Popular Romance Novels Research Articles

Post-Trump masculinity in popular romance novels

As an almost exclusively female-dominated medium, the popular romance novel has, throughout its history, allowed women writers to “amplify their political voice” (Teo, 2016, p. 102), especially when they could not actively participate in politics. Commonly, writers fashion storylines that reflect and process concerns from the real world in a fictional context. Using the Regency Romance as an example and based on Jayashree Kamblé’s theory that romance novels have a shared DNA that evolves in response to social and cultural influences, this paper first defines the figure of the romance hero in the pre-Trump era to segue into analysing selected novels published by Tessa Dare in 2011 (A night to surrender) and Sarah MacLean in 2012 (A rogue by any other name). This figure is then compared and contrasted with the incarnations of the hero in these authors’ publications from 2017 (The day of the duchess by MacLean) and 2019 (The wallflower wager by Dare) to map how his phenotype has evolved to reflect a shift in cultural perceptions regarding sex and sexual power dynamics. As I intend to show, in the wake of the 2016 US presidential election and the “#MeToo” movement, the new hero’s phenotype differs specifically in the expression of gendered power and sexuality. He is less forceful than his predecessors and places heavy emphasis on the heroine’s enthusiastic consent and pleasure.

The popularity of Korean romance novels in contemporary China: A feminist interpretation

AbstractThis essay deals with Korean romance novels translated into Chinese, especially the works of Kim Ha‐in and Guiyeoni which forms a pattern of cross‐cultural communication from the marginal culture to the center. Most studies treat them as an aspect of fast‐food culture that undermines serious literature, with little attention to this literary and cultural phenomenon. Why are Korean romance novels so popular in contemporary China? There are some answers from different perspectives. However, it is obvious that Korean romance novels offered Chinese women the opportunity to reconceptualize gender. This article contributes to criticism on the interface between Korean romance novels and Chinese feminism and further unveils the relationship between Korean popular romance novels and new interpretations of femininity in contemporary China. The success of Korean romance novels benefits from the conscious choice of Chinese readers in the cross‐cultural context, influenced by changes in Chinese women's concept of gender. The response to the aesthetic needs and expectations of readers has prompted the appearance of inverted cultural export, wherein such novels influence other cultures, reflecting upon and even challenging the gender concepts of other countries, which manifests the symbiotic relationship between popular literature and feminism.

Softcore romance: on naked heroes and beefcakes in popular romance novels

ABSTRACT This article seeks to contribute to ongoing debates about whether popular romance novels are pornography or not. I argue that we might reframe the question and instead of focusing on kinds, we might, rather, focus on degrees. For instance, how might scholars of the romance draw upon beefcakes, pin-ups, and softcore in these debates? To these ends, I consider various scenes from several novels in which the hero/male protagonist is naked and argue for a softer and thus a softcore reading. These scenes are divided into two categories: in the first, the hero is seen naked or imagined naked; and in the second, the hero is in the shower. Additionally, I draw upon both male/female and male/male romance novels to show why nakedness matters in the novel.

Superwomen, Latte Dads and Feminist Alphas: Negotiations on Feminism in Contemporary Swedish Popular Romance Novels

Superwomen, Latte Dads and Feminist Alphas: Negotiations on Feminism in Contemporary Swedish Popular Romance Novels

Marketing Love: Romance Publishers Mills & Boon and Harlequin Enterprises, 1930–1990

When Harlequin Enterprises acquired British publisher Mills & Boon in 1972, the merged firm became the world’s dominant publisher of popular romance novels. Little is known, however, about the role that innovative marketing strategies played in the growth of these two romance publishing companies, especially their use of product sampling, direct mail, product standardization, and what was known at Mills & Boon as the “personal touch.” Through research in the Mills & Boon company archive at the University of Reading, the Grescoe Archive at the University of Calgary, as well as an analysis of company histories, trade publications, interviews, and marketing techniques, this study reveals how Harlequin and Mills & Boon took a different approach to product promotion than traditional publishers. Their innovation was to incorporate consumer goods marketing strategies, familiar to other industries, that disrupted and redefined standard practices of book publishers.

멜로드라마와 4.19 혁명의 서사적 절합 - 박경리의 1960년대 대중연애소설 『푸른 운하』, 『노을 진 들녘』 다시 읽기

멜로드라마와 4.19 혁명의 서사적 절합 - 박경리의 1960년대 대중연애소설 『푸른 운하』, 『노을 진 들녘』 다시 읽기

The Disruption of Victorian Class and Gender Norms

During the late-nineteenth century, discussions surrounding female shop assistants permeated British society and culture appearing in newspapers, popular romance novels and political literature. Ultimately, through romantic literary and cultural texts “the shopgirl” emerged as a social construction, obscuring and shaping the experiences and identity of “ordinary” female shop assistants. While Victorian gender norms attempted to restrict women to the domestic sphere, the study of shopgirls illuminates the social anxieties and gender discourses that emerged alongside shifting consumption practices in Britain, resulting in the breakdown of separate gendered spaces. This paper will argue that the emergence of female shop assistants and the socially constructed “shopgirl” in the latter half of the nineteenth century transformed pre-existing Victorian class and gender norms in British society. Not only did shopgirls embody fantasies connected to consumer culture, but disrupted class and gender norms resulting in a variety of social anxieties, pertaining to the loss of female domesticity, social mobility, morality, as well as the dangers of London for women.

Representations of Nation and Spanish Masculinity in Popular Romance Novels: The Alpha Male as “Other”

The alpha hero embodies the hegemonic masculinity that has long dominated romance fiction. The portrayal of this male type is, however, problematized when he is an exotic foreigner, as his hyper-heterosexualized masculinity is often associated with the gender backwardness of his country. This article is concerned with popular romance novels set in Spain in the 1970s. It explores how British authors rely on gender and national clichés that construct an essentialized image of Spanish men. The primitive and instinctual masculinity attributed to them reveals these novels’ complicity with the ideology of Britain’s superiority.

The Purity of His Maleness

“The Purity of His Maleness: Masculinity in Popular Romance Novels” seeks to open a discussion between critical studies of men and masculinities and popular romance studies. The phrase “purity of his maleness” is taken from Janice Radway’s groundbreaking study of the popular romance novel, and from this vantage, the article considers how critical studies of men and masculinities might think about, respond to, and engage popular romance novels and scholarship.

Illustrating Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

Abstract Throughout the nineteenth century, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) was repeatedly picked up for publication; however, it was slow to be illustrated. Austen tells the story of the Bennet family, as the five girls in the family come of age and are seeking husbands. Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet become the titular characters, and have inspired millions of readers for them to root for their union. The book, of which the countless film adaptations attest, has found a lasting audience. Through an examination of the publishers and the various artists that worked on the editions, I want to examine how the book epitomized trends in the publishing industry. Key publishers like Richard Bentley and J. M. Dent, hired some of the most important illustrators of the time, including John Gilbert, John Proctor, C. E. Brock, Hugh Thomson and Chris Hammond. Through an examination of the artists and the illustrations, we can begin to examine the popularity of the book and why this endearing novel’s popularity is so lasting. Focusing on characters, fanciful clothing and revelatory conversations, these illustrators contributed to the books’ position as one of the most popular romance novels of the century.

New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction: Critical Essays Sarah S.G.Frantz and Eric MurphySelinger, Editors. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012.

New Approaches to Romance Fiction: Critical Essays Sarah S.G. Frantz and Eric Murphy Selinger, Editors. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012.In his pioneering study of popular fiction, Adventure, Mystery and Romance (1976), John Cawelti characterizes formulaic romance as equivalent of adventure story (41). He concludes: No doubt coming age of women's liberation will invent significantly new formulas for romance, if it does not lead to a total rejection of moral fantasy of love triumphant (42). In 1982, Tania Modleski, author of Loving With a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women observes One cannot find any writings on popular feminine narratives to match aggrandized titles of certain classic studies of popular male genres (11). Author of Love's Sweet Return: The Harlequin Story (1984) Margaret Ann Jensen explains and literature scholars have failed to produce critical essays on romance because it is vilified as is no other category of popular fiction (25). Nearly thirty years later, Jonathan Allen, in June 2013 issue of Journal of Romance Studies notes Popular Romance Studies is a new enough that canon of relevant scholarship has yet to be established (1). Evidence of this is illustrated by content of The Journal of American Culture's March 2013 special issue on love and romance-the guest editor describes popular romance novels as the most recognizable media form of romance... so pervasive that it has its own genre with several subgenres and dominates publishing field (2). Yet this special issue contains no critical essays on popular romance fiction.No matter. In their introduction to New Approaches to Romance Fiction - Critical Essays, Frantz and Selinger, editors and contributors to book, offer a fascinating, comprehensive, and surprisingly concise history of scholarship on popular romance fiction. The slow maturation of scholarly work on romance is due, they argue, to obstacles genre must overcome: it is sentimental and emotional, written and read by women, and embraced by mass-culture marketplace (3). Happily, this volume marks a move away from a defense of formulaic romance to a more nuanced and self-assured apologetic.Seventeen remarkably erudite and instructive essays are organized into four parts. Part One, Close Reading Romance, provides a cultural context for romance including a historical romance novel set in Middle East, lessons on how to read romance novel with heart and mind, an interrogation of rewriting of masculinity within erotic paradigm of dominance and submission, and a compelling argument for numerous hegemonies-beyond patriarchal structures and feminist criticism-that plague romance fiction. …

Some Glittering Nondescript Vertebrate: The Provocative Style of Realism in Howells’ A Hazard of New Fortunes

In his 1891 realist manifesto Criticism and Fiction, W. D. Howells pits his watchful eye against both the literary stylist, whose skills are “wasted in preening and prettifying,” and the hoodwinked reader, whose perceptual capacities are bedazzled and whose judgment is lulled by glamour or mystery.1 For Howells, realist perception is a quality for the writer and the reader alike to refine in order to escape the allure of artificial discourse, which rears its head in popular romance novels, imitations of past literary forms, prose that dwells on its own style rather than on truth, and advertisements that ignite desire. Criticism and Fiction thus promotes a two-pronged agenda, taking both writers and readers to task for succumbing too easily to the temptation to indulge in emotion, desire, and literary style when they ought to privilege the common stuff of real observation. Howells’ polemics stridently eschew both literature that enacts or induces misperceptions of reality and readers who embrace such literature. What emerges is a double definition of realism: it names observation as a mode of unmediated literary production, while it also identifies observation as a mode of reception that is mediated by the good judgment and common sense of the realist writer. Thus, even as realist representation implies a direct conduit from reality to text, effacing the mediating role of the writer in forming the text, realism as Howells would have it also constructs the selective intellectual frame that is necessary for its own apparently unmediated perception of the real. Critics have taken Howells to task on both accounts—for a naive faith in (or, alternately, for his anxious insistence on) the referentiality of his texts and, despite his avidly professed progressivism, for a transparent organizing

“Less Than Perfect”: Negotiating Breast Cancer in Popular Romance Novels

“Less Than Perfect”: Negotiating Breast Cancer in Popular Romance Novels

Disabled Sexuality, Incorporated

In light of the recent proliferation of disabled characters in popular romance novels, this article examines the implications for disabled sexuality of increased visibility within the popular romance genre. Focusing on a subset of novels with cognitively disabled characters allows us to see how these narratives move to contain and discipline disability, both by literally and figuratively incorporating it into able-bodiedness, and by rehabilitating it via the transformative power of heterosexual romance. In so doing, these narratives make plain the ideological conjunction between heterosexuality and able-bodiedness; moreover, they demonstrate how visibility within such a popular medium functions largely as an adaptive strategy to contain the threat that disabled sexuality represents, and to impose on disabled people the intertwined ideological demands of compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory able-bodiedness. Despite the limitations imposed by these ideologies, both disabled and nondisabled readers ofte...

Songs as a Medium for Embedded Reproductive Messages

Research shows that sensational news stories as well as popular romance novels often feature themes related to important topics in evolutionary psychology. In the first of four studies described in this paper we examined the song lyrics from three Billboard charts: Country, Pop, and R&B. A content analysis of the lyrics revealed 18 reproductive themes that read like an outline for a course in evolutionary psychology. Approximately 92% of the 174 songs that made it into the Top Ten in 2009 contained one or more reproductive messages, with an average of 10.49 reproductive phrases per song. Although differences in the frequency of different themes between charts were found, further analyses showed that the most popular/bestselling songs contained significantly more reproductive messages. An analysis of the lyrics of opera arias and art songs also revealed evidence for many of the same embedded reproductive messages extending back more than 400 years.

Blood Ties: The Vampire Lover in the Popular Romance

A perusal of the popular novel section in any bookstore will affirm that the paranormal, and specifically the vampire figure, is enjoying a resurgence of interest among readers. Not to be outdone, the film and television industry is currently benefiting from this interest and producing works like the film Twilight, based on the book by Stephanie Meyer, and the TV show True Blood, based on Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse series. That these particular examples originate from novels that fall into the popular romance genre is not unexpected. According to statistics brought out by Romance Writers of America, in 2009, the paranormal subgenre made up 17.16% of the popular romance genre, which in itself comprised 54% of all books sold by the publishing industry.1 Until a few years ago, only a few popular romance authors, for instance, Christine Feehan, Emma Holly, and Sherilyn Kenyon, were writing paranormals. Since then, this subgenre, and with it the preponderance of vampires as lovers that feature in these books, has increased exponentially in terms of sales and popularity; so much so that well established authors in the field who were usually linked to historical or contemporary romances, such as Norah Roberts, Heather Graham, and Christina Dodd, are now writing paranormals. That the paranormal, and by extension the vampire figure, would appear so prominently in popular romance novels is not altogether surprising as the romance genre is one that is dynamic and constantly reflecting and lending itself to the inclusion of current social and cultural trends.2 In the paranormal romances, the conventions and practices of the vampire found in horror novels are appropriated and transformed by popular romance writers into the essence of women's fantasy heroes. In these novels, the image of vampire as predator and, more importantly, the taking of blood or the blood exchange between the protagonists become the very elements that enhance, consolidate, and secure the couple's romantic relationship. Though the traditional vampire with its association with evil or its persona as an agent of the devil may seem an unlikely model for the archetypal popular romance hero, the vampire hero, in fact, follows closely the paradigm of what Jane Gordon calls the sympathetic vampire. Gordon differentiates between the vampire figures in horror novels as inherently evil whose over [their] prey is both extraordinary and cruel (230), and the sympathetic vampires who rather than being super-killers are super-survivors (230). These vampires must live in harmony with their world, be flexible, adaptable, and possess stamina, writes Gordon, adding that in this new depiction the sympathetic vampire retains its strength, but loses its terror (230). Gordon goes on to suggest that generally women who write about the vampire avoid the horror genre as, in that particular genre, relations reflecting the cultural male view where the is subjugated to his will are reproduced. In contrast, according to Gordon, in women's vampire fiction there is no hierarchy of where either the male or are the dominant figures but instead a partnership based on equality is formed. The relationships reflect female notions of power where [the] does not involve a rigid chain of command or competition; instead it focuses on cooperation and endurance (230). This view is especially pertinent when considering the vampire romance novel (a genre predominantly written by women for women) which sets out to redefine perceptions of the traditional vampire and vampire lore. Typically, the vampire archetype in the paranormal romance adheres closely to the model of the Gothic romance hero in the Heathcliffean or Byronic mode, a standard in the romance novel genre. In the gothic romances, the hero is usually depicted as dark and brooding, writhing inside with all the residual anguish of his shadowed past, world-weary and cynical, quick-tempered and prone to fits of guilt and depression. …

FRANCOIST POLITICS OF FEMALE IDENTITY: THE CURIOUS CASE OF LIDA VERONA

FRANCOIST POLITICS OF FEMALE IDENTITY: THE CURIOUS CASE OF LIDA VERONA

Constrained Writing, Creative Writing: The Case of Handbooks for Writing Romances

This article broadens the concept of “constrained writing” by applying it to a less prestigious domain of literature, namely, popular romance novels. In order to find out how constraints play a role in writing and publishing such commercial texts, a corpus of handbooks for writing romances is carefully analyzed. Such handbooks meticulously guide aspiring writers through the entire process of writing romances, from the first ideas to the final act of having their texts published. This product- and process-orientated approach is ultimately based on a number of discursive strategies that enable the aspiring writer to conceive of romance writing as an accessible and feasible yet highly constrained activity. In this article, three such dominant strategies are carefully discussed. One is the handbooks' constant appeal to the reading experience of the romance. Another is their conceptualization of writing as a craft and a profession and their infrequent but functional use of explicitly normative language. Finally, the role of the genre's highly influential institutional context in the handbooks' formulation of generic norms and constraints is considered as well. This article ultimately demonstrates the broad applicability of the notion of constrained writing to many forms of literature.

Review of *From Australia with Love: A History of Modern Australian Popular Romance Novels*, by Juliet Flesch

Juliet Flesch, From Australia with Love: A History of Modern Australian Popular Romance Novels, Fremantle, WA: Curtin University Books, 2004. Paperback, $29.95

Hausa Women Writers Confronting the Traditional Status of Women in Modern Islamic Society: Feminist Thought in Nigerian Popular Fiction

This essay explores a burgeoning corpus of contemporary Hausa literature from northern Nigeria. These popular romance novels are an exploratory forum for the socially and culturally loaded issues of polygamy, marriages of coercion, purdah (the Islamic tradition of seclusion), and education for females. While the writers themselves insist that their ultimate intention is to exemplify proper moral behavior, other socially reformative didactic intentions are unmistakable in these books. The article focuses on a conservative writer, Bilkisu Ahmed Funtuwa, and a progressive writer, Balaraba Ramat Yakubu, and shows that both are feminist in valuing education, justice under Islamic law for women, and reform in the name of Islamic law. Whether traditionalist or modernizing, this romance literature is the target of widespread hostile conservative criticism even while steadily producing national bestsellers; these works have assumed the thankless task of suturing diverse social attitudes.