Popular Romance Research Articles

Medieval English Manuscripts:

Medieval English Manuscripts:

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

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

She Got Her Man, But Could She Keep Him? Love and Marriage in American Romance Comics, 1947–1954

In 1947, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby published what is widely considered to be first romance comic. It was first issue of title called Young Romance, and it bore an orange banner proclaiming that it was Designed for more adult readers of comics! Below, an equally large block of text announced, All true love stories! Inside were five short narratives featuring romantic misadventures of naive high school students, starry-eyed factory worker, and sophisticated young nurse. With this, Simon and Kirby, best known to us today as creators of iconic Captain America, set formal and narrative conventions of romance comics.According to Simon, Young Romance was essentially a comic book version of popular True Story Magazine, with youthful, emotional, yet wholesome stories supposedly told in first person by love-smitten teenagers. Visually, magazine stories seemed natural conversion for comic (Simon and Simon 122). The smashing success of True Story, which had been around since 1919 and was known to sell two million copies per issue, may also have been factor (Marchand 54). After all, in his autobiography The Comic Book Makers, Simon was frank about his financial needs in wake of World War II. As allure of patriotic superheroes faded and true-crime comics began to attract unwelcome scrutiny for allegedly glamorizing crime and fostering juvenile delinquency, work in comic book field was sporadic - at least until romance comic boom (Duncan and Smith 36-37; Simon and Simon 122).Simon and Kirby's innovation paid off handsomely: like True Story, Young Romance was hit. Imitators piled in: within two years, over one hundred and twenty copycat titles glutted market, representing between twenty and twentyfive percent of total comic book sales (Nolan 44). The vast majority of these adhered to Simon and Kirby's first-person confessional formula, and like Young Romance, titles such as New Romances, Popular Romance, Thrilling Romances, Teen-Age Romances, Teen-Age Temptations, and Teen-Age Diary Secrets delivered several stories per issue that focused on romantic adventures of attractive but rather interchangeable young people. Unlike multi-issue sagas and recurring characters familiar to readers of superhero comics, or even serial newspaper strips that featured romantic themes (such as Brenda Starr or Mary Worth), romance comic books were anthologies: once narrator had finished recounting dramatic incident at heart of her story, she rarely made second appearance. The characters were not themselves memorable; they were essentially avatars of white, middle-class culture that assumed a dominant, almost hegemonic position in American society following World War II (Bailey 12).The majority of characters in romance comics reflected particular demographic that Young Romance and its followers hoped to attract: girls and young women who had outgrown humor-oriented teen highjinks of Archie and his ilk. Accordingly, romance comics featured high-school students, college coeds, secretaries, nurses, shop-girls, young wives, even some young mothers. In aftermath of World War Two II, rapid social changes made it entirely possible for girl to find herself fulfilling all of these roles within very short span of time. As historian Jessica Weiss put it, the timing of major transitions to adulthood collapsed as young people threw over accepted ordering of milestones to maturity, and couples rushed through major milestones: high school graduation, military enlistment or discharge, quickly followed by marriage, parenthood, and often, more schooling (21). Romance comics dealt with every one of hectic transitions that took place in lives of young women and addressed uncertainty that accompanied their rapidly shifting roles from daughter to spouse, student and worker to homemaker, carefree girl to responsible woman. …

A Companion to Medieval Poetry ed. by Corinne Saunders (review)

Reviewed by: A Companion to Medieval Poetry ed. by Corinne Saunders Sarah Tolmie Corinne Saunders, ed. A Companion to Medieval Poetry. Oxford: Blackwell, 2010. Pp. 704. £136.00; $218.95. This is perhaps the most comprehensive of the numerous handbooks and thematic collections edited by the tireless Corinne Saunders, who is clearly a scholar with an encyclopedic grasp of the big picture and a determination to get it out there to students in omnibus form. In so doing she does us all a huge favor in putting well-chosen, up-to-date scholarship into the hands of undergraduate and graduate students alike (I can now see this book appearing on numerous comprehensive exam reading lists, for example) and saving us from the same tired old round of articles students find on Google. The only potential problem—and this is one that resides more with the press than the editor—is that the book is fairly expensive. This is not a problem unique to Blackwell: it is also the case with many of the excellent companion volumes that have come out to support medieval teaching in recent years—The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, for example. I do find myself wondering from time to time, even as I rely on these books myself, and buy them on my research budget, if asking students to purchase massive books to carry around with their ever-tinier tablets is the most efficient way forward. But let us not get lost in another elegy for the literacy of the codex. The book’s title is misleading. It is not a companion to medieval poetry, but to medieval English poetry. Anne M. Scott, reviewing the book for Parergon, noted this too. It may seem a quibble, but it reveals a parochialism that the book is otherwise without, so it is too bad. Absolutely on the upside, however, is the fact that this is a companion to medieval English poetry. This is thrilling, especially to the formalist holdouts among us who teach poetry across several periods and insist on its autonomy and value. I will personally be assigning Saunders’s eight-page comprehensive introduction in several of my classes, both British literature surveys that begin in the Middle Ages, and in Middle English classes. She does a very good job of excavating a “living tradition” (3) of English poetry across languages and contexts in the period, rescuing it from the endless adhesions of cultural studies. She is much more temperate about this than I would be, as befits a scholar of medical humanities and the body who has read acres of paraliterary text in her time and incorporated them into her own work. Still, from the crankier new formalist end of the spectrum, I have to applaud the way this volume [End Page 433] treats poetry as a continuously evolving entity that Old English and Middle English scholars, codicologists, and others can talk to one another about—several essays are clearly in dialogue, notably Saunders’s own on Chaucer (which replaced a projected essay by Derek Brewer, to whom the book is dedicated) with Nancy Mason Bradbury’s chapter on popular romance. I also like the way the volume has doggedly insisted that there were “Poets and Poems” both in the fourteenth century and the fifteenth century, mutually assuring scholars of those periods and keeping the fire lit under the emergent idea of vernacular poetic authorship. This is not to say that the book is not fully respectful of time and tide. It moves chronologically and provides plenty of historical context from Old English and Anglo-Latin up to the end of the fifteenth century, as well as tracking evolving literacies and the history of the book. We get many of the usual suspects defending, or at least delineating, their bailiwicks: Andy Orchard on Old English and Latin, Ralph Hanna on Middle English manuscripts and readers, Helen Phillips on Chaucer’s dream-visions. Yet a few were more unexpected: Lawrence Warner on Piers Plowman rather than A. V. C. Schmidt, for example, who instead covers Pearl, Cleanness, and Patience. Not being an Old English scholar, I was not familiar with Daniel Anlezark, and enjoyed his two chapters on...

Two Troy Books: The Political Classicism of Walsingham’s Ditis ditatus and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde

Thomas walsingham, the benedictine monk best known for his chronicle accounts of late fourteenthand early fifteenth-century English political culture, composed a number of texts on classical poetry and prose that have gone almost entirely unnoticed by scholars. Between 1380 and 1394,1 while precentor and head of the scriptorium at St Albans, Walsingham wrote the Prohemia poetarum, which is an accessus ad auctores, or ‘‘introduction to the authors,’’ comprising some twenty-nine excerpts, with commentary, from classical and medieval writers: the Historia Alexandri magni principis, a life of Alexander the Great modeled in part on the popular Historia de praeliis romance; the Archana deorum, a complete summary of and commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which is often indebted to Alberic of London’s mythography; De bello civili, a short summary of Lucan’s Pharsalia; and Ditis ditatus, which is a prose narration, with much digressive commentary and

Reflections of Western lifestyle on social life in Muazzez Tahsin's novels,the popular romance author of Republicperiod

Reflections of Western lifestyle on social life in Muazzez Tahsin's novels,the popular romance author of Republicperiod

Disability Studies Reads the Romance

As the most popular of the popular genres, romance novels are an important site of investigation for cultural disability studies, a field concerned with the effects that representations of disability have on the world. The article explores the productive potentials of a dialogue between cultural disability studies and popular romance studies. With a focus on selected novels by Mary Balogh, a bestselling author of historical romance, the argument is that the frequent use of disabled characters, and the way in which those characters are depicted, positions all disabled characters as potential romantic actants, and encourages readers to reflect critically upon how they conceptualize disability.

Modernism and the women's popular romance in Britain, 1885-1925

Today's mass-market romances have their precursors in late Victorian popular novels written by and for women. In Modernism and the Women's Popular Romance Martin Hipsky scrutinizes some of the best-selling British fiction from the period 1885 to 1925, the era when romances, especially those by British women, were sold and read more widely than ever before or since. Recent scholarship has explored the desires and anxieties addressed by both low and high British culture in the decades straddling the turn of the twentieth century. In keeping with these new studies, Hipsky offers a nuanced portrait of an important phenomenon in the history of modern fiction. He puts popular romances by Mrs. Humphry Ward, Marie Corelli, the Baroness Orczy, Florence Barclay, Elinor Glyn, Victoria Cross, Ethel Dell, and E. M. Hull into direct relationship with the fiction of Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence, among other modernist greats.

Before the Bride Really Wore Pink

Before the Bride Really Wore Pink

Poison and romance: Oscar Wilde and the strange case of Edith Thompson

Oscar Wilde considered crime and sin no impediment to art or culture, as the case of the poisoner-artist-critic Thomas Wainewright (1794–1847) allowed him to demonstrate. English society of the time, as George Orwell famously declared, was as fascinated by poisoning as was Wilde. One of Orwell's cases was that of Edith Thompson who, along with her young lover, was convicted in 1922 in London of conspiracy to murder her husband whom it was alleged she had tried to poison. She and her lover were hanged in early 1923. Thompson's preoccupation with poison was entangled with her preoccupation with popular romance fiction of the day which she read copiously and discussed perceptively with her lover in the letters that helped to convict her. Her favourite novelist was Robert Hichens, the acquaintance, imitator and caricaturist of Wilde. She quoted Hichens's novel Bella Donna (1909) in letters to her lover, including on the practical matter of poison, which helped convince the jury of her guilt. Her trial, like Wilde's trials – all involving sexual transgression – raised the difficult question of whether literature could poison and influence for the worse its readers or whether it lay outside both morality and the world of action. Moreover, were Thompson's own letters literature and fantasy or were they oblique discussions of practical intent, including the intent to murder? As in the case of Wilde, a larger question supervened. In part through her reading, in part through her own experience, Edith came to believe, even before the murder, that freedom is an illusion, fate an inescapable reality.

Martin Hipsky (éd.), Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance in Britain, 1885-1925

Martin Hipsky addresses the popular romances of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century, that is, the best-selling novels of the time which, however, have not yet found their (rightful) place in literary history. Redressing the “romance gap”—mostly the work of women romance writers—aims at a better understanding of literary modernism and its connections with fin-de-siecle fiction. Studying the “low modern” shows how the traditional romance developed into new forms and how canonical mo...

Bad Animals and Faithful Beasts in Bevis of Hampton

Most medieval Europeans lived closely alongside animals in a way modern city-dwellers do not, and unsurprisingly the literature features animals in debate poems and fabliaux. Animals even receive their own literary subgenre, the bestiary. The popular Auchinleck Manuscript romance Bevis of Hampton (c. 1330) similarly features animals charged with spiritual significations. The Bevis poet does not let his fauna talk, at times stressing their animality in realistic touches—lions get hungry—yet also gives them moral agency, personifying and endowing them with fantastic and deadly powers. Dragons are “real” in the story and live for centuries without aging and fly between countries. Beyond having narrative functions, the animals of Bevis symbolize the themes of the poem and the spiritual choices and trials which Bevis repeatedly faces.

New Evidence for the Social Reach of “Popular Romance”: The Books of Household Servants

This article explores the ownership/readership of romance in late fifteenth- and early sixteenthcentury England. In particular, it examines the copy of Amis and Amiloun in London, British Library MS Harley 2386, owned by household servants in early Tudor Herefordshire. It also examines the copy of Sir Isumbras in Oxford, University College MS 142, owned successively by servants of the archbishop of Canterbury and minor landowners from Surrey. It discusses the codicological evidence connecting these individuals to each manuscript and details archival findings about the owners of these codices. It also suggests how such detailed information about reception history might affect our understanding of the “popular” nature of Middle English romance in late medieval England.

Medieval Romance, Medieval Contexts (review)

Reviewed by: Medieval Romance, Medieval Contexts Nicole Clifton Rhiannon Purdie and Michael Cichon, eds., Medieval Romance, Medieval Contexts. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2011. Pp. ix, 195. ISBN: 978–1–84384–260–6. $90. A collection of thirteen papers from the eleventh ‘Romance in Medieval Britain’ conference, this volume focuses on the medieval contexts shaping the production of medieval romance. First, in ‘The Pleasure of Popular Romance: A Prefatory Essay,’ Derek Pearsall wittily and gracefully retracts his 1965 article, ‘The Development of Middle English Romance.’ Pearsall now admits to his own delight in the repetitious elements of Middle English romance. ‘The leap of understanding is in realising that in asking for the wrong things…one misses all that is particular to the pleasure of romance, all those elements that have to do originally and essentially with oral presentation’ (11). Repetitive elements in the Middle English popular romances create a bond between audience and narrative, reinforcing communal values. Pearsall’s essay must become a classic; together, this and the 1965 piece illustrate the changes in attitudes toward and treatment of Middle English romance over the past half-century. Two essays discuss proverbial discourse, both folk and learned, in northern romances. In ‘Representations of Peasant Speech: Some Literary and Social Contexts for The Taill of Rauf Coilyear,’ Nancy Mason Bradbury argues for the Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf as an analogue to Rauf Coilyear. Unlike chronicle portrayals of common men sounding like animals, Bradbury’s texts present clever, articulate peasants using proverbs and traditional wisdom to vanquish kings. In ‘“As ye have brewd, so shal ye drink”: the Proverbial Context of Eger and Grime,’ Michael Cichon studies traditional comparisons, proverbs to do with women, and proverbs about reciprocity. Nicholas Perkins, in ‘Ekphrasis and Narrative in Emaré and Sir Eglamour of Artois,’ argues that the protagonists both act within exchange networks and are themselves objects of exchange, like the rich fabrics, weapons, and other courtly items in these texts. The descriptions, rather than interrupting the narrative, are integral to it, encouraging the audience to interact imaginatively with the romance and its materiality. Marianne Ailes queries traditional generic distinctions in ‘What’s in a Name? Anglo-Norman Romances or Chansons de Geste?’ Ailes argues that despite a few romance elements, the Anglo-Norman versions of Otinel, La Destruction de Rome, and the Roman de Horn are chansons de geste; the English translations become known as ‘romance’ because derived from French. Phillipa Hardman works with a related text in ‘Roland in England: Contextualixing the Middle English Song of Roland.’ She concludes that it is an ‘innovative treatment’ transforming the geste into Middle English romance, which leans toward black-and-white contrasts and piety (104). Another essay including Charlemagne material is Siobhain Bly Calkin’s study of ‘Romance Baptisms and Theological Contexts in The King of Tars and Sir Ferumbras.’ Both texts ‘explore extremely complex ideas about what makes a body Christian’ (119). In ‘“For Goddes loue, sir, mercy!”: Recontextualising the Modern Critical Text of Floris and Blancheflor,’ John Geck argues that ambiguity is an important theme in all four manuscript versions of Floris, while the Auchinleck manuscript extends this [End Page 110] by ‘mitigating’ the ‘religious ambiguity’ of the text (77). Robert Rouse also studies an Auchinleck text in ‘Walking (between) the Lines: Romance as Itinerary/Map.’ He uses maps and merchants to contextualize geographical movement in Guy of Warwick. Guy also features in Yin Liu’s ‘Romances of Continuity in the English Rous Roll,’ which asks whether John Rous thought he was writing romance or history in his armorial rolls. Liu concludes that late-medieval readers did not differentiate between the two, and that this means that romance ‘was directly relevant to immediate social and political concerns’ (159). Emily Wingfield likewise considers manuscript context in her essay, ‘“Ex Libris domini duncani / Campbell de glenwrquhay / miles’: The Buik of King Alexander the Conqueror in the Household of Sir Duncan Campbell, Seventh Laird of Glenorchy.’ Campbell owned two copies of Gilbert Hay’s work, whose flyleaves reveal a wide circle of readers; Campbell’s other books confirm the family as ‘significant early modern readers of medieval romance’ (174). Judith Weiss reconsiders ‘Modern and Medieval Views on Swooning...

Passion beyond death? Tracing "Wuthering Heights" in Stephenie Meyer's "Eclipse"

Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight tetralogy has lately become an enormously successful phenomenon in contemporary popular fiction, especially among a young adult readership. Regarded as a mixture of genres, the Twilight series can be described as a paradigm of contemporary popularculture gothic romance. Stephenie Meyer has recently acknowledged she bore one literary classic in mind when writing each of the volumes in the series. In particular, her third book, Eclipse (2007), is loosely based on Emily Brontë’s Victorian classic Wuthering Heights (1847). This paper aims at providing a comparative analysis of both Brontë’s novel and Meyer’s adaptation, taking into consideration the way the protofeminist discourse that underlines Brontë’s text is not only subverted but also acquires significantly reactionary undertones in Meyer’s popular romance despite its contemporariness.

ANDREW LANG, COMPARATIVE ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE CLASSICS IN THE AFRICAN ROMANCES OF RIDER HAGGARD

The long-standing friendship between Andrew Lang (1844-1912)1 and Henry RiderHaggard (1856-1925)2 is surely one of the most intriguing literary relationships ofthe Victorian era.3 Lang was a pre-eminent literary critic and his support forHaggard’s earliest popular romances, such as King Solomon’s mines (1885) andShe (1887), helped to establish them as leading models of the new genre ofimperial adventure fiction.4 Lang and Haggard co-authored The world’s desire(1890)5 and the ideas of Lang, who was also a brilliant Classics scholar, can beseen in many of Haggard’s works. There are some significant similarities betweenthe two men: both were approximate contemporaries who lived through the mostaggressive phase of British imperialism, both were highly successfully writers whoearned their living by their pens, both wrote prolifically and fluently on a wide range of subjects,6 both were largely self-educated, both were interested in thesupernatural, both had had unhappy experiences in love at first but later maintainedlong-lasting marriages, and both were men with powerful faculties of imagination.There are, of course, significant differences also: Lang was a gifted intellectualwho had won a fellowship at Oxford, a Homeric scholar, a poet with a gift forirony and humour, and one of the earliest exponents of the new science ofanthropological mythology; Haggard was less well educated and more seriousminded,he preferred action to ideas, was personally involved in the extension ofBritish rule in Southern Africa,7 and had a close experience of African tribal life.This article sets out to investigate the relationship between these two men, and toassess the extent to which Lang’s classical and anthropological thinking shaped thenarratives of Haggard, especially those set in his imperialistic fantasy of theAfrican continent.

The Transatlantic Indian, 1776–1930

The Transatlantic Indian, 1776–1930

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...

<i>Roderick Random</i>, Literacy, and the Appropriation of Plebeian Culture

This article characterizes Tobias Smollett's Roderick Random (1748) in terms of a specifically mid-eighteenth-century ambivalence about polite literacy and progress that both precludes its reading as a Bildungsroman and limits the utility of modelling the novel as an agent of empire. Though the preface and ending of the novel affirm traditional hierarchy, the digressive and peripatetic middle values such plebeian virtues in the protagonist as loyalty, righteous opposition to injustice, and manly competence, which are formal elements resembling such popular chapbook romances as Jack the Giant-Killer. Particularly significant are both the novel's portrait of Roderick's defiantly and virtuously impolite childhood and the depiction of maritime life as an alternative to the corruption and snobbishness of land-bound life, an alternate ethos that is complicated by its facilitation of the slave-trading that ultimately enables the Great House fantasy with which the novel concludes.

Si el caballo vos han muerto, y Blasón de los Mendozas (review)

Velez de Guevara, Luis. Si el caballo vos han muerto, y Blason de Mendozas. Ed. William R. Manson and C. George Peale. Introd. Javier Gonzalez and Valerie F. Endres. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2007. l67 pp.In a concerted effort to bring forth more attention to the works of Spanish Golden Age dramatist Velez de Guevara (1578-1644), William R. Manson and C. George Peale have edited and published rarely studied plays since 1997, including their latest, Si el caballo vos han muerto, y Blason de Mendozas, dated between 1625-1630, with introductions by Javier Gonzalez and Valerie F. Endres. This ambitious project stems from the fact that, as in the case of many of his contemporaries, not only are there significant research gaps in the vast majority of Velez de Guevara's extant plays (approximately seventy-five), but the number of modern editions of his works is limited. The authors continue their series by offering this particular edition because los mejores dramas de Luis Velez de Guevara son que se basan en la historia nacional ... y el mas destacado de todos ellos es Si el caballo vos han muerto (13).Based on a popular romance published in Flores del Parnaso, Octava parte (Toledo, 1596), which pays homage to historical figures Don Pedro de Gonzalez de Mendoza (1340-1385) and his son Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (1367-1404), Velez de Guevara contextualizes the glossed events in characteristic fabla antigua. The play dramatizes the relationship between Don Pedro, his son, and the king, culminating in Pedro's heroic actions in the Battle of Aljubarrota (1385), in which Pedro gave his horse to the king so that he could flee to safety, and, with no way to escape, Pedro falls in battle. Due in large part to this valiant and noble act, the Mendoza family continued on a path to greatness in power and wealth.In conjunction with Velez de Guevara's mastery of dramatic ambiance, dialogues, and recycling of legendary episodes well known to the public, Javier J. Gonzalez maintains that the dramatist's ingenuity in his creation of a theatrical world that makes the action in the romance come to life not only sets this historical play apart from many others in the genre, but it is an excellent example of the fame, popularity, and direct influence that traditional romances had on the Comedia Nueva during the first decades of the seventeenth century, particularly with regard to action and themes. Si el caballo is unique in that fue compuesta, y seguro representada, cuando estaba en auge el culteranismo que desterro por completo la recurrencia al romancero tradicional (15).Although Manson and Peale are the primary authors of the play's annotations (135-62), manuscript variants, versification analysis (31-39), and bibliographical information (41-47), Gonzalez and Endres share a surprisingly thin introduction to the work (sixteen pages total). …