New Publications: Race, Rape, and Romance in Maltese Libraries

Maybe I've simplified things a little in the title of the post due to the allure of alliteration. But there's definitely a lot in these recent publications about race/ethnicity and racism.

As always, if there's a hyperlink in the title, that means it's freely accessible online.

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Abdullah-Poulos, Layla (2023) "Sisters, Skanks, and Jezebels: American Muslim Fiction and the Other Woman." The Bloomsbury Handbook of Muslims and Popular Culture. Ed. Hussein Rashid and Kristian Petersen. London: Bloomsbury. 205-214. [Excerpt here.]

Derbyshire, Valerie Grace (2023). “ ‘Do you think I haven’t paid for what I did?’: Rape in the Mills & Boon Romantic Novels of Penny Jordan.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 12. 

Garcia, Christina (2023). The Race of Publishing: The Troubling Whiteness in Publishing and the Forces Pushing Back. Master of Arts in English, Texas Christian University.

Henderson, Aneeka Ayanna (2024). "Popular Romance and Literary Undergrounds." The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature. Ed. Yogita Goyal. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 164-179. [Excerpt]

Hutter, Verena (2023). "Fire, Savannah, and Passion: The New Africa Novel and the Construction of White Femininity." Gender and German Colonialism: Intimacies, Accountabilities, Intersections. Ed. Chunjie Zhang and Elisabeth Krimmer. New York: Routledge. [See https://rsdb.vivanco.me.uk/bibliography/fire-savannah-and-passion-new-africa-novel-and-construction-white-femininity for more details.]

Kamblé, Jayashree (2023). “Romancing the University: BIPOC Scholars in Romance Novels in the 1980s and Now.” Esferas Literarias 6: 39-55.

Phumithammarat, Nanphatchaon (2023). The Cultural politics of Chinese -Thai Identities in Ethnic Romance Novels by Female Authors. PhD thesis, Silpakorn University.

Posti, Piia K. (2024). “‘I Get to Exist as a Black Person in the World’: Bridgerton as Speculative Romance and Alternate History on Screen.” History and Speculative Fiction. Ed. John L. Hennessey. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. [The whole book is available for free since it's open access.]

Limond, Verity. (2023) "‘The door is open to everyone’: The public libraries of Gozo." Omertaa, Journal for applied anthropology. 745-754.

Call for Papers: Australia 2024

From 16-18 August 2024 the Romance Writers of Australia will be holding their conference at Stamford Grand, Glenelg and, in collaboration with Flinders University, they're looking for romance scholars to join them on 16 August:

The Degrees of Love Romance Research Hub at Flinders University, with the support of Assemblage Centre for Creative Arts, is thrilled to host an academic symposium on popular romance studies as part of RWAus’ 2024 conference. Featuring the latest research from romance academics, and open to anyone with an enquiring mind who wishes to attend, this symposium will showcase the latest romance scholarship. The symposium will consider the role of tropes in all sub-genres of romance, focusing on the power of the romance genre and its intersections with feminism, gender, sexuality, generic forms and formulas, ideologies and more. When experts in the field of popular romance studies bring their research into the same room, new ideas ignite. This will be a day of fun, excitement, learning and sharing - throwing an intellectual spotlight on the role of tropes in the most read genre in the world. 

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers, or 90-minute panels or roundtables, on romance tropes and the intersections of tropes with subgenres, gender, sexuality, race, ideologies, love and desire, the body, power and more.

The deadline for proposals is 8 March 2024 and more details can be found here.

Controversial "updated" editions of romance (and also details of some new publications)

K. J. Charles (on BlueSky, which I don't think I can link to) posted a link to a New York Times article about

new editions of Heyer with the antisemitism removed. I'm not honestly sure how I feel about that. She *was* antisemitic and racist, and if it is going to be done, there should absolutely be an afterword saying it was done.

I feel the same. The author of the New York Times article, the appropriately named Alexandra Alter, states that:

When Heyer’s American publisher, Sourcebooks, decided to release new editions of her romances this year, they had to strike a precarious balance. Leaving the original scene could repel some readers. But changing it risked provoking a backlash from fans and scholars who see posthumous revisions as a form of literary reputation laundering, or censorship.

After a lengthy back and forth with the Heyer estate, Sourcebooks made small but significant changes to “The Grand Sophy.” In the new version, the moneylender’s name has been changed to Grimpstone. References to his Jewish identity and appearance have been deleted, along with other negative generalizations about Jews.

Acknowledgment of the changes appears on the copyright page, which says “this edition has been edited from the original with permission of the Georgette Heyer Estate.”

Originally, Sourcebooks had brought in Mary Bly/Eloisa James to write introductions to all the new editions but "After the estate declined to include Bly’s explanation of the changes in an afterword, she quit the project."

The acknowledgment which will be included is, presumably, in small print and rather easy to miss, which is what makes this solution problematic to me from an academic perspective (which as our subtitle states, is what Teach Me Tonight's all about). While the publication of a text which includes such changes may in itself be of interest to future scholars of Heyer for what it implies about Heyer's ongoing status in the genre and the attitude of the Heyer estate, and may also be of wider interest because of what it might tell us about the economic calculations made by this publisher, and their assessments of the preferences/attitudes of twenty-first century readers, none of these questions will arise in the minds of scholars who use this edition of the text while unaware that it has been changed. And, obviously, a scholar's close reading of the text, and their assessment of Heyer and her oeuvre, will undoubtedly be flawed if they base their analysis on this text without being aware of its altered status.

In a comment attached to the New York Times article a reader called "emmel" observed that:

There was a major incident this past summer when romance readers discovered that Lisa Kleypas updated about 50% of her beloved Secrets of a Summer Night to meet "today's" standards versus those of 2004, when the book was published. Readers were horrified that major elements had been changed (which many perceived to be detrimental to understanding the hero's actions) with no notification in the 2021 edition. (This was discovered in a group read when the readers couldn't understand one another's reactions until they deduced the editions had fundamental differences.) So notifications and explanations are vital; you can't just say it's been "updated."

I found some discussion about that at https://www.reddit.com/r/RomanceBooks/comments/rme2tc/secrets_of_a_summer_night_completely_changed/ and another, Reddit discussion mentioning another Kleypas novel which has been significantly altered: https://www.reddit.com/r/RomanceBooks/comments/ob98yp/revised_lisa_kleypas/ . I'm not sure if there was even a note made on the copyright pages of the texts themselves that changes had been made. Maybe someone more knowledgeable can let me know? Do you know of any other romances which have been reprinted in an updated, significantly altered, version that don't make it clear what's been done?

By the way, if any regular readers of Teach Me Tonight would like an invite code to BlueSky, I have a couple available. Let me know via the contact form on my website: https://www.vivanco.me.uk/contact/contact !

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On to new, scholarly, publications:

 

Garciano, Shylyn G., Cuevas, Gloria Con-ui, Geraldizo-Pabriga, Maria Gemma Macabodbod, Saira Jay J. Yu, Jaciah Mae B. Pinote, Ma. Jezan A. (2023). "Romance-Themed Novels: Influenced on Relationship Satisfaction." International Journal of Literature Studies 3.3:35-48. https://doi.org/10.32996/ijts.2023.3.3.5 

Garton, Stephen (2023). "Return Fantasies: Martial Masculinity, Misogyny and Homosocial Bonding in the Aftermath of Second World War." Gender & History ONLINE FIRST. Open access (and it complements an earlier article which is behind a paywall).

Olkusz, Ksenia (2021). "Stripping The Vampire. Erotic Imaginations and Sexual Fantasies In Paranormal Romances (A Study Of Selected Examples)." Manifestations of Male Image in the World's Cultures. Ed. Renata Iwicka, Kraków: Jagiellonian University Press. 137-156. [Details can be found here. Although it was published in 2021, the electronic version from Cambridge University Press only became available in October 2023. An open access version written in Polish was published in 2015 and details about that can be found here.]

van Hattum, Fatima Y. (2023). "Orientalist Public Pedagogy: Visual Representation of Muslims in Pop Culture and Desert Romance Novels." Thesis from the University of New Mexico. It's embargoed until 2025. https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/educ_llss_etds/148 

Volunteering, Cover Art, Fan Fiction and Canada

The Journal of Popular Romance Studies is looking for a volunteer to become the next editor of the "Notes and Queries" section of the journal. More details here: https://www.jprstudies.org/journal-of-popular-romance-studies-notes-and-queries-editor/

Alice Liang takes a look at trends in cover design over the past few decades: https://pudding.cool/2023/10/romance-covers/

Audrey Lavallée is starting to publish a series of blog posts about the history of Canadian romance publishing. There's an introduction to the series here and the first post is about Julia Catherine Beckwith's St. Ursula’s Convent, or the Nun of Canada (1824). The Internet Archive has a copy available which dates from 1824 although the following statement from Jennifer Blair in her “Reading for Information in St. Ursula’s Convent, or The Nun of Canada” in The Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 46, 2016, pp. 201–18 may put you off reading it (or encourage you to see if it really is as bad as Blair claims):

Julia Catherine Beckwith Hart’s St. Ursula’s Convent, or the Nun of Canada. Containing Scenes from Real Life (1824) secured its place in the canon of English Canadian novels retroactively, not because, as with most texts, its aesthetic or social importance could be appreciated only long after publication, but for the unique reason that it is the progenitor of that canon. While Frances Brooke’s The History of Emily Montague (1769) is often cited as an earlier Canadian novel, and while John Richardson has been called the ‘first real Canadian novelist’ for his later Wacousta (1832), St. Ursula’s Convent is the first English novel to be written by an author born in the region that would become Canada. Despite its claim to fame, the book has since gained notoriety for its discomfiting lack of quality. Suffice it to say that while St. Ursula’s might be forever celebrated as the ‘first Canadian novel’, Hart’s admittedly ‘“little work”’ now tends to be counted among Canada’s very worst novels of all time. (201)

And, still on a Canadian theme, here's a new thesis which is freely available:

Vermeer, Lina (2023). The Affective Power of Intimacy: A Case Study of a Men’s Hockey Real Person Fan Fiction’s Literary and Social Contexts. Master of Arts, Trent University.

Posts, Podcasts and Publications: Endings, Identity, Preservation and Negotiation

Charlotte of Close Reading Romance has written a series of posts thinking through how

any HEA is, fundamentally, an act of inferring the future from information about the past. In queer romance, though, doing so means imagining optimism from not-always-hospitable spaces. It has also sometimes meant thinking around certain concluding structures integral to the genre – cohabitation, marriage, procreation – that haven’t always been accessible to queer protagonists. So as I often do, I started wondering about the particular prose demands of writing re-imagined pasts and imagined futures. What kind of work is done by the last sentences of queer love stories, the words that place a completed narrative into the past while opening up towards imagined futures?

Here's the Introduction to the series and links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.

Jayashree Kamblé's been promoting Creating Identity: The Popular Romance Heroine’s Journey to Selfhood and Self-Presentation so there's now a video in which she discusses the book at the Asian American/Asian Research Institute: https://aaari.info/23-09-22kamble/ and there's an episode of the podcast  ShelfLove in which she discusses the book: https://shelflovepodcast.com/episodes/season-2/episode-145/heroines-creating-identity-in-romance

Over at JPRS, Jonathan A. Allan has been worrying about how to preserve romance texts for future scholars and I do think it's a big issue, especially for works which are ebook only. Eric Selinger says that if you have any answers to the questions/issues raised in Jonathan's note, please contact the journal to add a note of your own on this topic!

And here's a list of some new publications:

Ali, Kecia (2023). "The End of the World as We Know It: Climate Catastrophe in Nalini Singh's Paranormal Romance Fiction." The Journal of the Core Curriculum: An Annual Literary and Academic Anthology in the College of Arts and Sciences at Boston University 32:81-86. [The link is to a pdf of the whole volume, which means you'll have to scroll down/do a search to find the article. It's free, though!]

Bharathi, L. Divya and K. Muthuraman, K. (2023). "Nicholas Charles Sparks’s The Notebook: A Novel Of Love Or Romance?" Journal of Namibian Studies 35, special issue 1: 3749-3755. 

Horgheim, Celina (2023). From Rape to Romance: Sexual Consent Negotiation in Romantic Retellings of the Myth of Persephone. MA Degree Secondary Teacher Programme, University of Oslo.

Petrović, Janja (2023). Breaking the stereotype – romance novel today. Masters thesis, University of Zagreb.

CFP: Young Adult + Series + Romance

From the Journal of Popular Romance Studies

Proposal deadline December 1

2023 marks the fortieth anniversary of the initial publication of Sweet Valley High. While Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield may rank amongst the best-known teen romance heroines, the texts themselves exist within a much larger pantheon of series books intended for or read by teens, and featuring romance narratives. The Journal of Popular Romance Studies (JPRS) seeks articles for a special issue devoted to young adult series romance. These articles may focus on YA series romance from any historical period or language context, and may derive from any relevant discipline, including interdisciplinary approaches.

Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:

• the relationship between young adult literature, series novels, and popular romance
• ideology within YA series romance
• literary precursors to YA series romance
• midcentury series romances aimed at teens
• 80s and 90s teen romance series, such as Wildfire, Young Love, First Love, or Sweet Dreams series
• legacies of Sweet Valley High or other YA series romance in current YA romance
• positive or problematic representations of identity (including race, gender, sexuality, and disability) within YA series romance
• YA series romance in global perspective
• sex (or potentially the lack of sex) in YA romance series
• ghostwriters and/or corporate constructions of teen romance series
• teen responses to YA romance series
• YA romance series within fanworks and fandom
• teacher or librarian reaction to and/or use of YA romance series
• pedagogical approaches to using YA romance series within the classroom (at any level)

For more details see JPRS.

CFP: PCA's 2024 National Conference - March 27-30, 2024

 The Romance Subject Area has a call for papers for this conference:

 

Call For Papers - Ugly Love

When critical attention to romance rebooted in the 21^st century, the new wave of scholars made a conscious decision to move away from the often-pejorative approaches of earlier critics and focus instead on romance’s strengths:  an emphasis on women’s pleasure, for example, and models of good communication.

However, romance is an emotion-centered genre, and the sentiments it explores include such ugly feelings as jealousy, envy, and a thirst for vengeance. Ugly themes and ugly tropes also abound (see, for instance, the bully romance, or the recuperation of Nazis as romantic heroes), as well as plentiful examples of ugly behaviors in media cultures surrounding romance (such as the recent sexual harassment scandal that erupted around a section of hockey romance fans on TikTok).

The theme of the PCA Romance area in 2024 is the ugly in romance and romantic media. We encourage you to define this theme broadly, and to think not just about specific texts but also about their creators, consumers and critics, to understand the broader discussions in which these texts are implicated.

We also encourage you to move away from decisionist and diagnostic approaches that seek to position texts on a spectrum of progressivism to conservatism. Our aim in raising this topic for exploration is not to pass judgment, but to enable deep thinking in the scholarly community – to ask questions that go beyond asking whether texts and tropes are “good” or “bad” and think in more nuanced, layered ways about their affordances and the work they perform.

Possible topics on this theme could include:

·      negative emotions, affect theory, and romance

·      tropes: enemies to loves, the other woman, etc.

·      Taming of the Shrew and its remakes

·      erotica and fantasies of submission:  the legacy of Fifty Shades 

·      the villain hero, the criminal hero, the morally grey hero

·      criminal dyads:  Bonnie and Clyde, etc.

·      ugly scandals in book and media culture

·      cheating, lying, and misbehaving love interests

·      break-up revenge songs

·      jealousy in poly romance

·      bully romance, mafia romance, stalker romance, dark romance

·      fantasies of sexual coercion

·      degradation

·      the eroticised abject and/or the eroticised disgusting

·      hate reading and/or hate watching

·      extreme confession/memoir (ex. Bentley's The Surrender, The Story of O, etc.)

·      transactional sex

·      dirty talk

·      ugly emotion and the therapeutic romance

If none of these suggestions appeal, or you simply want to pursue your own intellectual passion, you are very welcome to do so.

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More details can be found here. The full CFP has also been cross-posted to IASPR. I think you may have to be/become a member of the PCA in order to submit a proposal.

CFP: 2024 Conference on Love Studies

Conference on Love Studies, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Canary Islands), January 2-7, 2024

They're looking for papers about love:

We consider love in its broad meaning, including different modes and types of love, and various contexts from those that inhibit to those that facilitate the experience and expression of love. Among the variations implied above are:

• Love at the nature of humans and humanity, philosophy of love, good and bad sides of love
• Familial love, maternal love, paternal love, the love of children for their parents
• Love as interpersonal attachment, and pair-bonding love
• Romantic love, passionate love, obsessional love, lovesickness
• Love, physical attraction, sex, and diversity of sexual love
• Companionate, compassionate love, love for friends, and friendship
• Diversity of polygamy and monogamy in love, polyamory, and open relationships
• Rational, practical, pragmatic forms of love
• Love focused on divine and supernatural entities, religious conceptions of love
• Love as positive social connection, communal and ideological love
• Para-social forms of love and sex
• Love directed to oneself, self-love, and narcissism
• Love for pets and inanimate beings (flowers, money, activities, etc.)
• The biology and physiology of love
• The various other types of love and relationships, including those at an intersection between them

Any kind of love is of interest for this conference.

The International Advisory Board has extended the deadline for submission of proposals for presentations at the International Conference on Love Studies, which will be held in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Canary Islands) on January 2-7, 2024 (both in-person and virtual formats).

The extended deadline is September 10th, Sunday. See the details at https://love-studies-institute.org/international-conference-on-love-studies/

New Publications: Masculinity, Race, Sexuality and More

There are a couple of anecdotes from 

Joshua Thorburn (2023). "Exiting the Manosphere. A Gendered Analysis of Radicalization, Diversion and Deradicalization Narratives from r/IncelExit and r/ExRedPill." Studies in Conflict & Terrorism.

which I wanted to share. The whole article's open access, from https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2023.2244192

Amusingly, one user on r/ExRedPill stated that his deradicalization journey was prompted by reading “soppy romance novels” targeted for women, while in concurrence, another replied that romantic poems and historical period dramas helped him question his red pill beliefs. Because this media focused on romance beyond sexual gratification alone, and the fact that it was either popular with women or targeted towards them, such materials again therefore challenged manosphere claims that women are exclusively driven by an innate desire for the physical attributes of so-called alpha-males. (17-18)

On the topic of men/masculinities, I missed Jonathan Allan's Men, Masculinities, and Infertilities when it first came out in 2022, but the good news is that it's also downloadable for free, from https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003010432 or https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/57071 and includes a chapter each on LaVyrle Spencer's The Fulfillment and The Trouble with Joe by Emilie Richards.

Giovanni, Chiara (2023). "Hetero Ever After? Romance Novels, Race, and the Limits of Social Dreaming." Post45. ["Chiara Giovanni shows that popular romance novels by and about women of color often indulge a positive orientation toward heterosexual desire. Giovanni calls this orientation "heteroidealism" and sees it as an adaptive strategy to forge solidarity between men and women along racial lines."]

Heying, Sarah M. (2023). "Sealed With a Kiss on Your Artery": An Archive of Southern Lesbian Desire. PhD thesis, University of Mississippi. [This isn't specifically about romance but it does have a chapter on Ann Allen Shockley. More details here.]

 

Kamblé, Jayashree (2023). "The origins of U.S. mass-market category romance novels: Black editors and writers in the early 1980s." The Journal of American Culture. [This hasn't yet been added to a volume, so the pagination available now isn't as it will eventually appear, but it's available (albeit behind a paywall) from here. I've collected some key quotes here.]

Leenstra, Lisa (2023). Covers of Lovers: A Multimodal Comparison of the Front Covers of Romance Novels in 2011 and 2021. Masters thesis, Universiteit Utrecht.  

Nichols, Sue (2023). "Love matters: the case for an inclusive, contemporary approach to romance themes and texts in subject English." The Australian Journal of Language and Literacy. [This is about teaching YA romance/romantic fiction to future teachers of English.]

Stobaugh, Rebecca (2023). Halfway-Sexual: Exploring Demisexuality in American Literature. PhD, Louisiana State University. [This is embargoed until 2030 but apparently discusses Fifty Shades of Grey and Jack Byrne’s Ace. The abstract can be found here.]

Call for Papers: NEPCA fully virtual conference in October

The 2023 Northeast Popular Culture Association (NEPCA) will host its annual conference this fall as a virtual conference from Thursday, October 12-Saturday, October 14. See https://nepca.blog/2023-annual-conference/

The conference includes a romance/popular romance fiction area, which has put out a call for papers:

Romance/Popular Romance Fiction
Current Chair: Wendy Wagner, Johnson & Wales, Wendy.Wagner@jwu.edu

This area invites proposals relating to romance fiction and its influence and adaptations in popular culture. Romance Writers of America, the professional organization of romance authors, identifies two specific features of romance fiction: a central love story, and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending. Romance novels generate $1B of sales each year, and the reach of the romance narrative permeates a variety of popular culture texts, from movies and television to music and comics. This area welcomes submissions from variety of disciplinary perspectives. Topics may include:

• History of the romance novel
• Analysis of romance readers
• The romance novel across cultures
• Romance tropes
• Politics and activism in the romance community
• Film and television adaptations
• Romance fandom and “shipping”
• The economics of the romance novel industry
• Portrayals of romance authors in popular culture
• Controversies in the publication of romance novels
• Romance book clubs
• New media and romance novels
• Library and archival collections of romance fiction

That's here (scroll down the page). Submissions are open until 11:59pm on Monday, August 14 (EST) and there are more details about how to submit a proposal etc here.

Talk by Jayashree Kamblé about her new book: 22 September

Creating Identity: The Popular Romance Heroine’s Journey to Selfhood and Self-Presentation

Both in person and via Zoom, on Friday, September 22, 2023 | 6pm to 7:30pm

In Creating Identity, Prof. Jayashree Kamblé examines the romance genre, with its sensile flexibility in retaining what audiences find desirable and discarding what is not, by asking an important question: “Who is the romance heroine, and what does she want?” To find the answer, Kamblé explores how heroines in ten novels reject societal labels and instead remake themselves on their own terms with their own agency. Using a truly intersectional approach, Kamblé combines gender and sexuality, Marxism, critical race theory, and literary criticism to survey various aspects of heroines’ identities, such as sexuality, gender, work, citizenship, and race.

Ideal for readers interested in gender studies and literary criticism, Creating Identity highlights a genre in which heroines do not accept that independence and strong, loving relationships are mutually exclusive but instead demand both, echoing the call from the very readers who have made this genre so popular.

You have to register in advance in order to attend. The links to do so are here.

Not Just for Academics! Free Romance Conference at Yale in September

 

Popular Romance Fiction: the “Literature of Hope” is a conference event occurring on Friday, September 8 - Saturday, September 9, 2023 at Yale University. This interactive gathering brings bestselling romance writers together with scholars, students, readers, and the public for two days of conversation and events at Yale and in the New Haven community about the nation’s most popular literary genre. Through discussion panels, a romance writing workshop,  documentary screening, historical exhibition, Elm City LIT Fest collaboration, a special keynote event, and more, we examine romance fiction in expansive ways that move at and beyond its surface appearances, exploring its political, material, racial, feminist, and religious histories and manifestations. Confirmed speakers include Roxane Gay, Adriana Herrera, Eloisa James, Beverly Jenkins, Julie Moody-Freeman, Sarah MacLean, Radclyffe, and others.

The conference includes:

How to Write a Romance Novel Workshop with Adriana Herrera and Sarah MacLean 

Love Between the Covers (2015) documentary screening followed by "talk-back with documentarian Laurie Kahn and writers from film Eloisa James, Beverly Jenkins, and Radclyffe on writer experience, making the film, romance as a literary vehicle of hope, and how Romancelandia has changed since the film, with attention to class, race, sexuality, gender, and more."

Book signing

“Popular Romance Fiction: the ‘Literature of Hope’ ” - Keynote conversation between Roxane Gay and Beverly Jenkins on romance and the power and politics of hope.

The full programme and more details can be found here. One of the organisers says that "The program and website will be updated with more details in the coming weeks, so please check back in August for more exciting info."