and publication in Turkey, was selected "based on Amazon.com customer star ratings" (164) and the translation makes minor changes which, cumulatively, make the characters seem "less foreign" (166) to Turkish readers.

It also makes "small changes [which] consistently make the women more stereotypically feminine and less intelligent" (167) and ensures that the ageing heroine "conforms to beauty ideals" (168). Such changes are not, however, unique to Turkish translations: in France, for example, translated novels "often made the heroine less confident and experienced that in the source-text" (168).

The essay is relatively short and, in my opinion, well worth a read.

CFPs: Readers and Crime

Laura Vivanco

From Cover to Cover: Reading Readers
Edited Collection of Essays
Editors: Dr. Bilge Mutluay Cetintas and Dr. Ceylan Ozcan

This collection of essays "aims to take a fresh look at the 'good old practice' of reading in all its denotations and connotations from all possible quarters and perspectives, provided that papers relate to the American context." Essays "should be between 5000-7000 words and should adhere to the latest MLA style. Full text submissions should be sent to readingbooks2014@gmail.com by March 30, 2014." More details here (though unfortunately they do not include information about the likely publisher of the collection).

Gender and Transgression in 20th-Century Britain
Newcastle University, 7th March 2014

The link between gender and transgression is integral to both representing and understanding the controversy that surrounds popular works. To add to Jenks’ conclusion: we are both obsessed by transgression and the transgressor’s gender.

In this symposium we intend to consider how representations of transgressive acts are linked to gender, asking whether crimes are more punishable depending on the gender of the criminal, if certain transgressive behaviours are more acceptable for one gender than another, or if it is possible for transgressive acts to be represented without issues of gender being at the forefront of that representation.

More details about the conference can be found here. Submissions to antony.mullen@ncl.ac.uk by 1^st December 2013.  They seem to have a strong focus on crimes. Still on the topic of crime:

Captivating Criminality: Crime Writing, Darkness and Desire
Bath Spa University and Crime Studies Network
At Corsham Court (http://www.corsham-court.co.uk/)
24-26 April 2014

How can crime writing be defined? Although crime fiction is traditionally regarded as a distinguishable literary form, what can be considered part of this genre? The various sub-genres that are encompassed under the title of crime writing, including the ‘whodunnit’, the Hard Boiled thriller, Golden Age narratives, and the ‘whydunnit’ psychological thriller are all so variable that a defining process becomes nearly impossible. [...]

I thought this might be of interest to anyone studying romantic suspense. More details here. The deadline for submissions is 6 January 2014.

Radway Revisited - at PCA/ACA 2014

Laura Vivanco

Reading the Romance:Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature 
1984 - 1991 - 2014

Janice Radway will be joining the Romance area of the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association for a 30th Anniversary roundtable discussion of Reading the Romance: the book, its impact, and its legacy. Details of the programme haven't yet been finalised but the conference will be held in Chicago from 16-19 April 2014.

More details about the Romance area can be found here - and there are still a few hours left before the deadline for submissions if you'd like to present a paper.