Romantic Hero Research Articles

Virginity in Young Adult Literature after Twilight by Christine Seifert (review)

Reviewed by: Virginity in Young Adult Literature after Twilight by Christine Seifert Tharini Viswanath (bio) Virginity in Young Adult Literature after Twilight. By Christine Seifert. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. According to Christine Seifert, “progressive” young adult romance novels have a lot in common with ideas that are thousands of years old. In this study, she analyzes some of the most popular young adult novels since 2005—based on reader favorites on Goodreads and Amazon—that present characters who want to have sex but cannot for the sake of preserving their virtue. Popular romance, Seifert argues, relies on the trope of “abstinence porn,” in which teens and, by extension, their virginities become objectified and readers are invited to participate in this eroticization of virginity (3). Chapter 1, “From Forever to Twilight,” briefly discusses the concept of the purity myth and its role in America’s cultural understanding of young girls. This notion of purity is reflected in adolescent literature, where “abstinence porn tells us that the most titillating aspect of a sexual relationship is obsessing about doing it [because] once you do it, it’s all over” (5). Invariably, Seifert claims, the characters are predominantly white teens in heteronormative relationships, and issues of race, gender, and sexuality are rarely (if at all) questioned (17–18). In chapter 2, Seifert deals with virginity and sex in paranormal novels after Twilight, with special emphasis on the couples in the Hush Hush series by Becca Fitzpatrick, the Mara Dyer series by [End Page 314] Michelle Hodkin, and the Wolves of Mercy Falls series by Maggie Stiefvater. Invariably, the heroines are “ordinary girls who are secretly extraordinary,” and only the “romantic hero” is able to see their extraordinariness from the very beginning (24). Chapter 3 focuses on the formulaic romances in dystopian fiction, where virginity is not a choice for female characters. In the three series Seifert examines—the Selection series by Kiera Cass, the Matched series by Ally Condie, and the Delirium series by Lauren Oliver—virginity is a requirement and is central to the plot: “marriage is the ultimate goal because it means the couple can finally have sex” (67). Similar issues are raised in chapter 4, which deals with contemporary teen romance, in which the protagonist’s virginity is once again equated with morality. All of the novels that Seifert examines are predictable to the last; she even provides her readers with charts that summarize the romantic relationship between characters based on their status as virgins, how dangerous they are to each other, the problem in their relationship, the sexual activities in which they partake, and how the story ends. While the romantic partners may or may not have sex in the text, the innocent female protagonists almost always marry their (dangerous and sometimes abusive) partners. According to Seifert, there are four recurring tropes associated with virginity. Most important, the female protagonist’s naïveté and lack of sexual awareness not only make her attractive, but are also instrumental in making a “bad boy” good. Second, women cannot be trusted with their own virginity and must rely on a paternalistic “virginity guardian” to step in and reinforce the rules. The idea of “true love as destiny” is critical to these romances, in which “teen relationships can and should last forever, even if the partners seem to be poor matches” (38). Finally, and most disturbingly, possessive behavior and potentially dangerous people are portrayed as sexy and tempting, and violence is central to most of the novels that Seifert examines. Particularly insightful is her observation that virgins retain their virginal status even after they have had sex, as the “protagonist will remain pure for [her] one special and fated partner” (38). Arguably, the seemingly repetitive text serves to highlight the fact that the same ideology (sex is bad, abstinence is good) recurs in each of these novels, albeit with slightly varied plot lines. In a nutshell, virginity is less about sexual intercourse than it is about good behavior and moral quality; female nonvirgins become the young adult romance novel’s designated antagonists and are depicted as lacking in moral values because they acknowledge their sexuality. Chapters 5 and 6 help place Seifert’s...

Mytho-auto-bio: Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, the Romantics and Shakespeare’s The Tempest

Abstract This article examines Neil Gaiman’s Sandman as a series that invokes English Romanticism’s perspectives of dreams, heroism, the virtue of storytelling and Shakespeare’s source of authorship, bringing to the fore the series’ relationship with the European literary canon. I initially discuss how popular culture reconstructs possible ‘selves’ of Shakespeare in ways that are designed to suit particular artistic endeavours and/or modern subjectivity, and then focus on ‘how’ and ‘why’ traditional criticism identifies an autobiographical dimension in the playwright’s character Prospero, from The Tempest. Reading the character as metonymic in a Romantic vein, I construct a paradigm to shift current Sandman scholarship from the mythological level to the tropological level to examine its literary values and merit. I maintain throughout the article that Gaiman designs Morpheus with Romantic understandings of Prospero and, drawing from the larger DC Universe of superhero motifs, how Gaiman constructs Morpheus as an alter ego. Rather than a superhero, I argue that Morpheus is a Romantic hero bearing traces of the author’s autobiography. After examining Gaiman’s relationship with the narrative, I discuss the confluences between Gaiman and Samuel Taylor Coleridge locating Shakespeare’s imaginative source in d/Dream (Morpheus) – what Coleridge names the ‘Morphean Space’. Since The Tempest is believed to be Shakespeare’s final play wherein he announces his exeunt from The Globe Theatre and that Gaiman intended to end Sandman with his ‘The Tempest’, I conclude by explaining Gaiman’s use of an autobiographical simile.

“A Bold and Hardy Race of Men”: The Lives and Literature of American Whalemen by Jennifer Schell, and: Antebellum at Sea: Maritime Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century America by Jason Berger (review)

Reviewed by: “A Bold and Hardy Race of Men”: The Lives and Literature of American Whalemen by Jennifer Schell, and: Antebellum at Sea: Maritime Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century America by Jason Berger Amy Parsons Jennifer Schell “A Bold and Hardy Race of Men”: The Lives and Literature of American Whalemen Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013. xiv + 262 pp. Jason Berger Antebellum at Sea: Maritime Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century America Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. x + 338 pp. These two recent books on antebellum American maritime literature share a question about fantasy: both ask how the cultural fantasies about common sailors functioned in the nineteenth-century imagination even when these were at odds with the actual lives and working conditions of maritime laborers. Schell looks to a large archive of whaling narratives to examine their investment in an idealization of working-class masculinity that valued production, autonomy, and physical skill over attributes such as the restraint and formal education associated with the middle and upper classes. She writes that these “fantasies—even those that proved to be unrealistic or that could be easily discredited—were compelling because they provided physical laborers with a useful way of understanding their lives and their national significance” (17). Berger’s explicitly Lacanian study examines maritime narratives to establish the “significant political relationship among fantasy, desire, and maritime experience in antebellum America” (2). As in Schell’s analysis, maritime narratives offered nineteenth-century Americans a way to make sense of a complex cultural landscape. Berger’s aim is to do more than show how maritime literature reconciled and complicated these complexities or how they misrepresented historical facts to advance the work of capital, nation, and empire. After all, fantasies rarely diminish in power by one’s “simply . . . coming to some epiphany about the illusory nature of one’s ideas” (Berger 138). Berger’s Lacanian framework allows him to illuminate the function of maritime fantasies in national discourse, what he identifies as their “social and [End Page 99] ideological work, as opposed to social and ideological content” (11). Although these studies are methodologically and stylistically distinct, taken together they provide significant insights into the centrality of maritime literature in the antebellum national imagination. Schell opens with the claim that despite recent interdisciplinary interest in maritime literature, even the most significant studies have tended to treat their objects of study “monolithically” (xi), without differentiating between types of nautical work and how the specificity of that work might affect the writing and reception of maritime narratives. Schell looks to an extensive archive of works related to the whaling industry, which were shaped by the centrality of economic production as opposed to combat or exchange, the focus of narratives about the naval and merchant services. In order to explore the “thematic, symbolic, and artistic complexity” (xii) of whaling narratives, Schell traces a historical arc that begins in the late eighteenth century with Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer and ends in the late nineteenth century, throughout which American whalemen were transformed into exemplary “romantic heroes,” representatives of a particular kind of idealized American masculinity (4). Borrowing the term “producerism” from Robert Westbrook, and situating herself explicitly in the fields of labor history and masculinity studies, Schell builds her analysis around the concept of “producerist fantasies.” These fantasies have their roots in Revolutionary-era rhetoric, which valorized agrarian and artisanal modes of production as the keys to America’s future success. She connects the specialized work of whaling, which remained fairly constant even as other sectors of the economy mechanized, to these early valorizations of productive labor. In the public imagination, whalers also possessed a set of specialized physical skills requiring bravery, independence, and strength, which transformed nature into valuable products that increased the wealth and prestige of the industry and the nation. In the terms of this fantasy, the whaleman was not just an exemplary worker but also an exemplary American man, as these narratives were often meditations on national values and identity. The most dominant forms of “producerist fantasies” around whalemen did not entirely exclude other ways of writing about the industry; however, according to Schell these fantasies were flexible and powerful enough to absorb...

The Arab translator as hero

The article examines fiction where the protagonist is an Arab translator to explore the significance of centralizing the role of the translator and what theoretical implications about translation can be extracted from such works. The image of the translator varies in these works from that of a tragic hero, a romantic hero, an ironic hero, a collaborating hero, a comic hero, and an impotent hero. Whereas all these works discuss translation and what it implies for cultural exchange and encounters, the emphasis is on fidelity versus creative license in the process of translation. These concepts invariably relate to power since fidelity is governed by a prior text where the translator is captive to wording while in creative rendering the translator is on equal footing with the author and may accomplish a text parallel to the source. The underlying power dimension and the failure of translators in these works point obliquely to the anxiety of intellectuals in the face of authority.

Imperiets genfærd – Profeterne i Evighedsfjorden og den dansk-grønlandske historieskrivning

<p align="LEFT">While the official Denmark has declined taking part in a reconciliation process with Greenland, its former colony, a large literary audience has embraced the novelist Kim Leine, who puts colonial history and Danish-Greenlandic power relations on the <span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">agenda. Originally published in 2012, his novel </span><em><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT;">Profeterne i Evighedsfjorden </span></em><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">(English title: </span><em><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT;">The Prophets of Eternal Fjord</span></em><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">) has received huge attention and several </span>prestigious literary awards, but it has also been the target of criticism for painting a distorted picture of Denmark’s conduct in Greenland. The article examines how the novel relates to the established narratives about Danish colonialism and how it contributes to the ongoing negotiations. The novel’s use of narrative modes is analysed in light of the assumption that certain modes are associated with certain plots, where a particular framing of the past defines a space of possibility for the way we shape the future. It is argued that the novel draws on the anticolonial dream of ‘total revolution’ and supports the struggle of the colonised to break free from the colonial power and establish their own nation state. Its key narrative mode, however, is not the preferred mode in anticolonialist literature, heroic romance; instead it is tragedy. The novel portrays the profound transformation of society and subjectivity that is brought about by modernity with Christianity and colonialism as its vehicle. As a consequence of this transformation, resistance cannot be posited from a point outside modernity but arises from within modernity itself. Thus the protagonists of the novel are not only portrayed as equals but as actors in the same universe, regardless of the highly asymmetrical power relations between Danes and Greenlanders. In this sense, the book participates in efforts to reframe the Danish-Greenlandic relationship based on the new language of equality and partnership found in the Act on Greenland Self-Government.</p>

Trade and Romance by Michael Murrin (review)

michael murrin, Trade and Romance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Pp. x, 327. isbn: 978-0-226-07157-2. $45.Michael Murrin's ambitious longue duree study of the romance genre distinguishes itself through an interest in historical geography. Murrin combines literary criticism with a discussion of the spatial configuration of urban environments and physical conditions of travel routes, and he reveals how realities of travel provided the content out of which Western romance fiction emerged. As this book moves across time and space, it reveals a symbiotic relationship between the lived conditions of travel and acts of literary representation (Marco Polo through Milton).This book offers fascinating details in prose accessible to non-academic readers. Broadly tracing the West's fascination with Central and East Asia, the book adopts an innovative structure. Three sections move chronologically through time, each section taking a different culture as its orientation device: first the Mongols, next the Portuguese, and then the English. Throughout these sections, the study pursues intertwining aims. First, it describes the role of 'Farther Asia' in influencing new modes of 'heroic literature' in Western Europe (1). Second, it traces the ever-increasing interest by 'the mercantile class' in aristocratic romance (1). Third, it shows how geography shaped shifting perceptions of the East in romance literature.Murrin's broad arguments about the romance genre's shift from narrow aristocratic values to an increased accommodation of a mercantile ethos are well established (indeed, Murrin's extensive bibliography suggests many others have made similar arguments), but the scope of geographical settings under discussion sets this study apart from others. Part 1 traces the role of Mongol khanates in establishing connectivity across the Eurasian continent from the mid-thirteenth through latefifteenth centuries. The chapters discuss Marco Polo's travels through the lands of Khubilai Khan; narratives about 'Assassins' or Nizari Isma'ilis in Iran; Marco Polo's legacy in Geoffrey Chaucer's Squire's Tale; and the Italian poet Boiardo's treatment of mercantilism and invention of a 'Renaissance version of heroic romance' (2). Part 2 focuses on Portuguese travels throughout Africa, India, China, and Japan. These chapters discuss texts by Portuguese writers who drew from their own knowledge of Vasco da Gama's first voyage. Part 3 turns to texts by early modern English writers. Chapters address the 'double audience' (aristocratic and mercantile) of Spenser's Faerie Queene; representations of Central Asian environments in Marlowe's Tamburlaine; and Milton's Moscovia, a poem that Murrin examines in the context of the Muscovy Company's endeavors in Siberia. …

Особенности тембровой драматургии Третьей симфонии Густава Малера

The originality of the dramaturgical solution of Gustav Mahler’s Third Symphony is seen by the author of the article in that the composer for the irst time in the history of European music broadly incorporates means of a unique kind of instrumental thea ter and timbre dramaturgy. Examining the content of the symphony from this point of view, he sees an essential contradiction of the initial programmatic intentions of the composer with the achieved result. Mahler purposely personiies a romantic subject, in which the hero seeks for his place in life, deludes himself wholeheartedly and, inally, inds the true path towards happiness and universal Harmony. The dramatically complex history is shown by the composer by the means of personiied instrumental timbres. Similarly to actors in a theatrical production, they present a brilliant musical show. A special role belongs to the timbres of the horns, so beloved by Mahler, symbolizing the image of the romantic hero. Close to them are the timbres of the high trumpets and trombones. The evil element is embodied in the timbres of the bassoons, low cellos and double-basses. The world of happiness and the unattained Universal Harmony is conveyed by the timbres of the high strings, harps, lutes and, at times, oboes and English horn. The sung texts brought into the symphony’s score (by Nietzsche, Arnim and Brentano), participation of the solo mezzo-soprano, boys’ chorus and female chorus convey in a mediated form the hero’s complex philosophical and morally aesthetical strivings. A thorough analysis of the score reveals the non-contradictory manifestation of the content-related conception by means of timbre-sonorous resources. Keywords: Mahler’s symphonies, instrumental theater, timbre dramaturgy

Rethinking Normal: A Memoir in Transition by Katie Rain Hill, and: Ensnared by A. G. Howard (review)

Reviewed by: Rethinking Normal: A Memoir in Transition by Katie Rain Hill, and: Ensnared by A. G. Howard Alaine Martaus Hill, Katie Rain Rethinking Normal: A Memoir in Transition; by Katie Rain Hill with Ariel Schrag. See review under Andrews, p. 297. Howard, A. G. Ensnared. Amulet, 2015 404p ISBN 978-1-4197-1229-6 $17.95 R Gr. 9-12 Alyssa Gardner’s last showdown with Queen Red (in Unhinged, BCCB 2/13) ended with her mother trapped in a fast-decaying Wonderland and her two loves, Jeb and Morpheus, imprisoned in the treacherous mirror-land of AnyElsewhere. Now, in a desperate bid to save herself, her kingdom, and the people she loves, Alyssa sets out on a final quest, this time with her father in tow. Their first stop: AnyElsewhere, where former rivals Jeb and Morpheus have formed an unlikely bond, and from where Jeb seems strangely unwilling to depart. Unfortunately, the Queen of Hearts lurks nearby, ready to tear their hearts out for her ally Queen Red, while the deposed queen of Wonderland makes her own plans to retake the throne. Further complicating her mission is Alyssa’s own reluctance to choose between her netherling and her human destinies. Torn between two worlds, two selves, and two loves, Alyssa must find a way to make herself whole enough to defeat Red once and for all. Howard’s weird and wonderful trilogy comes to an excellent close in this final volume. Still a lively fantasy adventure, this novel sheds the family drama to focus more completely on Alyssa’s personal journey, while showcasing the logic puzzles, reimagined familiar characters, and playful creepiness that make the series work. The ties to Carroll’s fantasy classic are looser here, giving the author more room for original, largely successful world-building, and the novel benefits greatly from the change of scenery as new horrifying and fascinating characters are introduced. Various threads that connect Wonderland’s history to Dodgson and Liddell family legacies are tied up nicely, and a satisfying conclusion that will please fans of both romantic heroes gives this strong fantasy heroine the happy ending she deserves. Copyright © 2015 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Women writers and the hero of romance

Women writers and the hero of romance

The Korean Wave and Asian Americans: the ethnic meanings of transnational Korean pop culture in the USA

The transnational Korean media and its active streams to the USA have seemingly increased its potency as new ethnic media. Ethnic media can be defined in more than one way; this demands a shift in the definition, meaning, impact and role of ethnic media at the heart of increasing transnational media use by ethnic minorities and immigrants. This study examines how transnational Korean pop culture has been consumed by Asian American youth and in what ways the Korean media are serving them. All 15 undergraduate students at a public university in the Midwest volunteered for interviews and they were all females, identifying themselves as Asian Americans. According to them, the Korean media has been used along with the media from country of origin; however, the Korean content facilitates their ability to reminisce about the pan-ethnic identity as a member of the East Asian community. The mediated connection to the Korean pop culture presents concrete manifestations of not only the nation, but also the coeval territory of East Asia, which has been limited in their imagined community. Participants also prefer to watch Korean romance dramas because romantic heroes and heroines in Korean romance dramas are depicted to be charming in their roles, and for participants these fresh and positive Asian leads produce pseudo-satisfaction, enabling them to feel comfort from their perception of social marginality.

Romantic Intertextuality: The Adaptive Weave

weave represents a network of allusive threads that, once plotted, enables an enhanced understanding of Romantic-period intertextuality. OED defines as The need for one text to be read in light of its allusions to and differences from content or structure of other texts; (allusive) relationship between esp. literary texts. most familiar methods by which authors refer to other authors and their tropes and themes in both oblique and obvious ways are through borrowing, allusion, plagiarism, and quotation. A few eminent critics such as Adela Pinch (1997), Tilar Mazzeo (2006), and Stuart Curran (2008) have allowed readers to critique and complicate this notion, moving away from an assumption of anxiety and its attendant need to situate self by annihilating predecessor. At same time, critics have perhaps not yet fully fathomed a model that is more than bilateral. Most investigations look at how x has incorporated y; I would like to offer some thoughts on what might be called warp and weft of literary cross-reference, in which work of writing meshes with work readers see female characters undertaking: manipulating threads to construct something new and comprehensive and yet visibly product of many strands. And so, pace Roland Barthes (1989), my counter to intertextuality is weaving, activity of using and reusing literary heritage to forward and maintain narrative (see also Stanford Friedman, 1991). Barthes maintains that act of weaving is, essentially, undercover: that is, it hides its own pattern. As he comments, the quotations a text is made of are anonymous, irrecoverable, and yet already read: they are quotations without quotation marks ( 60). adaptive weaver, however, pulls visibly on threads of text that both underpin and overlay pattern of plot. I begin with Charlotte Smith, whose work, as Curran (2008) has demonstrated, absolutely teems with allusiveness. But, as well as displaying her familiarity with foundational voices of her literary heritage (which of course includes European as well as British progenitors), she also threads her narratives, over and under like weft, with their patterns. For instance, to enter world of Romantic hero for a moment, and reflecting on his usual pattern in standard novel of sensibility, familiar picture is of someone who is, if not fully perfect, at least fully deserving of hand of heroine from his first appearance. hero's virtues are enhanced by competition he faces from foils like libertine and fop. Smith's novels give due prominence to Romantic hero; however, she also complicates his role. Smith rewrites genre from within; by stretching warp as tightly as possible, her novels follow familiar Romantic pattern while subverting attractions of main male player. Smith anchors this in Petrarchan, Wertheresque, or Rousseauvian behaviour on die part of her heroes. Self-absorbed; devoted to an unreal ideal of love; unable to see their beloved outside of stark, innocent/ compromised binaries; convinced of universality of their unstable feelings; wanderers; at mercy of their self-conceptions: just about all of Smith's heroes fit at least some of these parameters, noted by scholars such as Gerhart Hoffmeister (1990), Lilian Furst (1990) and Steven Sondrup (1990) as closely identified with Continental literary tradition. As she works out her plots, French, German and Italian modes usually function problematically, something not unique to Smith but rather inherent in her patterns: Petrarch, Werther and Rousseau offer difficult forms of manhood. By piecing together past and present, Smith does something different from intertextual allusion: she imports and then interweaves patterns so that standard male characters of novel of sensibility are developed into inhabitants of a modern world in which conflict, confusion, irrationality, and faulty decision-making are rife. …

Conflicting obituaries: the Abyssinian ‘outlaw’ Debeb as treacherous bandit and romantic hero in late nineteenth-century Italian imagination

In 1886 the Abyssinian chief Debeb became a public figure in Italy as a rapacious colonial bandit. However, over the next five years he acquired additional public personas, even contradictory ones: as acondottieroally, a ladies’ man, a traitor, a young Abyssinian aristocrat and pretender to an ancient throne, a chivalrous warrior, and a figure representing the frontier and an Africa mysterious and hidden to Europeans. Upon his 1891 death in combat, he was the subject of conflicting Italian press obituaries. For some commentators, Debeb exemplified treacherous and deceitful African character, an explanation for Italy's colonial disappointments and defeats. However, other commentators clothed him in a romanticised mystique and found in him martial and even chivalrous traits to admire and emulate. To this extent his persona blurred the line demarcating the African ‘other’. Although he first appeared to Italians as a bandit, the notion of the bandit as a folk hero (the ‘noble robber’ or ‘social bandit’, Hobsbawm) does not fit his case. A more fruitful approach is to consider his multi-faceted public persona as reflecting the ongoing Italian debate over ‘national character’ (Patriarca). In the figure of Debeb, public debates over colonialism and ‘national character’ merged, with each contributing to the other.

‘For you are a man and she is a maid’: Performing masculinity in Orientalist medieval and modern popular romance fiction

Abstract Dominant, virile, brooding: the alpha male is quintessential in modern western popular romance published by companies such as Harlequin Mills & Boon. One persistent iteration of the alpha is the Middle Eastern sheikh, whose hypermasculinity seems initially at odds with the ‘feminine penetrability’ of the Oriental east with which he is connected. Yet, the modern sheikh romance was not the first genre to persistently represent eastern romantic heroes; in late medieval England, the most popular secular texts were romances, several of which contained Orientalist heroes. This article scrutinizes the masculine performance of the sheikh hero in light of the romance genre’s medieval history. I consider how the masculinities of modern and medieval eastern romance heroes are inextricably connected to their eastern surroundings. Focusing on the Middle English romance Floris and Blancheflour, I identify two contrasting models of eastern hypo- and hyper-masculinity that make overt deviant gender performance and the associated anxiety and effect on heterosexual gender relations. Finally, I re-examine the presentation of the hypermasculine sheikh hero, arguing that these romances too exhibit anxiety about male gender identity in the east. These romances, medieval and modern, thus acknowledge and deny Said’s effeminate Orient and its destabilizing potential.

Trade and romance

In Trade and Romance, Michael Murrin examines the complex relations between the expansion of trade in Asia and the production of heroic romance in Europe from the second half of the thirteenth century through the late seventeenth century. He shows how these tales of romance, ostensibly meant for the aristocracy, were important to the growing mercantile class as a way to gauge their own experiences in traveling to and trading in these exotic locales. Murrin also looks at the role that growing knowledge of geography played in the writing of the creative literature of the period, tracking how accurate, or inaccurate, these writers were in depicting far-flung destinations, from Iran and the Caspian Sea all the way to the Pacific. With reference to an impressive range of major works in several languages - including the works of Marco Polo, Geoffrey Chaucer, Matteo Maria Boiardo, Luis de Camoes, Fernao Mendes Pinto, Edmund Spenser, John Milton, and more - Murrin tracks numerous accounts by traders and merchants through the literature, first on the Silk Road, beginning in the mid-thirteenth century; then on the water route to India, Japan, and China via the Cape of Good Hope; and, finally, the overland route through Siberia to Beijing. All of these routes, originally used to exchange commodities, quickly became paths to knowledge as well, enabling information to pass, if sometimes vaguely and intermittently, between Europe and the Far East. These new tales of distant shores fired the imagination of Europe and made their way, with surprising accuracy, as Murrin shows, into the poetry of the period.

‘That complete fusion of spirit as well as body’: Heroines, heroes, desire and compulsory demisexuality in the Harlequin Mills & Boon romance novel

Abstract In the romance novels published by Harlequin Mills & Boon, sex and love are inextricably intertwined. The governing paradigm of the romance is a concept I have termed ‘compulsory demisexuality’. Someone who is demisexual only experiences sexual attraction to someone with whom they have an emotional bond. In the romance, this means that sex is only truly pleasurable when the partners are in love. The intersection of this paradigm with the notion of one true love means that the romance hero and heroine can only find real sexual pleasure with the other. This paradigm manifests differently between genders. Generally, heroines are demisexual, whereas heroes become demisexual. This change wrought in the hero is the key to understanding the romance text as a text of feminine victory: the ubiquitous happily-ever-after of the romance takes place in the heroine’s world. The way in which compulsory demisexuality has been realized within category romances has also changed over time. This article will discuss the historical evolution of the gendered relationship between sex and love in relation to two key texts, Denise Robins’s Shatter the Sky (1933) and Lynne Graham’s Desert Prince, Bride of Innocence (2009), focusing particularly on how the heroine’s sexual desire has complicated this relationship.

Guy of Warwick and the Active Life of Historical Romance in Piers Plowman

This essay contributes to the ongoing conversation on Langland and romance, arguing that Piers Plowman’s engagement with the genre extends beyond the kind of courtly pastiche that characterizes the Christ-Knight allegory of passūs 16-18. Rather, the insular heroes of historical romance, and that of the Middle English Stanzaic Guy of Warwick in particular, model a relationship between the individual subject and the production of national (or even universal) history that impacts Langland’s own exploration of lay piety. Piers Plowman becomes a framework in which to view the transformation of romance from a literary genre to a historical temper exerting itself on other forms of medieval fiction.

Transitions

Transitions Katharine Capshaw Smith As the journal representing the membership of the Children’s Literature Association, the Quarterly is a beautifully collaborative enterprise. From members who submit essays, to readers and consultants, to guest editors and symposium contributors, the Quarterly invites a wide range of participation from its readership. One of the distinguishing features of the journal is its editorial structure. Instead of locating the editorship at a single institution with a permanent editor, the leadership of the journal shifts every five years. This structure permits every ChLA member the opportunity to propose a new leadership team for the journal. I am very pleased to announce that Claudia Nelson of Texas A&M University will commence her term as editor of the Quarterly with Volume 40. Claudia begins the transition with a year as acquisitions editor, a post that will enable her to become familiar with the evaluation process and to build the content of issues under her editorship. Please send new submissions to her at chlaquarterly@tamu.edu. Claudia is joined by a stellar pair of associate editors, Anne Morey of Texas A&M University and Sara Day of Southern Arkansas University, who will support her in all stages of the production process. I want to express the organization’s profound gratitude to Claudia for volunteering to head the journal. A brilliant and penetrating scholar, exceptional former ChLA president, and gentle and generous colleague, she will bring her unparalleled insight and experience to the editorship. We are very fortunate to have Claudia, Anne, and Sara preparing to take the helm of the journal. We are also quite lucky that Mark I. West of University of North Carolina at Charlotte has volunteered to continue as book review editor with Claudia and the new team. As those of us who have worked with Mark can attest, this past ChLA president brings a tremendous body of knowledge and invaluable good humor to editorial collaboration. The journal will be in superb hands. This issue brings us four exciting essays and four provocative manifestos. The issue begins with Rachel Conrad’s “‘And stay, a minute more, alone”: Time and Subjectivities in [End Page 377] Gwendolyn Brooks’s Bronzeville Boys and Girls.” Conrad considers the multiplicity of perspectives in this understudied volume of lyric poetry, concluding that “In [Brooks’s] poems, temporality functions as a portal onto individual subjectivity, whereby the poet constructs the child as constituting herself or himself in time.” Lise Jaillant’s essay examines three children’s versions of “A Fine Old Tale of Adventure,” Beowulf: A. J. Church’s Heroes of Chivalry and Romance (1898), Thomas Cartwright’s Brave Beowulf (1908), and H. E. Marshall’s Stories of Beowulf Told to the Children (1908). This fascinating essay examines the “medievalizing packaging” of books to Victorian and Edwardian children, an approach that persists in representing a British past to the young. Arthur P. Young’s “Banish the Books: Horatio Alger, Jr., the Censors, the Libraries, and the Readers, 1870–1910” will speak particularly to ChLA members who work in library science. Young examines forty-seven book library catalogs from nineteen states in order to present evidence that “arguments and proposed sanctions” against Alger’s fiction “did not result in . . . pervasive reductions in Alger library holdings.” We are pleased to include an essay from the field of library science that intersects nicely with the journal’s investment in audiences and book history. Finally, Erica Hateley’s lively essay, “Sink or Swim?: Revising Ophelia in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction,” examines Lisa Fiedler’s Dating Hamlet (2002), Lisa Klein’s Ophelia: A Novel (2006), and Michelle Ray’s Falling for Hamlet (2011). Hateley argues that in these books, “a complex of gender, sexuality, and agency emerges that intervenes not only into narratives of female adolescence as first and foremost being at risk, but also into narratives of canonical literary patriarchy, even as they potentially extend the reach of both.” These four essays pose provocative questions about authorship, book history, and reader engagement. Under the current editorial team during the past four years, the Quarterly has included in each volume some representation of cutting-edge work being presented at conferences. In this issue, we offer a...

“A Fine Old Tale of Adventure” : Beowulf Told to the Children of the English Race, 1898–1908

When publishers started marketing the tale of Beowulf to a large audience of children (and adults) in the 1880s, they capitalized on the aura of the Middle Ages by selling editions with golden titles, decorated initials and reproductions of medieval drawings. The medievalizing aspect of these children’s books offered a suitable format for a tale presented as the founding text in English literature. This article argues that the heroic and nationalistic ideology of these early versions is anchored in their material aspect. The analysis of three juvenile adaptations first published between 1898 and 1908 – A. J. Church’s Heroes of Chivalry and Romance , Thomas Cartwright’s Brave Beowulf , and H. E. Marshall’s Stories of Beowulf Told to the Children – shows that their ‘bibliographic code’ was closely intertwined with archaic translations inspired by nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxon scholarship.

Melodramatic Music in the Western

The Western film developed from a variety of sources, including written and visual sources, such as the classic and dime novels, as well as paintings and photographs. Eventually these were dramatized with live action in the rodeo, Wild West shows, and on stage, particularly in melodramas. In his history of the Western film, David Lusted points out, “Whether gunfighter or outlaw criminal, cowboy or sheriff, the Western hero is invariably a romantic hero of melodrama.” The Western owes a great deal to melodrama, not the least of which is the music that usually accompanies it. Owing to the substantial amount of action and infrequent dialogue, Westerns particularly rely on music to convey excitement, tension, and all the other emotions so necessary to their popularity. As exhibited in the collections of photoplay music and silent film cue sheets, the Western film score appropriated many of the musical clichés that accompanied the staged works of the late nineteenth century. This presentation will begin to trace the history of the music that accompanied the Western narrative from the stage to the screen, demonstrating how many of the aural clues that enhance our enjoyment of this genre today have their roots in late nineteenth century melodrama.

Remix: Practice, Context, Culture

Remix: Practice, Context, Culture