Monday, April 27, 2015

CFP: Popular Romance Fiction at the Northeast Popular Culture Association Conference

CFP: Popular Romance Fiction (NEPCA: Oct 30-31, 2015, New London, NH)

The Northeast Popular/American Culture Association (NEPCA) is seeking paper proposals on the topic of Romance/Popular Romance Fiction for its fall conference to be held at Colby-Sawyer College in New London, NH on October 30-31, 2015. For more information, please visit the NEPCA website: http://nepca.wordpress.com/fall-conference/.

We welcome a wide variety of papers related to romance and popular romance fiction. Possible approaches can include narrative analysis of the romance genre, issues of representation in romance fiction, production and dissemination of romance fiction, audiences for romance fiction in various media, the public uses of romance fiction/s, and more.

NEPCA Fall Conference information, including the paper proposal form, can be found at http://nepca.wordpress.com/fall-conference/. Please submit the form, including a brief CV and abstract, located on the site. Both proposals for individual papers and complete panels will be considered. Please direct any questions to either 2015 Program Chair Kraig Larkin (kraig.larkin@colby-sawyer.edu) and/or to Area Chair Wendy Wagner (wwagner@jwu.edu). The deadline for proposals is June 15, 2015.

NEPCA presentations are generally 15-20 minutes in length and may be delivered either formally or informally. NEPCA prides itself on holding conferences which emphasize sharing ideas in a non-competitive and supportive environment involving graduate students, junior faculty, and senior scholars.

NeMLA and Sherry Thomas



On 2 May, at the 2015 NeMLA conference, in a session on "Neo-Victorianism in the Twenty-First Century," Jayashree Kamble, City University of New York, will be giving a paper on:
"What’s in a Name? Hybridity and Globalization in the Neo-Victorian Romance Novels of Sherry Thomas"
Jayashree's tweeted that she'll be "Talking #China, #NeoVictorianism, cultural #globalization & the popular #romance heroine."

Anyone else going to be at this conference and giving a paper on romance fiction?

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Links and Call For Papers


Thanks to Twitter, I've got a lot of links to share:

In "History in Color: A Black American Romance Roundtable"
Kianna Alexander (author of two multicultural historical romance series), Piper Huguley (author of inspirational historical romances), Lena Hart (writer of sensual to steamy interracial romances), and [...] Alyssa Cole [...] discuss our personal experiences as romance writers, the current state of multicultural historical romance, and our thoughts on the future of historicals that feature people of color as the heroes and heroines.
USA Today's Christyna Hunter attended the recent
What Is Love? Romance Fiction in the Digital Age Symposium. [...] One of the panels that I found interesting was the one discussing the romance canon. If you are anything like me, a definition had to be researched before the full effect of the panel could be appreciated. According to Merriam-Webster, a canon is "a sanctioned or accepted group or body of related works." The term is mostly a phrase for academics, and that was largely the case for this panel, which included two authors and three professors. Notably missing: librarians. In fact, there were no librarians on any of that day's panels, though the occasion was held in one of the many buildings of our national library.

So here's my chance to add insight to the conversation from a couple of librarians. I'd like to introduce Wendy Crutcher and Kristin Ramsdell.
She does so in "Love in the Stacks: Which books should be part of the romance canon?" and "Love in the Stacks: Romance canon as librarian tool?"

Jodi McAlister has written up her observations on "Reproductive Futurism and Cruel Optimism: Romance at PCA, Day 1" and "Race, Libraries, and the Academic Heroine: Romance at PCA, Day 2".


CFP: EUPOP 2015
Humboldt University of Berlin, July 29th – 31st 2015 Deadline: Monday, April 27th, 2015

Individual paper and panel contributions are welcomed for the fourth annual international conference of the European Popular Culture Association (EPCA), to be held at the Humboldt University of Berlin (Hauptgebäude, Unter den Linden 6, Berlin) from July 29th – 31st 2015.

EUPOP 2015 will explore European popular culture in all its various forms. [More information here.]


Call for Presentations: Gender and Love/The Gender and Love Project
Mansfield College, Oxford, UK, 20th September – 22nd September 2015
Deadline: Friday 1st May 2015

The “Gender and Love” project calls for reflections on the interaction between gender and love and how this nexus of ideas pertains to self-perception, (dis-)ability, ethics, religion, kinship, bonding, nationality, globalization, environment, etc.  The project welcomes elaborations on gender and love in all forms, styles, and media, past or present. [More information here.]


CALL FOR PAPERS: New York Metro American Studies Association
Guttman Community College, NY, Saturday, November 14, 2015
Deadline: June 1, 2015

The New York Metro American Studies Association (NYMASA) has chosen the theme of “Love” for our 2015 annual conference. We invite papers, presentations, performances, and exhibitions that explore the cross-disciplinary, transnational, and trans-historical possibilities embedded in the concept of love. [More information here.]

Monday, April 06, 2015

#PCAROM: Tweets From and About the 2015 PCA Romance Area

--Eric Selinger 

In case you missed the conversation, or want to quote from it for research, here's a captured version of the #pcarom Twitter stream. A very lively and memorable conference, and one which will, I hope, bear fruit in new published scholarship in the months and years to come!

Thursday, April 02, 2015

Romance XIII: The Romance of Work? Books, Sex, Magic, and the Academic Heroine

Romance XIII: The Romance of Work? Books, Sex, Magic, and the Academic Heroine


Heroines in Bookstores: The Romantic Economies of You’ve Got Mail and Three Sisters Island

(Heather Schell, George Washington University)
Around the turn of the millennium, two Noras created popular love stories:  Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail and Nora Roberts’ Three Sisters Island trilogy.  While the plots differ strikingly, the heroines in both stories have strikingly similar work experiences:  Kathleen and Mia both own and manage independent bookstores, stores which are extensions of the heroines themselves and which serve as central meeting places in their communities.  Yet in both cases, Kathleen’s and Mia’s love interests appear to conflict directly with their work interests.  In fact, in both stories, the hero’s economic pursuits threaten to destroy or at least undermine the heroine’s bookstore.  Both the film and the romance novels discussed here pay careful attention to economic issues, and they have their heroines do the same.  However, the resolution of each love story reveals a distinct economic model underlying the plot:  a cynical neoliberalism in Ephron’s story, in which the heroine’s only option is to take a wage job provided by the hero; and, in Roberts’ series, an insistence on regulated economic planning based on community needs, which allows both the heroine and her hero to develop mutually beneficial economic strategies that benefit their island.  In fact, I would argue, the ideal economy in Roberts’ series is modeled on the ideal romantic relationship.


“She would take her fate into her own hands”: Sex work and Happily Ever After in popular romance

(Kathrina Haji Mohd Daud, Universiti Brunei Darussalam)

Popular romance as a genre confronts sex work as an inevitable facet of male-female relationships, particularly in historical romances, tending to condemn the industry and humanize its workers (particularly mistresses and prostitutes). This paper will examine the deployment of romantic heroine as sex worker in four texts: Lisa Kleypas’ “Dreaming of You”, Catherine Anderson’s “Comanche Magic,” Courtney Milan’s “Unclaimed” and Joan Wolf’s “His Lordship’s Mistress”.

A comparison of the central conflicts or “barrier” and the Happily Ever Afters of these four texts will query both the effectiveness of female solidarity and authority within the industry, and whether/how men can be allies to female sex workers. Additionally, this paper will explore the extent to which the texts resist the resolution of the tension between romance and the sex industry, by resisting the use of romantic hero as "saviour", and how this works with popular romance’s generic insistence on a holistic (physical and emotional) approach to romantic love.


Contemporary Supernatural Romance and the Academic Woman

(Jennifer Mitchell, Independent Scholar)

Deborah Harkness’s The All Souls trilogy (2011, 2012, 2014), Juliet Dark’s Fairwick Chronicles trilogy (2011, 2013), and Elizabeth Hunter’s Elemental Mysteries foursome (2012, 2013), all chronicle the supernatural romantic entanglements of young women in academia. Harkness’s Diana Bishop is an historian of alchemy, splitting her time between two prestigious institutions: Yale University and the University of Oxford. Dark’s Callie McFay is a scholar of folklore, mythology, and the Gothic who takes a tenure-track job at the aptly named Fairwick College. Hunter’s Beatrice de Novo is a serious student pursuing degrees in literature and library science. All three women, who are intimately tied to their respective fields of study, become involved with non-human partners: Diana falls for Matthew de Clermont and Beatrice falls for Giovanni Vecchio, both of whom are centuries old vampires while Callie has a tumultuous relationship with her own demon lover.

Each of these heroines is presented to readers as exceptionally intelligent, fiercely loyal, and, most interestingly, deeply committed to her own scholarly pursuits. Moving beyond the reductive eternal and teenaged romance of the Twilight novels and beyond the reconfigured Cinderella story of the Fifty Shades of Grey series, these works all speak to a particularly telling trend in the relationship between a woman’s academic identity and her romantic desires. As such, this paper analyzes the perhaps unexpected allure of young, sexualized female academics as the ideal protagonists of these erotic supernatural romances.


It's All Academic: Scholar, Scientist, Romance Heroine

(Jayashree Kamble, CUNY LaGuardia Community College)

From time to time, one encounters a romance fiction heroine who is an academic, be it as a field researcher or university professor. In some novels, such as Kresley Cole's Dark Desires After Dusk or Laura Kinsale's Midsummer Moon, the scholar heroine comes across as a familiar stereotype--an absent-minded and unworldly scientist, focused on her work to the extent of it being a near-fatal liability. In others, such as Linda Howard's Son of the Morning, the heroine is intrepid and clever, while in Nora Roberts's Jewels of the Sun, she is an Earth Mother fleeing from the cut-throat nature of academic life. As the genre has had a love-hate relationship with academia since the 70s, these choices provide an intriguing glimpse into how academia may appear to romance fiction writers.

No matter how these representation vary, however, the everyday reality of the researcher--teach, grade, read, write--is seen as problematic, co-terminus with backbiting, boredom, behavioral disorders, or breakdowns. Cole's Holly Ashwin is one academic who uses the staid routine of academic life to keep her anxieties--she has OCD--under control, anxieties resulting from being a closeted Valkyrie. In other words, Ashwin is a professor who has a hidden violent and homicidal side, one she does not comprehend herself. Ashwin's mousy work persona is a veneer that both protects her from her fear of her true self and manages to keep her enemies at bay till she can come into her powers as a warrior woman. In this take on the identity conflict that is central to the journey of romance heroines, Cole rejuvenates the trope of the workaday academic and turns it into an origin story of a superheroine.

Romance XII: Libraries, Classrooms, Communities


Romance XII: Libraries, Classrooms, Communities


The Romance Novel: A Course in History and Creative Entrepreneurship at Duke

(Laura Florand and Katharine Dubois, both of Duke University)

In Spring 2015, Professors Katharine Brophy Dubois and Laura Florand, both established romance authors as well as Duke University faculty members, created “The Romance Novel” course at Duke University. Offered as both a History course and an elective in the Innovations & Entrepreneurship Certificate, the course focuses on the romance novel’s development from the eighteenth century to the present, the romance fiction publishing industry, and student creative entrepreneurship. In conjunction with the course, Dubois and Florand launched the “UNSUITABLE” events series to engage students in a wider community discussion of romance fiction, creativity, and popular perception. In this presentation, Dubois and Florand will discuss the challenges encountered in developing a course of this nature, its role at Duke as well as in the broader community, course objectives, text selection, pedagogy, and preliminary feedback on the classroom experience and student and community engagement.


Creating a Popular Romance Collection in the Academic Library

(Sarah Sheehan, George Mason University)

Academic libraries have long had an uneven record of collecting so-called popular contemporary literature. Academic libraries that do collect it have often done so as part of so-called “leisure reading” collections. Popular genre collecting, especially for popular romance novels, is often viewed as the prevue of the public libraries.  However, most public libraries do not collect for the long term needs of researchers and students, but instead focus on the present reading interests of the populations that they serve.

There are a few academic libraries that do systematically collect popular romance materials, however, these collections are housed in their respective library’s Special Collections, which does limit student and researcher access.  We argue that there is value in systematically collecting popular romance fiction for circulating academic library collections. As no established collection development model presently exists specifically for this type of collection, therefore the authors created a strategy using other genre collections and their skills as established liaison librarians in crafting the collection.  We will cover resources to identify appropriate items for the collection, specific selection criteria, non-traditional sources of obtaining titles, and the creation of an appropriate collection development policy. They will also discuss future plans for a popular romance novel collection.

Imagine a library that collected literary scholarship written about Eugene O’Neill, but not The Ice Man Cometh. Such a situation is currently the case for popular romance at many academic libraries. Circulating popular romance collections can play a vital role in promoting teaching and scholarship.  In effect, it would mean treating popular romance novels like any other literary genre currently in circulating collections.


Fact or Fiction? Are New Adult Romance E-books Emerging in Public Libraries?

(Renee Bennett-Kapusniak and Jennifer Thiele, both of University of Wisconsin Milwaukee)

No abstract provided.


Women's favourite titles in a Portuguese prison: from library use to romance reading

(Paula Sequeiros, Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Portugal)

The library prison in Santa Cruz do Bispo, Portugal, constitutes an interesting social location: this library is visited by a large proportion of women from the popular classes. The average age for imprisoned women has been increasing in recent years and with it average literacy skills have been lowering within a population with low education levels. Time allocation being for sure quite different from what used to be in the outside world, with no domestic and parenting tasks consuming their time, reading is expected to have a higher allocation in the imprisonment context.

The aim of this research was to understand what are the reading practices, what are their meanings and what is the role of reading in an everyday life of confinement. The results from ethnography and interviews were analysed according to social variables such as class, gender, ethnicity, age, occupation, and education.

Having come to know that most request items were light-literature novels, self-help books, and biographies/misery books, this research took a second step also focusing on favourite genres and titles. A critical analysis of one tittle from each genre was then contrasted with readers' favourite passages in order to better understand what attracted these readers.

A comparison was also made among categories – using Amorós' concept of "novela rosa" and Calinescu's definition of kitsch - in order to understand whether there is some form of "lineage" linking them as to stylistic and narrative devices, and whether their popularity could be, at least partially, explained by the use of these devices.
Concepts of light-literature and kitsch art are then discussed according to theories on taste, taking into account social class, gender and historical perspectives. Feminist approaches to kitsch and light-literature, in particular, were taken into account.

Romance XI: Erotic Romance, Erotica, and the Erotics of Vulnerability

Romance XI: Erotic Romance, Erotica, and the Erotics of Vulnerability


The Erotics of Vulnerability in African American Romance Fiction

(Conseula Francis, College of Charleston)

I will do two things in this presentation. First, I will offer a theory of romance that pays attention to its narrative preoccupations rather than its formal elements. In this presentation I am interested in romance fiction’s narrative preoccupation with the erotics of vulnerability. My theory of the erotics of vulnerability builds on Audre Lorde's "Uses of the Erotic" and Brene Brown's research on vulnerability. The second, and more important, thing I plan to do in this presentation is attempt to re-focus our critical attention on African American romance, which typically gets scant attention in romance scholarship. I will argue that romance fiction’s attention to the erotics of vulnerability sets the stage for the radical possibilities of black romance.

I will offer two brief readings to illustrate my argument. The first will focus on the Beverly Jenkins historical Something Like Love, in which the characters find themselves subject to myriad political, social, and sexual vulnerabilities and must learn the reward (and erotics) of risk. The second will focus on Maureen Smith's contemporary Recipe for Temptation. The characters in this novel are largely free of the kind of vulnerability that plagues the heroine and hero of Jenkins' novel (the racial landscape of 19th century and 21st century American are quite different). Yet these characters still exist in a world that posits black intimacy and sexuality, and the resulting vulnerability, as necessarily sites of profound and persistent degradation, humiliation, and oppression. Like Jenkins, Smith uses genre romance to de-center what I call narratives of despair and re-narrate black pleasure and desire.


Climax and Consent: The Emancipatory Potential of Erotica in Popular Romance Fiction

(Catherine Roach, The University of Alabama)

I have argued elsewhere that female sexual pleasure is central to the broad romance narrative and that the romance genre can be powerfully sex-positive (Roach, forthcoming 2015).  However, the erotic content in romance fiction, as is true of erotica in general, can serve to endlessly reproduce tired old stereotypes and oppressive master narratives.  The new wave of feminist and queer pornography proves that erotica can be a radical imaginative space of exploration and possibility; erotica can be a descriptive and prescriptive narrative for how sexuality can be lived for partners’ mutual pleasure, support, and emancipation.  How can the erotic aspect of romance story-telling reach this full potential for sex-positive, queer-friendly, feminist liberation?  What might such erotic content in the romance genre look like?  In this presentation, I explore these questions by focusing on two aspects of sexual relationship: consent and climax.  In the romance storyline, partners agree to engage in sexual activity (consent) and enjoy such activity (climax)—if not immediately, then by the story’s end; if not explicitly on-page, then implicitly off-page.  (The new asexuality movement represents an interesting counter-argument that I briefly pursue.)  The point about consent can be summarized as “the problem of the bodice ripper.”  Much discussion about romance fiction, both popular and academic/critical, has viewed as problematic “old school” scenes of non-consensual sex between main characters destined for true love.  I suggest that non-consensual sex has not gone away.  Contemporary BDSM romances represent a current form of the earlier bodice-ripper, a more politically correct version wherein partners negotiate consent in advance before engaging in scenes of force and bondage.  More widely, many romances grant such masterful powers of seduction to the hero that sex scenes are rape-like: the heroine’s initial “no” yields to “yes” in the hero’s magical embrace.  I argue the genre stages non-fully-consensual sex scenes to create a collective, woman-oriented imaginative space to work through complicated problems of assault, rape, consent, will, agency, and desire in sex.  The second problem of climax can be summarized, to borrow Wendell and Tan’s terms, as the problem of the hero’s “Wang of Mighty Lovin’” and the heroine’s “Magic Hoo Hoo.”  In short, women (and men) do not climax from intercourse in real life as easily and as often, with such pleasure and life-changing consequences, as in romance fiction. The point isn’t that sex needs to be realistic, but that it could be more varied and more in line with typical patterns of female sexual response.  The erotic in romance, as in wider media, could get beyond master narratives centered around penetrative, genital, orgasmic sexuality in order to realize the full goals of sex-positive culture.


The Lexicon of Love: An Analysis of Sexual Language in Lesbian Romance and Erotica

(Len Barot, Bold Strokes Books)

Until the last few decades, graphic sex scenes were uncommon in lesbian romance. In many instances the consummation of the love relationship occurred off-stage or was couched in euphemistic terms. Explicit depictions of sex between women was most often reserved for erotica, creating a divide in the form of sexual expression between romance and erotica and reinforcing the expectation of readers that “sex,” at least the sweaty, unbridled, wild kind, was not part of “romance” fiction. This parallels observations in non-same-sex romance as noted in a recent blog by Jane Little: “Prior to 2000, references to the penis would often be couched in terms such as “manroot” “stalk” and “pleasure rod”. The clitoris or vagina would be known in equally obscure terms. Now it’s not uncommon to see the use of “cock”, “cunt”, or “pussy” within many mainstream romances whether they be historical, contemporary or paranormal. Today the line between erotic romance and non erotic romance appears blurred, not just for readers but authors and publishers as well.” (1)

In the last decade, a merging of the erotic and romantic has become more common within the expanding field of lesbian romance. Erotic romance is recognized as a subgenre by authors and publishers and sought after by readers. This study looks at variations in sexual language usage in two different populations of contemporary lesbian romance novels: 1) romances written by self-identified erotic romance authors versus “sweet” romance authors, and 2) sex scenes written by authors who write both lesbian erotica and romance (thereby serving as their own controls in terms of language choices). Sex scenes are analyzed and compared by word count/phrase for pre-selected terms commonly associated with genitalia or descriptors of intercourse/sexual intimacy to determine the differences if any in sexual language based on genre dictates.

(1) http://dearauthor.com/ebooks/the-curious-case-of-elloras-cave/


Love in the Xtreme: Publishing the Erotic Romance Novel

(John Markert, Cumberland University)

The romance novel has become increasingly erotic, but few mainstream publishers stray into the upper stratum of eroticism.  The mid-range, four-to-six level of eroticism, is where the heroines of mainstream romances tend to find love.  Some novels may venture into seven-level eroticism, but few step into the upper eight-to-ten level of the xrotic, where sexual escapades are graphically depicted and often occur outside a committed relationship; it is also, more-often-than-not, with multiple partners over the course of the novel.  It is obvious that mainstream publishers are not meeting the need of romance readers since their failure to depict sexual activity in any detail has given birth to a flourishing cottage industry of small digital xrotic publishers.  This paper explores the growth of these small presses in an attempt to explain their success and why mainstream publishers have failed to respond to the desire for the xrotica. 

Romance X: Love Theory, Romance Practice

Romance X: Love Theory, Romance Practice


This Modern Love: representations of romantic love in historical romance

(Jodi McAlister, Macquarie University)

Historical romance is one of the most popular and recognisable sub-genres of the romance novel. The period setting is key to the construction of the romance: historical heroines often find themselves bound by more restrictive social rules than their contemporary sisters, particularly when it comes to appropriate female sexual behaviour.

This rather Foucauldian notion of a repressive society has an interesting effect on the portrayal of romantic love. While historical heroines often break the rules of their own societies, I contend that they regularly follow recommended contemporary patterns for romance, especially when it comes to the relationship between love and sex. The picture of romantic love offered by the historical romance is distinctly modern, despite the effort authors make to create historically accurate backdrops for their novels. In this paper, I will draw on the history of romantic love and several key texts to discuss the ways in which the historical romance regularly portrays romantic love as transhistorical and universal, as well as how this has changed over the genre’s history. I will explore the scripts for love and sex followed by several historical heroines, and will ultimately attempt to draw some conclusions as to the appeal of modern love in a period setting.


Outsmarting the Universe: Precocious Love in John Green’s Fault in Our Stars

(Susan Leary, University of Miami, English Department )

John Green’s 2012 bestselling young adult novel, Fault in Our Stars, introduces teenage cancer patients, Hazel Grace Lancaster and Augustus Waters, who fall in love over the shared experience of knowing they are going to die.  There are all the elements of the cloying sweet, love-turned-tragic archetypal romance, yet the intellectual backdrop and smart wit of the characters transforms this love into one that resists such categorization: Hazel and Augustus bond over a deep fascination with Hazel’s favorite book, Imperial Affliction; they correspond sophisticatedly with its sardonic and cerebral author; they speak in metaphor, converse routinely with philosophical language, and kiss passionately in the midst of their touring the Anne Frank House.  Yet, Hazel and Augustus are not standard nerds, nor are they the sympathetically-viewed cancer kids.  Their intelligence in fact protects them from these labels.  The universe, however, is believed to be an ordered system.  As Hazel’s father says: “I believe the universe wants to be noticed.  I think the universe is improbably biased toward consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed.”  Love, cast as an intellectualized experience, is this consciousness.  I call this precocious love because it is a love ahead of its own image; it only approximates love as it contains no elements of the artificiality we read into the idea and potential of it to organize experience.  In this way, Hazel and Augustus succeed in outsmarting the universe as how they feel about one another is archetype-less, lens-less, unqualified, and unprecedented—unprecedented being Augustus’s most frequent descriptor of Hazel.  The universe’s elegance is therefore an illusion of perfect order; even in his eulogy for Hazel, Augustus equates his love for her to “stars he cannot fathom into constellations.”  It is this intellectuality that makes love a simultaneous maker and unmaker of the universe.


Redeeming (M/M) Love: Christian Romance and Erotic Faith in Alex Beecroft's False Colors and Alexis Hall's Glitterland

(Eric Selinger, DePaul University)

As Catherine Roach, Simon May, and other scholars have argued, popular romance culture draws on a 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 queer romance novels engage with this faith tradition in particularly self-conscious and artful ways, whether by asserting the power of “erotic faith” to trump social and Biblical injunctions against same-sex romantic love or by reasserting the value of "erotic faith" in the face of the postmodern intellectual turn that characterises romantic love--especially with a happy ending--as a banal or déclassé ideal.  This presentation will look closely at the ways two m/m romance novels think through ideas about love and erotic faith, often in explicitly theological terms:  Alex Beecroft’s progressive Christian m/m romance, False Colors; and Alexis Hall’s ostensibly secular m/m novel Glitterland, whose self-conscious, self-doubting narrator invokes both Christian tropes and the critical work of Roland Barthes as he struggles to accept his own romantic redemption, at once redeemed by and redeeming love.


The Matter of Romantic Love Matters

(Morgan Klarich, Texas Woman's University)

Romance novels are made up of matter and can become an actant in the reader’s own narrative as they navigate their own fantasy and inter/intra-action with matter. Western philosophies (like materialism) tend to ignore romantic love as an ontologically relevant philosophical space. Romantic love is considered an emotion, and not relevant to the philosophical discourse of classical materialism. However, using new materialism I wish to challenge that and critically interrogate the validity of romantic love’s exclusion in this discourse. Using romance novels as a crucial point in my interrogation, my paper explores the possibility that romantic love is matter, an independent complicated product of physical matters intra-action. Among others, I utilize discourse from new materialists and romance novel scholars. I conclude that the old opinions towards matter cannot apply to the modern way of thinking. There is little room for absolutes when so much is clearly unknown about what matter actually is. Romantic love is that unknown, unseen, and uncharted territory of philosophical discourse that can and will be considered, not only a product of matter, but matter itself.

Romance IX: Kismet! Turkish Soap Operas and the Global Culture of Popular Romance (Special Session)

Romance IX: Kismet! Turkish Soap Operas and the Global Culture of Popular Romance (Special Session)

The popularity of contemporary Turkish soap operas in the Middle East, North Africa, the Balkans, and Asia has sparked avid discussions of issues related to sexuality, women's rights, and the politics of popular culture.  This special session will feature a rare American showing of KISMET, an award-winning short documentary film (58 minutes long) about these TV shows, their makers, and their global fandom, followed by a discussion of the film led by romance scholar Heather Schell, who has studied popular romance in Turkey, romance Area Chair Eric Selinger, and Katherine Larsen of the PCA Fan Studies area.  As these discussion leaders will demonstrate, the content of these discussions bears striking similiarities to debates over the value and effect of popular romance fiction in Anglophone cultures; however, the context of the discussions is often radically different, depending on the viewing locale.  Comparisons to the content and reception of other international TV dramas--e.g., Korean dramas of the Hallyu [Korean wave] will also be addressed.

Romance VIII: Imperialism, Transnationalism, and the Politics of Genre


Romance VIII: Imperialism, Transnationalism, and the Politics of Genre


Imperial Affairs: Colonialism, race and the early twentieth-century romance novel

(Hsu-Ming Teo, Macquarie University)

The romance novel became a distinct genre during the zenith of the British Empire and, unsurprisingly, women writers used Britain’s colonies as exotic backdrops for their love stories. At a time when many men insisted that the empire was ‘no place for a white woman’, romance novels from the 1890s to the Second World War spread imperial fantasies of women who travelled to the colonies, hunted, worked as governesses, nurses and secretaries, managed households, ran viable plantations, fended off attacks by ‘the natives’, fell in love, married and made a place for themselves in the empire.   This paper explores how dreams of love and empire building bloomed in the Kenyan novels of Florence Riddell and Nora K. Strange; the Rhodesian and South African romances of Gertrude Page; the New Guinean romances of Beatrice Grimshaw; and the Raj romances of Maud Diver, Ethel M. Dell, Bertha Croker, Alice Eustace and many more. Martin Green has argued that ‘the adventure tales that formed the light reading of Englishmen for two hundred years … were, in fact, the energizing myth of English imperialism … they charged England’s will with the energy to go out into the world and explore, conquer, and rule’. Romance novels may not have created such determinedly colonizing drives among women, but they were important nonetheless because they purportedly disseminated ‘knowledge’ about Britain’s colonies and naturalized colonial possessions and racial hierarchies among women readers. At the same time, they unintentionally foregrounded the fragility of love relationships between British men and women by portraying the strains colonizing activities placed on interpersonal relations and the racial anxieties caused by the sexual attractiveness of ‘native’ men.  

Tears and Desires: Qiong Yao’s Romantic Melodrama in a Transnational Frame

(Danju Yu, Stony Brook University)

Qiong Yao, the renowned Taiwanese female novelist, is known for her sensational novels that depict pathos, overwrought emotions and the ostensibly suffering female protagonists. The visual adaptation of one of her most popularly-received novel, You Can’t Tell Him (Tingyuan Shenshen, 1972), tells the story of a female schoolteacher’s rendezvous with a student’s blind father, who eventually discovers that this mysterious school teacher happens to be his beloved ex-wife who has been reported dead for years. The novel as well as its film adaptation mimic Jane Austen’s 1847 bildungsroman novel, Jane Eyre, while the narrative is relocated to Taiwan in the 1970s with the backdrop of problematic Cold War geopolitics and Taiwan’s rapid economic boom. Embedded in the romantic love affair are the film’s detailed depiction of Taiwan’s budding tea farm business and the growing community of working class women. This paper examines the gothic elements, melodramatic narrative, elaborate mise en scène to tease out the underlying neoliberal desires expressed through the tears and desires of female protagonists. In addition, this paper intervenes in the derogatory reading of Wenyi Aiqing melodrama (romance melodrama) films by shifting the attention to excessive emotions that provide ruptures in dominant ideologies. By tracing the transnational trajectory of You Can’t Tell Him, I explore romance melodrama and its role in opening up new spaces for female discourse.


“I’m Just Telling You a Story, That’s All”: The Reading and Misreading of Gendered, Raced, and (Dis)Abled Bodies in Courtney Milan’s The Heiress Effect

(Mallory Jagodzinski, Bowling Green State University)
Courtney Milan is quite well-known in the romance industry for walking away from a “very nice deal” at Harlequin to successfully self-publish her subsequent novels and for writing characters one doesn’t often see in the genre (such as virgin heroes, suffragette heroines, and heroines whose characters are defined by the work they do). In interviews, she alludes to the fact that this is because she has more freedom to write these characters due to the fact that there is no publisher asking her to make her characters more generic and typical. In her 2013 novel The Heiress Effect, which is set in 1867, Milan writes a “B” romance featuring an epileptic heroine, Emily, and an Indian student studying at Cambridge, Anjan.

In this paper, I show how Milan builds the romantic relationship between the heroine and hero through the reading and misreading of bodies in regards to gender, disability, and race. I argue that Milan uses the constraints placed on Emily and Anjan’s bodies by systems of power and privilege to illustrate the ways our society has and continues to allow bodies to speak for individuals rather than trusting their stories. It is only after Emily and Anjan begin telling stories to one another about their possible courtship that the two are able to achieve the genre’s requisite happily ever after, which I assert to be Milan’s insistence on importance of diverse representation in the stories American culture tells itself about who is worthy of love.


Brothers Under Covers: Race and the Paranormal Romance Novel

(Amanda Hobson, Ohio University)

From sparkling teen-angst-filled “vegetarians” to crime fighting warriors, the vampire hero has become a mainstay in novels, films, and television. Vampires have held the imaginations of readers since the time of the “penny dreadful” and Dracula.  In contemporary American culture, the vampire has shifted beyond the borders of the horror and science fiction genres to become a featured icon in the romance genre. The subgenre of paranormal romance has inundated the publishing market over the last decade for both adult and young adult romance readers.  One of the most glaring and intriguing aspects of these vampire romance novels is their consistent whitewashing.  Just where are all the undead heartthrobs of colour, and why are they seemingly absent? Though this piece will focus on Black vampire heroes specifically, where are the women of colour as female leads?  While these vampire romance novels may have periphery characters that are people of colour, they remain almost entirely populated by whites, mainly Americans descended from European heritages.  I explore the representations of race and ethnicity within the paranormal subgenre, focusing on two popular series as guideposts: Kerrelyn Sparks’s Love at Stake series and J.R. Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood series. How can a reader understand issues of race and ethnicity within these vampire romances?  The vampire, who has long-stood as the iconic symbol for the Other, reconstructs oppression within the narratives of these paranormal romance novels first by eliminating race and ethnicity from the vast majority of the texts and then by reinforcing the cultural stereotypes of Black masculinity.  The genre in which the vampire fiction is written matters a great deal for the representation and inclusion of Black vampires.  Using genre theory and critical race theory, this paper examines the lacuna of race and ethnicity present within vampire romance fictions.

Romance VII: Queer Love, Multiplicity, and the (Cruel) Optimism of the HEA

Romance VII: Queer Love, Multiplicity, and the (Cruel) Optimism of the HEA


Serial Monogamy? Archetype, Formula, and Variation in Paranormal Romance.

(Maria Ramos-Garcia,  South Dakota State University)

This paper will analyze the effect of serialization in the way romantic relationships are depicted in paranormal romance. The serial form tends to stretch a conflict, while the romance demands the HEA of a new couple on each installment. These seemingly opposed forces at play account for the creation of more varied relationships, a smorgasbord of options within the restrictions of a specific fictional world. Furthermore, the supernatural character of those relationships allows for levels of physical (but also ideological) experimentation that would be harder to accept by many readers in a single-title or realistic setting. It is my contention that the careful analysis of this “variation within the paradigm” will allow for new avenues of research on the nature of mainstream romance in the 21st Century. This paper specifically will analyze the variation on the physical descriptions of heroes and heroines, their previous sexual history (or lack thereof), the progression of their sexual and emotional connection, and the further evolution of established relationships on later books, especially regarding work and reproduction. It will also explore the implications of emerging story lines that challenge the heteronormative, monogamous expectations of mainstream romance, such as J.R. Ward’s inclusion of a homosexual couple as protagonists of one her “Black Dagger Brotherhood” novels, and Lynn Viehl’s happily ever after of a female protagonist with two individual males that through supernatural means are condemned to share the same body. I believe this line of study will contribute to delineate the ever-changing boundaries of romance and to expose both its potential and its limitations.


Love and Plurality: Ensemble Casting and Modularity in Contemporary Rom-Coms

(Katherine Morrissey,  University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)

The traditional boy-meets-girl story has typically been one of courtship. Two young people meet, stumble towards love, and then commit to spending their lives together. While the bulk of romantic films still focus on the stories of white, heterosexual, and upper-middle class characters, today's romantic films often depict not one courtship narrative but many. These films utilize ensemble casting and overlapping storylines in order to depict multiple romantic journeys within the space of a single film. In this paper I focus on two recent romantic films: What to Expect When You're Expecting (2012) and He’s Just Not That Into You (2009) and examine how the films’ narrative structures stretch to accommodate their multiple protagonists. I argue that these films adopt a modular approach to narrative and storytelling, using ensemble casting as a strategy for expanding the versions of relationships and family that can be addressed within a single film. Modularity has previously been identified as an essential element of digital media (Manovich), as a type of narrative play with time and memory (Cameron), and as an enactment of contemporary labor conditions (King). Contemporary romantic films reveal another side of modularity: its utility for managing ideological tensions and providing narrative space for conflicting cultural norms.  These films test a variety of configurations for romance and partnership, testing the limits of romance narratives and the scope of possibility for happy endings.


Blurred Lines: Queering Gender, Masculinity, and the Regency Romance

(Dawn Gott, University at Buffalo-SUNY)--Dawn was unable to present [EMS]

Regency romances are well-loved by the romance readership and have well established tropes that are easily identifiable—witty repartee, the aristocracy, Prinny, the ton, etc… When something is as comfortable and recognizable as the plot devices, tropes and general framework of a Regency, authors have room to stretch the boundaries of the sub-genre to engage the readerships’ attention and subtly tweak established mores. I will interrogate  the sub-genre, using  a queer theoretical framework, focusing on five romances—Dara Joy’s Ritual of Proof, Wen Spencer’s A Brother’s Price, and J.L. Langley’s My Fair Captain, The Englor Affair, and My Regelence Rake. These romances provide cultural insight into American society; especially as love, sex, and romance no longer seem to be constrained by heteronormative boundaries. In addition to looking at how these romances trouble the Regency sub-genre, I will also examine how they question patriarchy, gender, and masculinity. Indeed, Joy and Spencer’s romances address these themes utilizing the traditional hero/heroine (male/female) duo while Langley’s trio are all non-traditional hero/hero (male/male) romances. Regencies have been around for many decades, a stable and seemingly unexciting romance field. Yet, because the Regency provides an established milieu, it is available as a springboard for experimentation in themes and tropes that reveals much about modern American culture. These five romances use the Regency structure to create new ideas for classic love stories and blur the lines between gender and masculinity, queering the Regency in a manner that both old and new fans of the sub-genre can appreciate.


Happily Ever After's Cruel Optimism

(Jonathan Allan, Brandon University)

This paper focuses its attention on the “happily ever after,” often considered central to theories of the popular romance novel, particularly in the American Tradition. However, a close reading of the RWA definition notes that it is less about “happily ever after” and an “optimistic” ending. This paper, thus, focuses on optimism as a theoretical rubric through which to think about the popular romance novel. In particular, this paper brings together the insights of Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman.

Romance VI: Risky Business: Love, Abuse, and Violence

Romance VI: Risky Business: Love, Abuse, and Violence


Domestic Abuse and Violence in the Works of Nora Roberts

(Pavla Stefanska, Masaryk University)
Love overcomes everything. Everything is fair in love and war. There is a fine line between love and hate. These and similar sayings may evoke an impression that there is a close connection between love and violence. Apart from that, they also represent some of the beliefs which permeate western culture’s ideas of love and relationships. As people have the tendency to accept these sayings at their face value and rarely question where these ideas come from and how they affect their behavior, they seldom realize that these beliefs pose a potential threat to their intimate relationships.

Based on the article by Julia T. Wood “The Normalization of Violence in Heterosexual Relationships: Women’s Narratives of Love and Violence” in which she cites western gender and romance narratives as responsible for the high number of women who stay with abusive partners, this paper examines several novels by Nora Roberts, one of the most popular romance writers of our time, in which the author uses domestic abuse in hero’s or heroine’s past as a barrier which stands in the way of their HEA. The paper explores whether Roberts’ portrayal of the domestic violence corresponds to the narrative categories proposed by Wood, and is looking in more detail at the ways in which the after effects of the trauma caused by the abuse are dealt with in terms of reclaiming one’s own identity and re-establishing oneself not only within the narrative of a successful romantic relationship, but also within the much wider narrative of one’s place in community and society, to show that are differences at Roberts’ descriptions which mirror the changing trends in society and the de-tabooing of the issue of domestic abuse in the last thirty years. 


“It Felt Like A Kiss”: Violence and Violations in Jo Beverley’s An Unwilling Bride

(Angela Toscano, University of Iowa)

The title of this paper is taken from The Crystals’ 1962 single, “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss).” This was a song that was not popular even in its own time, and it garnered criticism for its supposed endorsement of spousal abuse. Yet, the song is not simply an unthinking approval of domestic violence. Rather, it reveals something—both in its tonality and its lyrics—about how love and violence intertwine and tangle until one becomes the metonymic stand in for the other. Similarly, discussions of Jo Beverley’s 1992 novel, An Unwilling Bride, question whether the book simply endorses violence as being synonymous with love.

Somewhere, someone once called An Unwilling Bride a novel that puts “the alpha male on trial.” Yet, it this what is being tried? What Beverley’s novel tries are the boundaries between love and violence, passion and anger, anger and abuse. These terms are alternately collapsed and separated throughout the course of the novel. What distinguishes an act of violence from an act of abuse? What is abuse? How are both related to passion? While romance community discussions of the novel have focused on either the acceptability of the hero’s actions or the believability of the novel’s HEA, my paper will argue that the novel plays out the logic of violent love in order to untie that metonymic bond between the two terms.


The Witch Must Die---- Gaze, Female Transgression and Misogyny in Linda Howard’s Dream Man

(Adam Tang, Springly Seasons International Publishers)

Linda Howard’s Dream Man, published in 1994, highlights the issue of misogyny toward female transgression through a combination of thrillers and popular romances. The story focuses on a number of female victims whose occasionally ill manners offend the male serial killer and thus are doomed to death as punishment. Howard explicitly depicts the bloody murder scenes as well as the irrational gender-specific hatred, which is rarely specified in popular romantic narratives.

Death and murder has long been a part of romantic narrative since Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Unlike the detectives or mystery, however, popular romances focus on the relationship development between the heroine and the hero rather than the process or motives of the murder itself. Mostly, murder in popular romances is never the center of romance readers’ gaze, functioning only as the story background or plot stimulation. The purpose of death and murder in romance narrative serves for the protagonists to recognize their love for each other as well as for the readers to contrast the expected happy ending. Hence, the murder depicted in popular romances is usually personally motivated. The cause of death is comprehensible and definite, lest the uncanny death threat should shadow the happily ever-after.

Yet Howard’s Dream Man portrays an irrational serial killer whose victims have little personal involvement with him. Through the heroine’s psychic sight/ gaze, the readers are presented with detailed bloody processes of murders. The murders become the center of romance readers’ gaze and none of the deaths is out of personal causes but of misogyny. This essay aims to elaborate the treatment of murder and misogyny in Linda Howard’s Dream Man and how it celebrates the female strength through a modern version of witch hunting.


Fifty Shades of Anti-Feminism: The Distortion of the Fetish and the Romance Novel in Post-Feminist Culture

(Kalauren McMillan, Winthrop University)

Fifty Shades of Gray, an erotic novel by E.L. James, tells the story of Ana Steele, who is forced via her attraction and dynamic position into an abusive, pseudo-BDSM relationship with Christian Gray. In my paper, I argue that the novel promotes a harmful trend of disempowerment of women through distorting the BDSM lifestyle, glorifying an oppressed heroine, and textually placing Ana in forceful passivity to Christian.

I start my presentation by surveying how romance novels are traditionally seen as anti-feminist. However, scholars have proven that this is not a requirement of the genre. Romance novels may contain feminist facets. I argue that James does not incorporate feminist literary techniques, but has shaped aspects of the novel toward oppression. The BDSM aspect of the novel does not conform to the tenets of the lifestyle and distorts the subculture into a mode of abuse and feminine disempowerment. In addition, Ana has no defense against the aforementioned factors due to her naivety and lack of self.

I conclude that the impetus of this novel is the post-feminist movement. The rise of post-feminism has allowed James’ novel to gain popularity with many female readers. These women, as a result, exalt the characteristics that allow and encourage Ana’s oppression via Christian. In light of Ana idolizing Christian for aesthetic beauty and perceived perfection and ameliorating his abusive and non-consensual sexual tendencies, I conclude female readers of the novel now see this portrayal of the “ideal” man as a potential romantic partner. Seeing Christian as the height of sexual and relationship pleasure, women are encouraged through the novel to seek oppression and disempowerment as “happiness” and “liberation.”

Romance V: Love Between the Covers: the Popular Romance Project Documentary (Special Session)

Romance V: Love Between the Covers: the Popular Romance Project Documentary (Special Session)


The Popular Romance Project is a multi-year, multi-platform exploration of romance in popular culture, including a website, a Library of Congress symposium on popular romance fiction, and a travelling exhibition about romance novels sponsored by the American Library Association.  At its heart, however, is the documentary film “Love Between the Covers,” produced and directed by award-winning filmmaker Laurie Kahn.  In this special session, Kahn will show excerpts from the final version of the film and discuss its creation, editing, and goals, as well as the congressional controversy that has swirled around federal funding for the Project as a whole.

[Love Between the Covers has been invited to have its official international premiere at Toronto's Hot Docs Film Festival. Showings will be on the 25th and 26th of April and 1 May.]

Romance IV: Outlander, Adaptation, and the Art of the Middlebrow

Romance IV: Outlander, Adaptation, and the Art of the Middlebrow

Middlebrow Love: Popular Romance with an Attitude

(Maryan Wherry, Independent Scholar)

The 20th century popular romance provides what Nicola Humble calls “narrative excitement without guilt and intellectual stimulation without undue effort.” As entertainment or escapist fiction, romances dramatize and heighten experiences about which women may be ambivalent. The popular romance embodies basic values and conflicts of the popular middle-class mind. This paper will show how the popular romance novel functions within the definition of middlebrow culture as it depicts women’s perspective and concerns regarding such topics as courstship, love, romance, sexuality and the promotion of literary quality by examining the rhetoric and aesthetics of the genre and the complexity of that expression.


From Trope to Truth: MetaRomance in the Outlander Series

(EMS note: Nicole was unable to join us and present, but I hope we'll hear more about this in the future.)

(Nicole duPlessis, Texas A&M University)

Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series regales readers with love, sex, relationships, history, and the metaphysics of time travel. Beyond the more obvious themes, Outlander strives to reassert a certain vision of reality over historical fantasy and theorizes historical truth.  Frequently, the novels depict “reality” by placing eighteenth-century social constraints over the strong will of displaced twentieth-century female Claire—other times, by stressing oppressive smells rather than conventions.  In the third and fourth books of the series, Voyager and Drums of Autumn, the implied discourse on truth in fiction turns explicitly to the to the Romance genre.  In Voyager, Claire discovers Romance literature in a hospital waiting room after surgery and bonds with Joe Abernathy, fellow medical student, over her virgin read.  Her Romance reading parallels Jamie’s experience—not of literature, though strikingly he is reading Fanny Hill, but of a Romance-ready scenario of coercion by a headstrong young virgin above his station.  Drums of Autumn continues the parallel with the historical Romance novel depicted in Voyager as Jamie and Claire’s daughter is raped by a pirate in stark contrast to Tessa and Valdez of the Spanish Main.  Thus, Gabaldon sets up a dialog between truth and fantasy with explicit reference to Romance fiction, acknowledging the uses of Romance literature while offering a caricature and critique of the tropes of the genre.


Lights! Camera! Adaptation! Outlander as Cable TV Series

(Jessica Matthews, George Mason University)

“Watched” any good romances lately? Probably not. The most recent adaptations of book to screen involve mysteries (Gone Girl), science fiction (The Hunger Games and Divergent), and fantasy (Game of Thrones and The Hobbit). In the summer of 2014, however, producer Ron D. Moore, of Battlestar Galactica fame, debuted the first half of his 16-episode adaptation of one of the most popular romance novels ever published: Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander. The first eight episodes aired on the Starz network in August and September. Reviews were overwhelmingly positive, with much praise heaped upon the lavish production, which Moore shot entirely on location in Scotland, and the stellar performances of the lead characters and supporting cast. What more could a fan of the book want from a cable series adaptation?

Apparently, fans did want more: they wanted the romance. In adapting Outlander to suit the genre demands of a cable series, Moore and his writers shifted the narrative from a hero-centric romance to a feminist historical adventure. Doing so meant suppressing the virility of the marquee player of the Outlander series, the heroic 18th-century Highlander, Jamie Fraser, and emphasizing the quest of the time traveling heroine, Claire, to return to her 20th century life and the husband who waits for her there. When the series went on hiatus in September 2014, the Outlander fan groups found themselves with a sense of unease: thrilled to see the novel they love come to life, but missing what made them love the novel in the first place: the charming, cocky, confident hero and his courtship of an unconventional woman. “Where is Jamie?” was the most common refrain, followed closely by “Where is the romance?”

This paper explores whether the elements readers expect in romance fiction can survive in a cable television series. Does the requirement for an HEA or HFN deny a cable series the suspense it needs to maintain viewer interest? Must the focus on courtship be subdued in order to attract the male audience needed to keep a cable series alive? In other words, can a romance remain a romance and be a successful cable television series? If Starz’ Outlander series is any indication, the answer is no, and yet it depends on fans of the novel to promote it as it competes for a viewership in an increasingly crowded field of cable series.

Relying on over a year’s worth of conversations in the Outlander social media universe that exploded in size when the cable series was first announced in the early summer of 2013, this paper analyzes how the marketing blitz of the series’ key players, to include executive producers, writers, actors, and Gabaldon herself, sought to influence the highly literate Outlander fan base to accept the narrative shift from romance to historical adventure. 

Such conversations reveal the myriad negotiations readers make as they come to terms with the transformation of “their” book by a creative artist other than the author. For readers of the popular romance, readers who often have a strong attachment to the novel’s hero and heroine and more direct contact with the novel’s author, this transformation generates joy and apprehension, as well as support and outrage. This fan reaction in social media reveals insights about romance readers’ interpretive processes, as well as their desire to protect that process when confronted with a significant challenge to it from a film or television adaptation.

Wednesday, April 01, 2015

Romance III: Civic Engagements: Romance Communities, In and Outside the Text

Romance III: Civic Engagements: Romance Communities, In and Outside the Text

“Have you forgotten how bad the gossips are around here?”: The Functions of Idle Chatter in Harlequin Medical Romance

(Jessica Miller, University of Maine)

Harlequin medical romance novels depict an emotional love story that develops within the social world of medicine. These novels focus on two morally good and professionally competent protagonists navigating a highly dramatic and intense romantic relationship. But much of the excitement and appeal of medical romance also derives from the “high stakes” health care setting, with its medical crises, organizational challenges, and contested workplace relationships. This presentation focuses on one particular feature located at the busy intersection of the social and individual aspects of the Harlequin medical romance: gossip.

Gossip is depicted in nearly every Harlequin medical romance under review (a selection of fifty novels published between 2010-2014). As in fiction more generally, gossip serves many functions in these novels: it drives plot, illuminates the norms of the social world, reveals character, and locates the protagonists relative to the social groups in which they find their identity. In terms of genre romance specifically, gossip has a crucial role to play in defining and creating the “flawed society” (in Pamela Regis’s formulation) of the romance, and in bringing that society to a changed and improved state by the end of the novel.

In general, the novels track the prohibition against gossip present in traditional moral codes. Gossip is likely to be trivial or false, and protagonists are much more likely to be fearful of gossip, threatened by gossip, or harmed by gossip than to engage in it, use it for their own ends, or benefit from it. However, this presentation will also consider an alternative approach to gossip found in the texts, informed by recent feminist theory, that gossip is an emotionally charged intertwining of attentive moral judgment and non-trivial information sharing, especially among oppressed groups.

(EMS note:  after the abstract was posted, Jessica contacted me with a new proposal focused on the representation of nursing In HMB medical romances, especially on the "virtue script" that shapes this representation, undercutting disourses of professionalism, etc.  A lot of work on this in other media, but not until now on medical romances.)

“The town has really nice blonde hair”: The Romance Plot and Civic Engagement in “Parks and Recreation”

(Wendy Wagner, Johnson & Wales University)

This paper situates the television comedy “Parks and Recreation” within the subgenre of the small-town romance in romance fiction, focusing on the love story of Leslie Knope and Ben Wyatt. Specifically, the presence of this particular love story in the show differentiates “Parks and Recreation” from similar television shows about quirky small towns, such as “Northern Exposure.” Television critics have often referred to “Parks and Recreation” as a political allegory, but I want to argue that it is, in fact, a romance plot where the hero and heroine’s relationship is deeply entwined with the story about the town of Pawnee. I compare the Leslie/Ben plot to classic romance novels such as Jennifer Crusie’s Welcome to Temptation and Courtney Milan’s The Suffragette Scandal, applying Pamela Regis’s eight elements of a romance novel to make this argument and calling attention to the relationship between romance and civic engagement in these texts. These romance plots are not just about finding love but also about remaking society, which Regis notes is a key element of the romance novel: “defining the society establishes the status quo which the heroine and hero must confront in their attempt to court and marry and which, by their union, they symbolically remake.” The inherent optimism of the romance novel, its foundational belief that love can ultimately change society, is in full display in “Parks and Recreation.”


Legitimating Romance: Neutralizing the Stigma of Romantic Fiction

(Joanna Gregson, Pacific Lutheran University, and Jen Lois, Western Washington University)

In April of 2010, we began a longitudinal sociological study of romance novel writers. By interviewing romance writers and other industry insiders, attending local and national RWA meetings, following writers on social media, and experimenting with writing romance ourselves, we are examining both the craft and the career of the romance writer. In so doing, we hope to explore how writers experience working in “the most popular, least respected literary genre” (Regis 2003: xi).

The present work examines how writer’s affiliation with the romance genre prompted outsiders to trivialize their work. We examine both the application and management of this stigma. First, we describe how outsiders applied the stigma, namely by suggesting that writing romance fiction is easy, that it is not “real” literature, and that it is not important. Although writers disagreed with these views, they nevertheless had to manage these negative perceptions. Writers attempted to neutralize the stigma by defending their writing process, contrasting the goals of literary and commercial fiction, demonstrating the impact of their work on readers, touting their financial success, and pointing out the sexism implicit in the stigma.
We conclude by distinguishing between the different stigma management techniques available to authors of different career statuses, and by highlighting the gendered and class-based biases informing the dominant cultural messages about the producers and audiences of romance fiction.


Blogging and Blackouts: Exploring Romance Readers’ and Authors’ Uses of Social Media

(Stephanie Moody, Kent State University)

In the wake of the October 2014 Blogging Blackout, new questions arise about the ethics and etiquette of romance fiction book blogging and reviewing. These questions are further complicated by the multiple and competing purposes romance readers and authors have for engaging with books and with each other online. My interviews with fifty romance readers, authors, editors, and publishers demonstrate that talking about books online – through blogs, reviews, Twitter, Facebook, and Tumbler – serves many, simultaneous purposes: as a marketing device, a creative outlet, a form of intimacy, a teaching tool, a process of reflection, and a political statement. Moreover, these purposes routinely change and shift, and are shaped by the web 2.0 medium in use.

In this presentation, I explore study participants’ talk about their purposes for using social media to discuss romance novels, and I suggest that notions of ethics and etiquette are largely shaped by individuals’ reasons for engaging with books and with others online. For instance, conceptualizing a book review as both a free source of marketing and as a way to, as one blogger put it, “c[o]me into being the person who I am now,” reveals how book blogging and reviewing collapse distinctions between public and personal writing. Likewise, characterizing the relationships between authors and readers within discourses of consumption, fandom, and intimacy demonstrates the slippery subjectivities evoked through such interactions. By attending to the literacy practices and talk that comprise individuals’ engagements with romance-related social media, I extend ongoing conversations about the perils and possibilities of book blogging and reviewing.

Romance II: Dangerous Texts, Censorious Readers


Romance II: Dangerous Texts, Censorious Readers


‘mushy eyes over a quarter chicken at Nandos’: Love, gender, class and history in romantic advice texts for young people.

(Amy Burge, University of Edinburgh)

We are in the midst of a global ‘moral panic’ about young people, love and sex. The ‘pornification’ (McRobbie, 2008) of contemporary popular culture has led, it is argued, to the ‘adultification’ (APA 2010) of young people, in particular young women. Forced to choose between ‘raunch or romance’ (Bale 2011), modern young women are confronted with a plethora of advice texts that stipulate a narrow set of rules and behaviours that govern successful romantic discourse.

Responding to a call to consider questions of young people, love and sex from a hitherto neglected historical-situated perspective (Egan and Hawkes 2012), this paper compares relationship advice for young adults from the late Middle Ages and twenty-first century.

The specific focus of the paper is on representations of class and their collocation with romantic discourse. The late medieval conduct poem How The Good Wife Taught her Daughter (c.1350) emphasises a particular type of bourgeois feminine identity which is central to its romantic and social discourse: for late medieval women, class clearly matters. Yet, in her 2012 study Why love hurts, Eva Illouz argues that gender and class boundaries have disappeared from modern guides on love following a shift towards a focus on the self.

Is it really the case that class and gender boundaries have disappeared from modern romance advice? Or is it possible, through a comparison of historical and contemporary advice materials, to observe a continued intertwining of gender and class in romantic discourse? Employing close reading and critical discourse analysis, this paper considers the relationship between gender, class and romance, and proposes a deeper consideration of the historical structures underpinning romantic love today.


Romancing the Taboo: The Marriage Law Challenge in Snape/Hermione Fanfiction

(Amanda Allen, Eastern Michigan University)

In No Future, Lee Edelman suggests that our politics fetishize a “cult of the Child,” our symbolic future that must be protected at all costs. The Child thus represents our reproductive futurism, our drive to live into the future. This drive propels the canonical texts of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, but it also emerges in the bodice-ripper-styled subset of Harry Potter fanon: Snape/Hermione fanfiction.

At the heart of SS/HG fanfiction is the recognition of the potential symbolic violence inherent in the taboo of the student/teacher relationship—a taboo that directly negates our drive to protect the child. While Rowling’s texts incorporate student Hermione (aged eleven to eighteen) and adult Snape (aged thirty-one to thirty-eight), many SS/HG writers appear uncomfortable with “shipping” characters of such differing ages and statuses. To protect the Child (Hermione), the majority of these writers attempt to normalize the power imbalance by changing the characters’ ages or time settings, incorporating authority figures (such as Dumbledore) to sanction the relationship, and legalizing sexual relations between Hermione and Snape under Ministry of Magic-approved laws.

This paper focuses on fics produced under the WIKTT (When I Kissed The Teacher mailing list) SS/HG “Marriage Law Challenge.” In these fics, the traditional “barrier” of popular romance—the reasons why the hero and heroine cannot marry (in this case, the student/teacher taboo)—is inverted, and becomes the reason why Snape and Hermione must marry; namely, to protect the Child. Yet this protection is doubled; while the marriage law fics use the institution of the Ministry of Magic to legitimize a taboo relationship, the overall purpose of the marriage law—to repopulate the Wizarding World—ensures that the fics remain fantasies of reproductive futurism. The Child is thus both sacrificed and saved by the romance narrative, thereby allowing the reader to celebrate the tabooed love between Snape and Hermione.


Anyone But Baby: Child-free Heroines, Heterosexual Romance, and Female Subjectivity in the Fiction of Jennifer Crusie and Emily Giffin

(Jessica Van Slooten, University of Wisconsin-Manitowoc)

As Myra Hird and Kimberly Abshoff conclude in their article "Women without Children: A Contradiction in Terms," “Feminism needs to be able to test its theories of women against the assumption that all women sexually reproduce. In other words, feminist theory needs to be able to authenticate childlessness as central to experiences of womanhood and femininity" (361). This theorization of child-free female subjectivity, while still nascent in feminist theory, is happening in practice—in women’s lives, and notably, in popular romance fiction. In Jennifer Crusie’s novels Anyone But You (1996) and Bet Me (2004) neither of the female protagonists want to have children. Rather than being a barrier to romantic fulfillment, this desire to live child-free strengthens the relationship between Nina and Alex, and Min and Cal, respectively. In these two novels. Crusie rejects the dominant culture narrative that romantic happiness necessitates a procreative future, and in doing so, theorizes a feminist female subjectivity that is not contingent upon bearing children.  In contrast, Emily Giffin’s novel Baby Proof (2007) suggests that motherhood is the price of maintaining true love, reinforcing theories that motherhood is central to adult womanhood and heterosexual marriage. Ultimately, the relationship between female subjectivity and motherhood is changing. According to the PEW Research Center, “nearly one-in-five American women ends her childbearing years without having borne a child, compared with one-in-ten in the 1970s” (“Childlessness Up Among...”). American women are increasingly choosing child-free lives, and popular fiction reflects these trends. While Crusie boldy suggests that female subjectivity and adult heterosexual romance can flourish because of a desire for a child-free life, Giffin reaffirms the dominant cultural narrative that places parenthood at the center of heterosexual marriage.


Love and Healing: Explorations of the value and meaning of Love in contemporary cinema

(Phil Matthews, Bournemouth University)

This paper will look at several selected contemporary cinematic romance examples and discuss how they utilize the cinematic narrative devise of the character arc model to inform and impress meaning and value to notions of Love, and whether these definitions have wider currency beyond the cinematic romance genre. 'HEA' or even 'HFN' are arguably pervasive in the romance genre but is this the case in cinematic notions of genre, and how do cinematic genre conventions respond and engage with these arguably widely accepted literary principles not least posited by Regis (2003). A story cannot be told about a protagonist who doesn't want anything, who cannot make decisions, whose actions effect no change at any level. (McKee, 1998. Pg. 138.) This paper will explore and discuss screenwriting narrative mechanisms for change in cinematic characters principally utilising the character arc form, and how motivations and decisions communicate meaning to an audience. In this way meaning and value can arguably be attributed to whatever a character pursues. The pursuit of love within cinematic narratives thereby has an assigned value and it is how cinematic narratives negotiate and work with this value whether consistently or not which will be explored and investigated within this paper. 

Romance I: Romance Across the Canon


The PCA/ACA annual conference is very special for romance scholars but not everyone can get there (I haven't even been once). We can, though, read the abstracts of papers which will be presented in the many sessions on romance. I'll be putting them up here at Teach Me Tonight, session by session.

Romance I: Romance Across the Canon (Fairy Tale, Shakespeare, Lit Fic)


Navigating the Fantasy of Romantic Love Through Popular Romantic Adaptations of "Cinderella"

(Margot Blankier, doctoral candidate at Trinity College Dublin's School of English)

This paper, part of a larger thesis project on “Cinderella” as fairy tale and American myth, will examine contemporary popular romance fiction that announce themselves as adaptations and use “Cinderella” as their structural framework. The narrative concerns of the popular romance and the fairy tale often overlap: in her article “Guilty Pleasures: Reading Romance Novels as Reworked Fairy Tales,” Linda J. Lee observes that classical fairy tales and romance fiction are both formulaic, invoke fantasy realms, and are often dismissed as trivial entertainments. However, where fairy tales are noted for their abstract and “depthless” characters, writers of contemporary popular adaptations of “Cinderella” justify the length of their novels by according their protagonists an interiority that, according to Max Lüthi’s The European Folktale, opposes the generic expectations of the fairy tale. In this way, the writers of these texts “betray” the expectations of the classical fairy-tale heroine by emphasizing her agency and wit over her “archetypal” qualities. She meets the prince character early in the novel and experiences an intense physical desire for him, but their relationship ebbs and flows over the course of the novel. Generally, the culmination of their relationship—the “happily ever after” ending—occurs after they have been “tested,” and the prince character has proved that he “deserves” the love of the Cinderella character. Thus, while the romantic implications of Cinderella’s marriage in Charles Perrault’s original fairy tale are largely reader-generated rather than textually present—there is no mention of love between the pair—writers of popular romance develop the physical and emotional relationship between Cinderella and the prince as the most important element of the story. This paper will consider the transformative power of love as a substitute for the fantasy aspect of fairy tale, the readerly movement between in and out of the textual world as a source of pleasure, and the stepmother figure as a source of repressive social milieu and patriarchy.

Texts to be considered include, but are not limited to, Eloisa James’ A Kiss at Midnight (2010), Claire Delacroix’s The Damsel (1999), Teresa Medeiros’ Charming the Prince (1999), Katherine Kingsley’s Once Upon a Dream (1997), Mercedes Lackey’s The Fairy Godmother (2004), and a selection of titles from Harlequin’s Silhouette Romance imprint.

(EMS:  Margot Blankier was unable to attend, but we hope to hear more about her research in the future!)

Taming Shakespeare: Historical Romance Novel Adaptations of Taming of the Shrew

(Tamara Whyte, Piedmont Virginia Community College)

Despite its less romantic elements, many romance novelists allude to and adapt William Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. In my research, I have found 40 romance novels since 2000 that allude to the play. Most of these novels have little to do with Shakespeare’s text, but six recent historical romance novels attempt to rewrite elements of the taming plot for a modern audience: Sabrina Darby’s Woo’d in Haste and Wed at Leisure, Johanna Lindsey’s The Devil Who Tamed Her, Christy English’s How to Tame a Willful Wife, and Eloisa James’s Kiss Me, Annabel and The Taming of the Duke. Darby breaks her adaptation into two separate narratives. The first, Woo’d in Haste, focuses on Bianca’s perspective, vilifying Kate. But then the second, Wed at Leisure, focuses on Kate, redeeming her. Lindsey’s novel adapts the taming plot to make it more acceptable to romance readers without changing the gender dynamic in which an aggressive man attempts to change the behavior of a woman who fails to conform to societal expectations for her sex. English includes a commentary on Shakespeare’s work within her adaptation. James depicts a failed taming attempt in Kiss Me, Annabel and inverts the gender roles in The Taming of the Duke. In my paper, I will analyze these various adaptations and appropriations of The Taming of Shrew with particular emphasis on how romance authors make the taming plot more palatable for modern romance authors. 


Love and the Machine: Romance in the Victorian Industrial Novel

(Sarah Ficke, Marymount University)

My most recent paper on popular romance (presented at this year’s IASPR conference) examined the Iron Seas steampunk series by Meljean Brook to discover how these texts configure the relationship between technology and humanity. I found that the language and actions of romantic relationships were instrumental in demonstrating a positive connection between people and technology in the stories. However, this made me wonder about the 19th-century novels that provide much of the foundation for steampunk. How did they represent romance within an industrialized, mechanized context? The paper I am proposing will answer this question by analyzing the role of romance and its relationship to technology in several important industrial novels from the Victorian period, including works like Hard Times by Dickens, North and South and Mary Barton by Gaskell, and Shirley by Charlotte Brontë. I will be using digital humanities tools to uncover language patterns and points of connection across the texts, as well as examining their individual representations of romance. I hope to discover how these industrial novelists imagined technology describing, enabling, or disrupting romantic relationships. This is part of my larger project on how steampunk romances adopt and reconfigure Victorian ideas about technology for a 21st-century world.


 “Stay away from my sister”: Romance and the Asian American Male Canon

(Erin Young, SUNY Empire State College)

No abstract provided.