Despite the prejudices of critics, popular romance fiction remains a complex, dynamic genre. It c... more Despite the prejudices of critics, popular romance fiction remains a complex, dynamic genre. It consistently maintains the largest market share in the American publishing industry, even as it welcomes new subgenres like queer and BDSM romance. Digital publishing originated in erotic romance, and savvy on-line communities have exploded myths about the genre's readership. Romance scholarship now reflects this diversity, transformed by interdisciplinary scrutiny, new critical approaches, and an unprecedented international dialogue between authors, scholars, and fans. These eighteen essays investigate individual romance novels, authors, and websites, rethink the genre's history, and explore its interplay of convention and originality. By offering new twists in enduring debates, this collection inspires further inquiry into the emerging field of popular romance studies.
English, cultural studies, fandom, religious studies, and other disciplines gathered to mark the ... more English, cultural studies, fandom, religious studies, and other disciplines gathered to mark the thirtieth anniversary of Janice Radway's Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Around the world, this ethnographic study of the romance readers of "Smithton," a small city in the American Midwest, has become a touchstone for the study of all forms of popular cultureor, rather, of how forms of popular culture are used and, sometimes, transformed by their audiences. Yet as An Goris observed at the 2010 IASPR conference in Brussels, Radway's work has also been controversial, and its reception within the field of popular romance studies has sometimes been marked by "harsh and even unforgiving critiques" which amount to a form of "Ritual Matricide."[1] As co-chairs of the PCA Romance area, Goris and I hoped to advance the conversation about Radway's work by bringing together senior faculty, junior faculty, and graduate students to talk about the book, its reception, and its continuing importance, both in the academy and outside of it. We invited the author herself to join us, and she very graciously accepted our invitation. At the last minute, a death in the family kept her from attending-but the packed rooms at both PCA roundtables remained packed even after her absence was announced, a tribute to the lasting and expansive significance of this study. Because these were roundtable sessions, much of the time was devoted to conversation. The pieces that follow cannot capture that lively debate, but they do hint at its parameters and crucial themes. We begin with a personal tribute to Radway as mentor, as well as scholar, by Deborah Chappel Traylor, a student at Duke in the late 1980s whose dissertation American Romances: Narratives of Culture and Identity was co-directed by Radway and Jane Tomkins. Lynn S. Neal, author of a more recent ethnographic study of romance readers, Romancing God: Evangelical Women and Inspirational Fiction, encountered Radway's work in the 1990s. As she explains in her remarks, she found in it a "scholarly model" for taking seriously the ways that ordinary people create "religious meaning through popular culture forms." This model has not, in Neal's experience, had the kind of transformative impact in religious studies that it has elsewhere-as, for example, in fan studies, the discipline of our third contributor, Katherine Larsen. A "spy in the house of
memorably, in her study's opening chapters. Over the years I've made good use of those opening ch... more memorably, in her study's opening chapters. Over the years I've made good use of those opening chapters, especially in the classroom. (I am currently teaching my twenty-fifth DePaul University course devoted exclusively to popular romance fiction.) In my remarks today, then, I'd like to begin by addressing Regis's contribution to romance pedagogy, and then open things out to some thoughts on her contributions to more recent scholarship on the genre. Finally, prospectively, I will speak to the way that the political claims that Regis makes on behalf of the romance novel-claims about which I find myself somewhat ambivalent, as the years go by-might point out some useful future directions for romance novel studies. In my 2007 review of Regis's book (among others) for Contemporary Literature, I praised the book for offering a ready-made canon of romance authors and texts one might
Despite the prejudices of critics, popular romance fiction remains a complex, dynamic genre. It c... more Despite the prejudices of critics, popular romance fiction remains a complex, dynamic genre. It consistently maintains the largest market share in the American publishing industry, even as it welcomes new subgenres like queer and BDSM romance. Digital publishing originated in erotic romance, and savvy on-line communities have exploded myths about the genre's readership. Romance scholarship now reflects this diversity, transformed by interdisciplinary scrutiny, new critical approaches, and an unprecedented international dialogue between authors, scholars, and fans. These eighteen essays investigate individual romance novels, authors, and websites, rethink the genre's history, and explore its interplay of convention and originality. By offering new twists in enduring debates, this collection inspires further inquiry into the emerging field of popular romance studies.
Looking back at Volume 7 of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies, I am struck not only by how c... more Looking back at Volume 7 of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies, I am struck not only by how capacious the field of popular romance studies can be, but by how much work still needs to be done. On the one hand, this issue includes three essays introducing new, largely unexplored areas related to popular romance fiction, each of which could serve as an invitation to future work. Layla Abdullah-Poulos's Francis-Award-winning essay "The Stable Muslim Love Triangle-Triangular Desire in African American Muslim Romance Fiction" is the first essay anywhere, to my knowledge, to explore this growing corpus, much of which is independently published, and it lays the groundwork for future comparative research on Muslim popular romance from a transnational and / or multicultural perspective, and on Muslim popular romance alongside Christian inspirational and other religiously-inflected subgenres. In "Rewriting the Romance: Emotion Work and Consent in Arranged Marriage Fanfiction," Milena Popova uses conceptual models from popular romance fiction scholarship and the sociological paradigm of "emotion work" to explore another independently published archive-arranged-marriage Loki / Thor slash fanfiction housed at Archive of Our Own-as a textual space in which cultural norms surrounding marriage and sexual consent can be investigated and revised. This piece suggests that there are many possibilities for cross-fertilization between fan studies (and fanfic studies) and popular romance studies: the archive of primary texts not only exists, but is so vast that it could produce fresh scholarship for many years to come. Finally, we have Kecia Ali's report from the Romance Writers of America's archives at Bowling Green State University: another vast, largely untapped resource which includes correspondence, RWA internal communication (newsletters, board meeting minutes, etc.), conference programs, and recordings of conference sessions from 1980-2008. I hope that readers of JPRS will follow Ali's lead in seeking out and analyzing this material, and I know that the research library staff at BGSU are eager to see us put it to use. Volume 7 of JPRS did not, however, focus exclusively on written texts. In a pair of firsts for the journal, we have published a bilingual special issue-its essays in English and French-devoted to love and popular music. This "Love and Rock" issue attends to music
, by the date-stamp on the Editor's Note for Issue 1.1. That note announced, a little grandly, th... more , by the date-stamp on the Editor's Note for Issue 1.1. That note announced, a little grandly, that we were going to be a "peer-reviewed on-line journal dedicated to scholarship on the representation of romantic love in popular media, now and in the past, from anywhere in the world," and that we would "build a community that includes academics, independent scholars, industry professionals, and serious general readers." To build that broad community we made JPRS an open-access journal, free to read and download, and we invited comments on all of our articles, hoping to stir up the kinds of discussions we admired on listservs and romance review / discussion websites. The comment feature didn't last long. Our mission statement, too, has been revised and professionalized, with an added emphasis on making JPRS a home for scholarship on teaching and learning the popular culture of romantic love. (A crisp new "About the Journal" description can be found at our home page.) Yet, as a glance at the table of contents for issue 5.1 suggests, our commitments to internationalism and interdisciplinarity have only deepened over the years, and we remain dedicated to bringing the voices of scholars and creative professionals into productive conversation. In this issue, Jyoti Raghu's essay on the "religion of love in American film" sits comfortably beside Helene Ehriander's analysis of Swedish "chick-lit in corsets" and Karin Heiss's account of teaching British Regency and desert romance at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg in Bavaria, Germany. In "Love in the Desert" historian Stacy Holden offers an analysis of the ways that American romance authors talk about writing sheikh romances in a post-9/11 context-an analysis to which Holden invited novelist Megan Crane to offer an "Author's Response." (The lines between scholar and creative practitioner are sometimes fuzzy in the romance world; Crane has, we note, a Ph.D. in literature of her own.) The voice of the romance author can also be heard in a lively interview with award-winning American romance author Susan Elizabeth Phillips, a followup to Lisa Fletcher's interview with Anne Gracie in JPRS 4.2 and the Rita Dandridge interview with Beverly Jenkins in our inaugural issue, five years ago. Two years ago, our Book Review editor announced that we would be taking "a new, more expansive approach to the book review section here at JPRS," and we are delighted to
Despite the prejudices of critics, popular romance fiction remains a complex, dynamic genre. It c... more Despite the prejudices of critics, popular romance fiction remains a complex, dynamic genre. It consistently maintains the largest market share in the American publishing industry, even as it welcomes new subgenres like queer and BDSM romance. Digital publishing originated in erotic romance, and savvy on-line communities have exploded myths about the genre's readership. Romance scholarship now reflects this diversity, transformed by interdisciplinary scrutiny, new critical approaches, and an unprecedented international dialogue between authors, scholars, and fans. These eighteen essays investigate individual romance novels, authors, and websites, rethink the genre's history, and explore its interplay of convention and originality. By offering new twists in enduring debates, this collection inspires further inquiry into the emerging field of popular romance studies.
English, cultural studies, fandom, religious studies, and other disciplines gathered to mark the ... more English, cultural studies, fandom, religious studies, and other disciplines gathered to mark the thirtieth anniversary of Janice Radway's Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Around the world, this ethnographic study of the romance readers of "Smithton," a small city in the American Midwest, has become a touchstone for the study of all forms of popular cultureor, rather, of how forms of popular culture are used and, sometimes, transformed by their audiences. Yet as An Goris observed at the 2010 IASPR conference in Brussels, Radway's work has also been controversial, and its reception within the field of popular romance studies has sometimes been marked by "harsh and even unforgiving critiques" which amount to a form of "Ritual Matricide."[1] As co-chairs of the PCA Romance area, Goris and I hoped to advance the conversation about Radway's work by bringing together senior faculty, junior faculty, and graduate students to talk about the book, its reception, and its continuing importance, both in the academy and outside of it. We invited the author herself to join us, and she very graciously accepted our invitation. At the last minute, a death in the family kept her from attending-but the packed rooms at both PCA roundtables remained packed even after her absence was announced, a tribute to the lasting and expansive significance of this study. Because these were roundtable sessions, much of the time was devoted to conversation. The pieces that follow cannot capture that lively debate, but they do hint at its parameters and crucial themes. We begin with a personal tribute to Radway as mentor, as well as scholar, by Deborah Chappel Traylor, a student at Duke in the late 1980s whose dissertation American Romances: Narratives of Culture and Identity was co-directed by Radway and Jane Tomkins. Lynn S. Neal, author of a more recent ethnographic study of romance readers, Romancing God: Evangelical Women and Inspirational Fiction, encountered Radway's work in the 1990s. As she explains in her remarks, she found in it a "scholarly model" for taking seriously the ways that ordinary people create "religious meaning through popular culture forms." This model has not, in Neal's experience, had the kind of transformative impact in religious studies that it has elsewhere-as, for example, in fan studies, the discipline of our third contributor, Katherine Larsen. A "spy in the house of
memorably, in her study's opening chapters. Over the years I've made good use of those opening ch... more memorably, in her study's opening chapters. Over the years I've made good use of those opening chapters, especially in the classroom. (I am currently teaching my twenty-fifth DePaul University course devoted exclusively to popular romance fiction.) In my remarks today, then, I'd like to begin by addressing Regis's contribution to romance pedagogy, and then open things out to some thoughts on her contributions to more recent scholarship on the genre. Finally, prospectively, I will speak to the way that the political claims that Regis makes on behalf of the romance novel-claims about which I find myself somewhat ambivalent, as the years go by-might point out some useful future directions for romance novel studies. In my 2007 review of Regis's book (among others) for Contemporary Literature, I praised the book for offering a ready-made canon of romance authors and texts one might
Despite the prejudices of critics, popular romance fiction remains a complex, dynamic genre. It c... more Despite the prejudices of critics, popular romance fiction remains a complex, dynamic genre. It consistently maintains the largest market share in the American publishing industry, even as it welcomes new subgenres like queer and BDSM romance. Digital publishing originated in erotic romance, and savvy on-line communities have exploded myths about the genre's readership. Romance scholarship now reflects this diversity, transformed by interdisciplinary scrutiny, new critical approaches, and an unprecedented international dialogue between authors, scholars, and fans. These eighteen essays investigate individual romance novels, authors, and websites, rethink the genre's history, and explore its interplay of convention and originality. By offering new twists in enduring debates, this collection inspires further inquiry into the emerging field of popular romance studies.
Looking back at Volume 7 of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies, I am struck not only by how c... more Looking back at Volume 7 of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies, I am struck not only by how capacious the field of popular romance studies can be, but by how much work still needs to be done. On the one hand, this issue includes three essays introducing new, largely unexplored areas related to popular romance fiction, each of which could serve as an invitation to future work. Layla Abdullah-Poulos's Francis-Award-winning essay "The Stable Muslim Love Triangle-Triangular Desire in African American Muslim Romance Fiction" is the first essay anywhere, to my knowledge, to explore this growing corpus, much of which is independently published, and it lays the groundwork for future comparative research on Muslim popular romance from a transnational and / or multicultural perspective, and on Muslim popular romance alongside Christian inspirational and other religiously-inflected subgenres. In "Rewriting the Romance: Emotion Work and Consent in Arranged Marriage Fanfiction," Milena Popova uses conceptual models from popular romance fiction scholarship and the sociological paradigm of "emotion work" to explore another independently published archive-arranged-marriage Loki / Thor slash fanfiction housed at Archive of Our Own-as a textual space in which cultural norms surrounding marriage and sexual consent can be investigated and revised. This piece suggests that there are many possibilities for cross-fertilization between fan studies (and fanfic studies) and popular romance studies: the archive of primary texts not only exists, but is so vast that it could produce fresh scholarship for many years to come. Finally, we have Kecia Ali's report from the Romance Writers of America's archives at Bowling Green State University: another vast, largely untapped resource which includes correspondence, RWA internal communication (newsletters, board meeting minutes, etc.), conference programs, and recordings of conference sessions from 1980-2008. I hope that readers of JPRS will follow Ali's lead in seeking out and analyzing this material, and I know that the research library staff at BGSU are eager to see us put it to use. Volume 7 of JPRS did not, however, focus exclusively on written texts. In a pair of firsts for the journal, we have published a bilingual special issue-its essays in English and French-devoted to love and popular music. This "Love and Rock" issue attends to music
, by the date-stamp on the Editor's Note for Issue 1.1. That note announced, a little grandly, th... more , by the date-stamp on the Editor's Note for Issue 1.1. That note announced, a little grandly, that we were going to be a "peer-reviewed on-line journal dedicated to scholarship on the representation of romantic love in popular media, now and in the past, from anywhere in the world," and that we would "build a community that includes academics, independent scholars, industry professionals, and serious general readers." To build that broad community we made JPRS an open-access journal, free to read and download, and we invited comments on all of our articles, hoping to stir up the kinds of discussions we admired on listservs and romance review / discussion websites. The comment feature didn't last long. Our mission statement, too, has been revised and professionalized, with an added emphasis on making JPRS a home for scholarship on teaching and learning the popular culture of romantic love. (A crisp new "About the Journal" description can be found at our home page.) Yet, as a glance at the table of contents for issue 5.1 suggests, our commitments to internationalism and interdisciplinarity have only deepened over the years, and we remain dedicated to bringing the voices of scholars and creative professionals into productive conversation. In this issue, Jyoti Raghu's essay on the "religion of love in American film" sits comfortably beside Helene Ehriander's analysis of Swedish "chick-lit in corsets" and Karin Heiss's account of teaching British Regency and desert romance at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg in Bavaria, Germany. In "Love in the Desert" historian Stacy Holden offers an analysis of the ways that American romance authors talk about writing sheikh romances in a post-9/11 context-an analysis to which Holden invited novelist Megan Crane to offer an "Author's Response." (The lines between scholar and creative practitioner are sometimes fuzzy in the romance world; Crane has, we note, a Ph.D. in literature of her own.) The voice of the romance author can also be heard in a lively interview with award-winning American romance author Susan Elizabeth Phillips, a followup to Lisa Fletcher's interview with Anne Gracie in JPRS 4.2 and the Rita Dandridge interview with Beverly Jenkins in our inaugural issue, five years ago. Two years ago, our Book Review editor announced that we would be taking "a new, more expansive approach to the book review section here at JPRS," and we are delighted to
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