[Crystal]

Here's the counterpart to the fiction list. These are articles or book that any romance academic should read, understand, know about.

Please reply to this thread with your suggestion for what should be on the list, and I'll add it to this post. You can also dispute anything on the list if you'd like.

A couple to start us off (again, in no particular order):

Pamela Regis: A Natural History of the Romance Novel
Lynne Pearce: Romance Writing
Kay Mussell & Johanna Tunon (eds): North American Romance Writers
Jayne Ann Krentz (ed.): Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance
Sarah Wendell & Candy Tan: Beyond Heaving Bosoms

[Angela Toscano]

Also:

Romantic conventions by Anne K. Kaler and Rosemary E. Johnson-Kurek
The romance fiction of Mills & Boon, 1909-1990s by Jay Dixon. London
Reading the romance: women, patriarchy, and popular literature by Janice A. Radway

[Jennifer Crowley]

Angela Toscano, on 11 July 2009 - 02:53 PM, said:

Also:

Romantic conventions by Anne K. Kaler and Rosemary E. Johnson-Kurek
The romance fiction of Mills & Boon, 1909-1990s by Jay Dixon. London
Reading the romance: women, patriarchy, and popular literature by Janice A. Radway

Radway's good to read, I suppose, to know what has come before, but after reading BHB and Regis, I feel like she should come with a qualifier. Of course, that might be a natural bias against her. The way she talks about romance makes me grit my teeth.

[Laura Vivanco]

Jennifer Crowley, on 11 July 2009 - 07:28 PM, said:

Radway's good to read, I suppose, to know what has come before, but after reading BHB and Regis, I feel like she should come with a qualifier. Of course, that might be a natural bias against her. The way she talks about romance makes me grit my teeth.

BHB needs to come with a qualifier too, because it's actually quite narrowly focused, mainly on American single-title non-inspirational romances from the 70s onwards. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but it could be a bit misleading if someone read it and thought the books discussed in it were representative of the entire genre.

[Laura Vivanco]

Particularly for the UK, where we have the Romantic Novelists' Association and the genre is "romantic fiction," which is broader than "romance," I'd suggest

• Rachel Anderson, The Purple Heart Throbs: The Sub-Literature of Love. As can be deduced from the title, this is not complimentary about the genre, but it does discuss British romantic fiction from the Victorian period to the 1970s.
  
• Mary Cadogan, And Then Their Hearts Stood Still: An Exuberant Look at Romantic Fiction Past and Present. Again, the title's fairly self-explanatory.

On Harlequin Mills & Boon there's jay Dixon's book, which has already been mentioned but there's also

• Paul Grescoe, The Merchants of Venus: Inside Harlequin and the Empire of Romance. This is focused mostly on Harlequin as a business, though there are some insights into authors, readers, etc.
  
• Margaret Ann Jensen, Love's $weet Return: The Harlequin Story. This includes details about the history of the business but also provides plenty of feminist analysis of the novels themselves.
  
• Joseph McAleer, Passion's Fortune: The Story of Mills & Boon. This is focused mostly on M&B as a business, though there are some insights into authors, readers, etc.

Some other seminal works on the genre are:

• Jan Cohn, Romance and the Erotics of Property: Mass-Market Fiction for Women.
  
• Rita B. Dandridge, Black Women's Activism: Reading African American Women's Historical Romances.
  
• Juliet Flesch, From Australia with Love: A History of Modern Australian Popular Romance Novels.

Another useful collection of essays is:

• Where's Love Gone?: Transformations in the Romance Genre, Paradoxa 3.1-2 (1997).

[An Goris]

I would also add Carol Thurston's The Romance Revolution: Erotic Novels for Women and the Quest for a New Sexual Identity (1987).

Oh, and Eric and Sarah's upcoming New Approaches collection from McFarland - don't know when precisely that will be out, though.

[Eric Selinger]

Has anyone looked at A Companion to Romance: From Classical to Contemporary (Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture), edited by Corinne Saunders? I just saw the listing for it on Amazon.com.

“Acknowledging the difficulty of defining "romance," Saunders and the contributors collectively produce a volume that offers a more comprehensive survey of the literature--including its historical, national, and generic varieties--than have previous standard works on the subject…Some of the essays--e.g., Helen Cooper's "Malory and the Early Prose Romances" and Richard Cronin's "Victorian Romance: Medievalism"--are exemplary in the quality of their writing, scholarship, and critical perception…Highly recommended.”
Choice <!--end-->

"... It would be worth acquiring for an academic humanities collection and, from my own experience, would be particulary useful for English literature students at undergraduate and postgraduate level."
Reference Review

Romance is a varied and fluid literary genre, notoriously difficult to define. This groundbreaking Companion surveys the many permutations of romance throughout the ages.

* Considers the literary and historical development of the romance genre from its classical origins to the present day
* Incorporates discussion of the changing readership of romance and of romance’s special relation to women readers
* Comprises 30 essays written by leading authorities on different periods and sub-genres
* Challenges the idea that the appeal of romance is exclusively escapist
* Draws on a wide range of specific and influential literary examples

Could be of interest, I reckon.

[Laura Vivanco]

Eric Selinger, on 12 July 2009 - 01:45 PM, said:

Has anyone looked at A Companion to Romance: From Classical to Contemporary (Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture), edited by Corinne Saunders? I just saw the listing for it on Amazon.com. [...]

Could be of interest, I reckon.

There's a pdf of the introduction to that volume here and the whole of that introduction and some other excerpts are available via Google Books.

As far as I can see, there's really not very much in it about the modern popular romance genre. The statement that "Romance is a varied and fluid literary genre, notoriously difficult to define" is true, if you're trying to describe all the different texts discussed in this volume as members of a single vast genre, but personally, I wouldn't do that. I tend to think of chivalric romances as a different genre from the modern popular romance, which is different again from the adventure tales of John Buchan and the poetry of the Romantics. This volume, though, includes essays about them all.

[An Goris]

Laura Vivanco, on 12 July 2009 - 07:36 PM, said:

There's a pdf of the introduction to that volume here and the whole of that introduction and some other excerpts are available via Google Books.

As far as I can see, there's really not very much in it about the modern popular romance genre. The statement that "Romance is a varied and fluid literary genre, notoriously difficult to define" is true, if you're trying to describe all the different texts discussed in this volume as members of a single vast genre, but personally, I wouldn't do that. I tend to think of chivalric romances as a different genre from the modern popular romance, which is different again from the adventure tales of John Buchan and the poetry of the Romantics. This volume, though, includes essays about them all.

I remember looking at this book quite a while ago (so details are hazy) and coming to the same conclusion as Laura: it's interesting in the sense that it gives an idea of the content designated by the term "romance," but it doesn't actually cover much of the contemporary popular romance novel. Barbara Fuchs' "Romance" (New Critical Idiom, 2004)bascially does the same - she discusses the occurence of romance throughout literary history - but in a more condensed version.

[Sandra Schwab]

Laura Vivanco, on 12 July 2009 - 06:36 PM, said:

As far as I can see, there's really not very much in it about the modern popular romance genre.

I bought the Companion a few weeks ago, mainly for John Simons's article on chapbooks and penny histories, which is truly excellent. I've skimmed over the Victorian medievalism part and found it not quite as insightful as the review which Eric has quoted claims.

There is also an article on popular romance. However, I was seriously underwhelmed by it, not the least because the author refers to Mills & Boon romance as the "degenerate" form of romance. She rehashes Radway's and Modleski's theories, applies some of their concepts to books that are not popular romances, and explicitly mentions only one M&B novel, namely Violet Winspear's The Viking Stranger of 1966. She uses neither any of McAleer's studies on M&B nor jay Dixon's. In addition, single title romance does not seem to exist for this author.

[Laura Vivanco]

Sandra Schwab, on 15 July 2009 - 07:33 AM, said:

In addition, single title romance does not seem to exist for this author.

I wonder if that's because she's from the UK, and most single title romances aren't sold in the UK (at least I suspect that's the case, given the minute selection of them that I've been able to find in bookshops near me). Maybe it's also partly due to a perception that M&Bs are quite different from longer forms of romantic fiction that do exist in the UK? They are marketed differently. Little Black Dress is doing something a bit similar by putting emphasis on the company's identity when marketing the books, rather than on any individual author, but they don't market their books in "lines" with matching covers, and they don't take them off the shelves after a month. It may well be that M&B's marketing techniques affect the perception of the quality of the texts, which may be why she thought of them as "degenerate."

[Laura Vivanco]

Crystal, on 11 July 2009 - 06:37 PM, said:

Here's the counterpart to the fiction list. These are articles or book that any romance academic should read, understand, know about.

We've been having a bit of discussion about cover art on another thread, so for those who're interested in that side of the genre, I'd recommend reading, or perhaps I should say "looking at" since these books don't have a huge amount of analysis, but they do contain lots and lots of photos of romance covers:

Bowring, Joanna and Margaret O’Brien, 2008. The Art of Romance: Mills & Boon and Harlequin Cover Designs, (Munich: Prestel). [There's a good selection of the covers included in the book here and here are some photos of the book which give a good idea of its text-to-cover-art ratio. To be a bit more accurate, the introduction, which contains almost all the non-photographic material, is on pages 8-17, and those pages also include quite a few photos.]

McKnight-Trontz, Jennifer, 2002. The Look of Love: The Art of the Romance Novel (New York: Princeton Architectural Press). [This is about the cover art of romance novels from the 1940s to the 1970s and contains a lot more analysis than the Bowring and O'Brien. Excerpt via Google Books, Description, small gallery of photos and an audio report from NPR radio, and index page and excerpts via Amazon]

[Sandra Schwab]

Laura Vivanco, on 15 July 2009 - 09:18 AM, said:

I wonder if that's because she's from the UK, and most single title romances aren't sold in the UK (at least I suspect that's the case, given the minute selection of them that I've been able to find in bookshops near me).

But she doesn't discuss authors like Georgette Heyer or Victoria Holt either. At the same time, she discusses Radway's "Reading the Romance", which was based on US romances and US readers. She also expands the concept of popular romance to include "postmodern, 'literary' varieties" which refer ironically to the basic structure and elements of romance. In many ways, the article could be understood as theory-heavy analysis of romantic fiction, but not of popular romance.

[Laura Vivanco]

Sandra Schwab, on 17 July 2009 - 01:12 PM, said:

In many ways, the article could be understood as theory-heavy analysis of romantic fiction, but not of popular romance.

And that's a huge amount of information to try to compress into a few pages, so there are bound to be omissions. The trouble with it, as with the volume as a whole, is that "romance" seems to be defined very loosely, so it can be very confusing for a reader who's expecting one thing but gets a mixture of different things.

Just so that people who haven't seen this volume can get a feel for what we're discussing, I'll quote a bit from the beginning of Lynne Pearce's article, "Popular Romance and its Readers":

Quote

In her original proposal for this Companion, Corinne Saunders observed that: "Romance exists in degenerate form in works of the Mills and Boon type" (my italics). As the author given the responsibility for dealing with this end of the romance spectrum, some manner of defense was clearly called for, and my initial response - "yes, but what is most degenerate is also most defining" - has stood up well to the way this chapter has developed. [...]
in preparing my material for the Companion, I quickly realized that it would be not only limiting, but anachronistic, to interpret my "popular" brief too narrowly: romance of the "degenerate" kind is now a staple point of refernce for any amount of postmodern "literary" fiction and film, and its "ironic but not" treatment in such texts is, I feel, a measure of the extent to which contemporary culture is as obsessed with this particular "Ur"-narrative as ever: the story of how two lovers meet, become estranged, and are then reunited under the aegis of an "unconquerable love" has lost none of its appeal. (521)

and

Quote

In this chapter, then, I shall be focusing my attention largely on the "deep structures" that help to elucidate, if still not fully explain, the "great enigma" of romantic love in its more popular literary and cultural manifestations. The first subsection thus offers a broad overview of the work of Tania Modleski (1982) and Janice Radway (1984). [...] This overview is followed by another on deep structure [...] drawing, first, on the insights derived from recent "Trauma Theory" and, second, on Ernst Bloch's (1986) work on "daydreams" and "anticipatory consciousness." (522-23)