Romantic Adventure Research Articles

A “Glorious” Dream of Awkward Romance: Humor and Desire in Wang Yun’s (1749-1819) Fanhua meng

AbstractWang Yun’s (1749-1819) Fanhua meng (A Dream of Glory, 1769) is one of the very few extant chuanqi plays written by women in late imperial China. Its female protagonist, who is frustrated by social restrictions placed on women, transforms into a man in a dream. The dream content revolves around the protagonist’s romantic adventures, which feature many awkward and laughable moments. As a fantasy about transgender experience, Fanhua meng has been the subject of critique for its embrace of patriarchal values as well as praise for its reflection on patriarchal depravity. These conflicting views attest to the complexity of Wang Yun’s use of humor in the play. This article explores how and why Wang Yun depicts her protagonist’s journey of desire in a comic mode, and how Wang’s contemporary male readers responded to Wang’s humor. It argues that Wang’s use of humor provides a palatable coating for a provocative reflection on the male privilege of being a desiring subject. As a whole, Wang’s play challenges the vision of worldly success promoted by the long-established and male-dominated chuanqi drama tradition. As a case study, this article draws attention to humor as a mode of self-writing for women writers in late imperial China.

Rhapsody of Modern Drama through

Abstract With the Lazarillo published anonymously in Spain in the 16th century, the romantic adventure changed paradigm and emancipated itself from the novels of chivalry. For Jean-Pierre Sarrazac, this picaresque novel brings a new voice to the theatre and modern drama that will evolve into a fundamental novelisation that will take off from 1880. This text was for a long time attributed to the humanist Diego Hurtado de Mendoza y Pacheco and the list of suspects is long akin to this “rhapsodic impulse” those multiple voices that each give a different interpretation to the same text, and that Jean-Pierre Sarrazac exhibits in his book Poétique du drame moderne, de Ibsen à Jean-Marie Koltès (2012). In this investigation of the Lazarillo, the modern drama, from the death of Hurtado in Madrid in 1575, will explore in substance and form the paradoxical question of drama in opening the doors of perception to fictional characters who are also gifted with life, if not our life, in a world where the true and the false mix while the opposing forces carry humanity towards a destiny worthy of Orwell’s 1984, but in the echo of the drama, the voice of the rhapsodes continues to resonate.

Uma preceptiva do Oitocentos

Durante o final do século XIX, circularam diversos manuais de cunho pragmático no Brasil. Concebidos como obras a orientar práticas profissionais, elas também poderiam ser lidas à luz de determinados preceitos retóricos, que se supunham extintos com o advento do Romantismo. Neste trabalho, examina-se o Novo manual epistolar ou Arte de escrever, de Machado Coelho, publicado em 1882.

Practices of (self)exclusion. ‘Minority’ and ‘marginality’ within Romanian literature

Being part of the European literary system has almost been an obsession for Romanian writers since the advent of Romanticism during the first half of the 19th c. At that time, Europeanization was translated in the literary field as the introduction of French genres, modes, and rhetoric. Several other cultural influences were to follow, the accommodation of which, against the background of what came to be termed as “national spirit”, could not dislocate the perception of irrelevance and marginality that haunted the Romanian intellectual imaginary for over a century. A very consistent debate was carried in the philosophical circles between the two world wars on the topic of cultural minority, to be later reiterated in the 1970s-1980s, as part of a political agenda. In this context, my paper will analyze how the awareness of participating to a minor literary culture could lead to developing an inferiority complex that sometimes took the guises of negation and/or exaggeration. The ambiguity that was displayed by most of the literary critics and historians towards reintegrating exile writers into the national literary canon is one very conspicuous feature of this attitude. Also, the paper will discuss the various interpretations of ‘minority’ with Romanian literary and cultural critics.

Belaboring the Maritime Novel: The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, Sea Fiction, and Constituent Power

In this article, I argue that Joseph Conrad’s revision of popular maritime fiction in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897) stages the anachronistic nature of romantic adventure in modernity in order to recuperate its own recognition of the revolutionary capacity of the body and collective labor. Throughout his work, Conrad participates in a range of popular genres, often engaging with, and drawing on, multiple genres in the space of a single novel. His formal flexibility at least partially accounts for his complex critical legacy as a writer who exposes the imperialist ideology in which he participates. The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, however, demands that we partially amend our notion of Conrad’s deconstructive aesthetic. This approach helps to clarify how the novella engages in critical self-reflection as it reveals the fragile constructedness of both genre and history. In adapting the genre of sea fiction, Conrad places pressure on extant tensions within the genre, especially around labor, and nearly renders the romantic adventure untenable. However, this pressure ultimately becomes an adaptive strategy to confront growing anxiety around imperial interdependency, including the rejection of commodified labor. At a moment in imperial history when the recognition of global interdependence and antagonism threatens the ideological, economic, and political underpinnings of imperialism, Conrad adapts the flexibility of sea fiction to confront this mounting pressure on the imperial consciousness and thus to reconstruct a more flexible representation of imperial relations.

MY READING HABIT

3 6 Y M Y R E A D I N G H A B I T P A U L A M A R A N T Z C O H E N I was a great childhood reader. Between the ages of seven and seventeen, my nose was always in a book. This was viewed as a sign of unusual precocity, and I received much acclaim for it from my parents and teachers. Looking back, however, I realize that I began reading by default and continued doing so out of habit. The philosopher William James wrote insightfully about the role of habits in our lives. He explained that we form habits through practice but that they eventually become embedded in our character: ‘‘So far as we are thus mere bundles of habit, we are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves,’’ he wrote. Our habits, in short, are us, and my reading habit helped make me who I am. Habits form for many reasons, but often because they are useful in some immediate, often primitive, context. Was my childhood reading habit the result of my being hungry for knowledge? No. I read because I was a self-conscious and anxious child; books were soothing forms of escape. As a teenager, I lacked athletic acumen and had problems with my skin, not to mention my hair; it seemed safer to stay inside with a book than to display my imperfections to the world and be picked last for the team. 3 7 R My parents, children of Jewish immigrants, had jettisoned the old-world Bible in favor of secular literature. They saw my reading as what James would call a ‘‘moral habit,’’ and allowed me to skip meals and bypass chores when I was engaged in it. ‘‘Lower your voice; Paula is reading,’’ I would hear my mother whisper as I lay stretched out on the couch engrossed in, say, The Old Curiosity Shop or the third volume of The Forsythe Saga. I was applauded if I finished a book, especially if the book was long and a classic. Such reverence for what felt like a pleasure, if not an indulgence, was an incentive for me to read more. The books that fed my reading habit fell within the tradition of the English domestic novel – those nineteenth-century tripledeckers that ended with the hero and heroine united in perfect harmony. The promise of a final clinch (not always represented, but all the more satisfying in being left to the imagination) was what kept me reading. These books were romances in the narrow definition of the word – love stories. The term romance has a broad as well as a narrow definition. The Romance languages – French, Spanish, and Italian – are derived from Latin, the language of the Church and of erudition, but used for everyday life and for popular story and folklore. As the novel emerged as a genre in the eighteenth century, romance became a≈xed to a combination of the mundane colloquial and the idealized make-believe (the word for novel in French is roman and in Italian romanzo). Henry James (William’s younger, novelwriting brother) explained the amalgam in his preface to The American: ‘‘The real represents to my perception the things we cannot possibly not know sooner or later. . . . The romantic stands . . . for the things that . . . only reach us through the beautiful subterfuge of our thoughts and our desire.’’ Novels are the place where the real and the romantic meet and are interwoven. The books that constituted my reading habit were, as I said, love stories, but they were also romantic in the sense James described : they drew on a world that was recognizable in its broad outlines but arranged to produce an idealized, emotionally satisfying conclusion. In this sense, they were not so di√erent from the romantic adventure stories that fed my husband’s reading habit. He, like me, had read voraciously growing up, but where my favored stories culminated in the heroine’s marriage, his led to the 3 8 C O H E N Y hero’s triumph over physical obstacles and fierce adversaries. Our respective tastes conformed to...

“[A] glowing gold tinge on the waters of the Pantai”: Conrad’s challenge to the narrative of economic success in Almayer’s Folly

The exotic setting of Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly suggests the novel’s affinity to the adventure romance, a genre popular in the final decades of the nineteenth century. However, readers expecting a story of dangerous exploits in the remote lands (or seas) must be disappointed. As Andrea White showed in Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition, Conrad challenges the romance convention by contrasting a life full of adventures, which can only be glimpsed from afar, with the protagonist’s mundane existence. The aim of my paper is to take White’s argument further, and to present Conrad’s first novel not only as a challenge to the late-Victorian romance tradition but also to any narrative of (economic) success which accompanied colonial ventures. Conrad exposes both the myth of the adventurer, whose luck coupled with daring enables him to find a treasure, and the myth of a self-made man, whose perseverance and hard work in the colonies ensure his financial success.

The River People in Flood Time: The Civil Wars in Tabasco, Spoiler of Empires

The River People in Flood Time: The Civil Wars in Tabasco, Spoiler of Empires

Explaining Extremism: Western Women in Daesh

Despite deeply conservative and gendered regulation, brutal violence, and widespread coverage of the group’s use of rape, more than 600 women have left Western countries to join Daesh. Researchers explain this recruitment primarily through women’s desire for romantic adventure, deception on social media, and anti-Western sentiment spurred by discrimination and violence in their home states. Using an original dataset of social media activity from seventeen Western female recruits between 2011-2015, we evaluate these arguments and offer a new explanation centered on a religious and political ideology that necessitates a physical hijra (migration) to Iraq or Syria. We find consistent evidence that anti-Western sentiment and ideological commitment drive women’s migration. This finding has valuable implications for counterterrorism policy and security studies, which tend to treat women’s mobilization as separate from general extremism. Our findings suggest female recruits should be taken seriously as motivated insurgents intent on establishing an Islamic caliphate.

Till death did us part: love and marriage in supernatural classic film in Argentina

Comedy was one of the main genres in the embourgeoisement that Argentine cinema went through in the 1940s. This process proposed a sophisticated universe where young bourgeois men and women could carelessly and recklessly have romantic adventures, and untouchable social institutions such as marriage and work life could be questioned. This approach was made possible by resorting to narrative forms such as parody and farce, and recurring motifs like supernatural elements that displaced the action to unreal scenarios where social order could be mocked. Movies such as Cita en las estrellas (Carlos Schlieper, 1949) and El extrano caso de la mujer asesinada (Boris H. Hardy, 1949) articulated heavenly afterlife settings with critical stances about monogamy and eternal love, while, at the same time, presenting new female characters for the Argentine film screen.

Kaunokirjallisuus kansallisuuspolitiikan palveluksessa

Literature in the Service of a Nation’s Policies. Representations of Ethnicity in the Works of J. A. Friis The novel Fra Finmarken. Skildringer by Jens Andreas Friis (1821–1896), published in Norwegian in 1881 and generally known by the name Lajla, is a hugely popular description of the Sami. As many as 15 editions of the book have been published in Norway, and there are three movies and even an opera based on it. Lajla has been translated into Finnish, Swedish, Dutch, German, English, Russian and French, to name a few. The book was included in Norwegian schools’ reading materials until the 1980s. J. A. Friis was a professor of Sami and Kven languages who actively engaged in societal activities, focusing on the ethnic issues in Northern Norway. He made public many problems of the Sami people and stood against the drastic, assimilating language policy. However, Friis’s actions and writings reflect the idea, typical to that time and based on the concept of cultural hegemony and racial hierarchy, that in terms of race and culture, the Sami people are at a lower level than Norwegians. The Sami -representations in his literary works are idealising and romanticising but also discriminatory and belittling. He refers to the Kven people as the agents of almost metaphysical evil. We are used to thinking of Lajla as a positive representation of the Sami. In my article, I study the representations of racial hierarchy in Lajla as well as the discrepancy between the ethnicising descriptions and the reputation of the work. The reputation of the book as a positive representation can be explained through three points: first, Friis’s public activities to defend the Sami; second, the fact that Lajla’s presentation of the Sami matched the expectations of the audience; and third, that the book is a romantic, exciting and naive adventure story and has as such been excluded from the canon of national literature.

Confessions of an ambidextrous fiddler crab

Confessions of an ambidextrous fiddler crab

Prose Fiction as a Narrative Companion for a Vegetable Parenting Videogame.

The purpose of this research is to explore the capacity of story to connect to a health-related videogame, as well as the qualities that may increase efficacy by making the story compelling. Parents of 3-5-year-old children often report difficulty getting their children to eat vegetables, which are protective against chronic illnesses. Videogames may be vehicles for training parenting practices for successful vegetable consumption outcomes but often rely on stories to provide context and details. Unfortunately, storytelling may interrupt immersion and player agency. Delivering stories outside of gameplay may provide an understanding of game situations while maintaining immersion. Two companion storylines (one a romantic adventure and the other a suspenseful fantasy) were generated for a vegetable parenting game, "Mommio," targeting mothers of preschool children. Mothers of 3-5-year-old children (n=18) read both storylines and completed semistructured interviews. Mothers preferred the romantic adventure, which featured strong characters, relatable issues, and an engaging plot. Most mothers were interested in playing the "Mommio" videogame after reading the stories. Results suggest that it is possible for prose literature to both motivate gameplay and be an immersive narrative companion to, but separate from, games for health. This literature should include engaging, realistic stories and relatable strong characters.

Poland in the Cultural Imaginary of Early Modern England

The King of is a personage invoked intermittently in English world of late 16th and early 17th century. Sometimes a reference to Polish king summons up a fairy tale fantasy on a par with tales about Sophy of Persia or Emperor of China-the ruler of a faraway land full of exotic surprises. This is how he figures in Francis Beaumont's The Knight of Burning Pestle, a play performed in a private theater, probably Blackfriars, to an upscale audience of courtiers, gentlefolk, merchants, and prosperous citizens sometime between 1607 and 1611.2 There citizen's wife casts her beloved apprentice, Rafe, as hero of a quest that involves perilous and romantic adventures. Having just learned that Rafe cannot share stage with Sophy of Persia because that story is stale and has already been played at Red Bull, a neighboring London theater, grocer's wife, undaunted, declares:Let Rafe travel over great hills, and let him be very weary, and come to King of Cracovia's house, covered with black velvet, and there let king's daughter stand in her window all in beaten gold, combing her golden locks with a comb of ivory, and let her spy Rafe, and fall in love with him, and come down to him, and carry him into her father's house, and then let Rafe talk with her. (4.33-39)Moments later, King of Cracovia's daughter appears on stage as richly adorned perhaps as citizen's wife demands: with gold, ivory, and black velvet. The Princess then says to Rafe: Welcome, sir knight, unto my father's court, / King of Moldavia; unto me, Pompiona, / His daughter dear (4.56-58). King of Moldavia, King of Cracovia-these are interchangeable terms in quixotic world of this play. Never mind that Prince of Moldavia was with Turkish ambassador at English court in November 1607.3It is harder to decipher phrase the King of Poland when Edward Herbert of Cherbury uses it. Herbert wrote several books, including philosophical work De Veritate (Of Truth), which he published in 1624 in Paris while he was King James's ambassador to France. Samuel Hartlib (who grew up in Poland) reported of Herbert in 1639 that Of whole Booke he said Hee had rather bee Author of it if he were put to his choice then to bee King of Poland (30/4/31A, Ephemerides, Part 4). How should we interpret this statement, even if we make allowances for Herbert's saturnine sense of humor? It suggests that for Herbert- who was evidently proud of his book and feeling grandiloquent about it-being King of is next best thing. Polish kingship is an influential and progressive position on forefront of advanced thinking. This also suggests to me a veering away from fiction to fact-where is not a fantasy land but a historical kingdom of political importance.4How, then, does figure in imagination of English during early modern period? The question gains in complexity given 's long political and cultural relationship with Lithuania.5 Obviously, answer will differ depending on particular time and persons involved. The scope of this essay, for example, does not permit discussion of Kazimierz Sarbiewski (1595- 1640), the Polish Horace, who spent most of his career in Lithuania and whose Latin odes were admired and imitated in 1640s and later by likes of Henry Vaughan, Lucy Hutchinson, Richard Lovelace, Edward Benlowes, Abraham Cowley and Andrew Marvell (Rostvig 15).6 Although mindful that much has been left out, this essay, nevertheless, purports to offer a general overview of some key events and developments mediating English view of in years 1570 to 1650. In keeping with my understanding of Herbert of Cherbury's cryptic remark, essay argues that appears as a site of political innovation and daring social experiment-and not only as military bulwark of Christendom, a buffer at rim of Europe, holding infidel at bay, as implied, for example, in Chaucer's fictional description of Knight's far-r anging adventures in The Canterbury Tales (lines 53-54), in warmongering of 1621 pamphlet, Newes from Poland, or in Ambassador Ossolinski's description of his country as validissimum Christiani orbis antemurale (2). …

Love in the Afternoon: The Supercouple of 1980s US Daytime Soap Opera

In the 1980s, the afternoon soap operas of US broadcast television featured ‘supercouples’, romantic pairings that both kept with conventional gender roles and defied traditional expectations. These stories brought a broadened audience to daytime soap opera and made the genre especially profitable for the television networks. They also helped to address viewers' uncertainties about a world changed by the women's liberation movement, embracing the ‘liberation’ of young women free to embark on romantic adventures with the men they loved, but removing any sense of patriarchal injustice, offering instead a fantasy space apart from ongoing social problems of gender inequality.

1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism, by Nicole Eustace

1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism, by Nicole Eustace. Early American Studies. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. xviii, 315 pp. $34.95 US (cloth). Nicole Eustace's 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism explores several fascinating cultural themes associated with the Anglo-American war of 1812-15. They centre largely on how people in the United States during the early 1800s used concepts of gender and face both to unite family obligations with national responsibilities, and to articulate their understanding of the conflict's varied meanings. Her book stands proud of most scholarship on the war, which tends to address traditional military and political affairs (with respectable attention also being given to First Nations issues), although much of that body of literature is repetitive and often is not very good. While these older approaches always will enjoy currency, especially when new endeavours enhance knowledge, scholars also ought to pursue different questions to enrich appreciation of the conflict, particularly because interpretations of the war suffer from a narrower historiographical profile than do comparable traumas in North American history. As an original study of how Americans perceived the war and their place in the world, Eustace's effort represents a positive response to that need. Cultural history, of course, is a big field, especially within Eustace's parameters of gender and race, so she tends to focus on questions of feeling. Within that emphasis, she stresses how the conflict often was presented a romantic adventure ... in which dashing young men went to war to win the hearts of patriotic maidens and in which the thrill of romantic love contributed directly to the surge of patriotism (p. xiii). Thus it is no surprise that words like ardour, zeal, passion, and spirit lie prominently across the pages of her book. One example of interest in such matters is her discussion of how Americans employed language normally linked to courtship rather than combat to comprehend defeat (such as at Detroit), or to celebrate victory (as on Lake Erie). She also explores related subjects, including Malthusian debates between Americans and Britons--and between pro- and anti-war elements within the US--over population growth, the republic's lust for First Nations territories, and the preservation of slavery. Eustace mined an impressive range of sources for her study, including sermons, songs, and other under-appreciated texts, and her care in analyzing these records is obvious, as indicated, for example, by the nicely curated captions that accompany many of the images that grace the book. There are some unfortunate stylistic choices and factual errors that, to a small degree, undermine her efforts. …

“She is Not a Lady, But a Legal Document”: The Tattoo as Contract in Mr. Meeson’s Will

“She is Not a Lady, But a Legal Document”:The Tattoo as Contract in Mr. Meeson’s Will S. Brooke Cameron “Oh, it isn’t quite so bad as that,” said Augusta with a sigh, as she began to remove her jacket. “Dear me!” he said, observing her movement with alarm. “I suppose she is hardened,” he continued to himself; “but I dare say that one gets used to this sort of thing upon desert islands.” —H. Rider Haggard, Mr. Meeson’s Will (212) Given the title of H. Rider Haggard’s novel Mr. Meeson’s Will (1888), one would assume that the text’s central events concern a will and not a woman. And yet, the novel’s plot turns on precisely this inability to distinguish between the woman and the will. After being shipwrecked somewhere off the coast of New Zealand, our heroine, Augusta Smithers, has her publisher’s will tattooed upon her back; the fortune of Mr. Meeson’s nephew and Augusta’s love interest, Eustace Meeson, depends entirely upon how one reads this will and, thus, Augusta’s body. Is this tattooed will a text that can stand on its own, or must the will be complemented by Augusta’s testimony? I am interested precisely in this slippage between reading the woman as a subject with a voice or as an object and, therefore, legible body. As I will show, a tattoo would have certainly confused Victorians as to a woman’s claim to Englishness, let alone the title of “lady,” with all of its connotations of upper-class propriety and privilege. Indeed, the doctor’s “alarm” at Augusta’s spontaneous disrobing—as described in the above epigraph—immediately aligns Augusta’s bared tattoo with a kind of sexual immodesty many readers would have considered inappropriate within English civil society. As the doctor speculates, she has clearly been “hardened” by those “desert islands” beyond England’s perimeter. [End Page 178] The obvious problem, of course, is that Augusta is English and that she has made her way back to England. As the doctor’s response makes clear, Augusta’s tattooed body reads as an abnormal or excessive variation of femininity. Most critics have tended to read this excess as code for the late-Victorian New Woman; Augusta’s tattoo, they add, represents the means by which the threat of this unruly feminist is contained. For example, Patricia Murphy’s “In the Sumptuous Rank of the Signifier” argues that Augusta’s “tattoo acts as a means of control over the transgressive quasi-heroine” by stabilizing and thus controlling the meaning of this feminist figure and the threat she poses to patriarchal structures of sexual and economic exchange (229; see also Murphy’s analysis of Haggard’s She [1887]). Similarly, LeeAnn Richardson’s New Woman and Colonial Adventure Fiction in Victorian Britain reads Haggard’s novel as representative of the late-Victorian tendency to combine novel genres of quest romance and New Woman fiction in a way that “illuminates both the development and interdependence of gender politics and imperialism in late-Victorian Britain” (Richardson 2; see also Fraser 42 on She). The result, she adds, is an adventure romance that tells of colonial quests that revitalize masculine authority over feminized others, including those unruly women who transgress masculine authority (see also Murphy, “Gendering of History” 751). However, the general tendency within such readings is to frame Augusta as a victim, as written upon and therein transformed into a passive object of male consumption; I instead want to shift the focus and ask what Haggard’s novel tells us about women’s agency, particularly in terms of Augusta’s own will to be tattooed. For inspiration, I look to Cathrine O. Frank’s article “Of Testaments and Tattoos,” which frames Haggard’s novel as a response to the Victorian Wills Act of 1837, as well as her recent book Law, Literature, and the Transmission of Culture in England, 1837-1925, which provides an in-depth analysis of Victorian fiction and legal discourse on wills and contracts. Like Frank, I view Haggard’s novel as a meditation on Victorian legal discourses on the will and, particularly, women’s changing rights...

Karol Szymanowski and Richard Strauss: Of Diverging Epiphanies

According to the philosopher Charles Taylor, since the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the advent of Romanticism, the work of art is defined by its epiphanic character. It is a manifestation of something of the highest moral or spiritual significance; this manifestation is not merely subjective, in which case it would be inaccessible to scholarly inquiry, but it has an objective character. The Third Symphony, op. 27, by Karol Szymanowski is analyzed in the light of Taylor's concept. The Deutsche Motette, op. 62, by Richard Strauss, which is based on a text similar to the one used by Szymanowski, serves as a foil to buttress the findings.

The two faces of Daniele Manin. French republican celebrity and Italian monarchic icon (1848–1880)

Owing to its profile of an (inter)national political process with a global audience, the Italian Risorgimento represents an extraordinary ‘laboratory’ for the ‘great media transformation’, or the ‘graphic revolution’, which pervaded Europe in the nineteenth century, and, as a consequence, is a privileged experimental field of celebrity politics. Through a plural set of printed and iconographic sources, this article analyses the mediatization and peopolization process involving the figure of Daniele Manin, President of the Republic of Venice of 1848, dying in exile in Paris in 1857, and the romantic adventures of his ‘martyr family’. In particular, the aim of this contribution is, first, to study the construction of Manin's double face: the Frenchified or French republican celebrity and the Italian monarchic icon. Second, the article highlights the tensions of the transnational media dynamics, which involve an appropriation by the French imaginary and a rediscovery by the Italian imaginary, specifically focusing on the the Franco-Italian monument to Manin inaugurated in Turin in March 1861.

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. …