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Academic Research Grant
Below is a list of RWA Academic Research Grant recipients and summaries of their projects.
Sarah S. G. Frantz, Fayetteville State University
"The Rare Tears of a Strong Man": Power Exchange and the Construction of Masculinity in Popular Romance Fiction
The cathartic tears that well up in the climactic scene of Joey Hill's erotic romance—a novel that explores in a richly layered narrative the themes of sexual power exchange and the contruction of gender—represent the appeal and explain the success of the Alpha male of popular romance fiction. These tears, symbolizing both the dominance and the submission of masculine authority and emotions, embody the core of my analysis of popular romance fiction. With the help of grant support of the Romance Writers of America, I propose to write and publish three academic articles that explore in greater depth the historical foundations and the narrative and ideological constructions of the meaning and emotional power of these "rare tears of a strong man" in popular romance fiction.
Jayashree Kamble, University of Minnesota
Love in the Time of Globalization: A Reassesment of Popular Romance
Romance fiction has become an increasingly visible object of academic analysis in the last two decades, from Janice Radway's Reading the Romance (1984) to the recently published Natural History of the Romance Novel (2003) by Pamela Regis. My own dissertation is spurred by the multiplication of the form into numerous subgenres, ranging from futuristic science fiction, to contemporary suspense, and historical intrigue, each one adapting the romantic plot for different purposes. I propose that determining why readers prefer some of these categories to others will contribute to understanding the appeal of the genre as a whole. My dissertation will also examine the effect of the rapidly growing romance community--notably, book clubs, on-line chat groups, conferences, and global readership (with the non-Anglo/American romance reader as the primary object of analysis)--on the writing, marketing, and the reception of the genre. My hypothesis is that romances operate in complex ways to assess not just romantic relationships but contemporaneous political, social, and economic concerns, and are currently influencing perceptions of the same on an unprecedented scale through their expanding readership.
Eric Selinger, DePaul University
Teach Me Tonight: The Art of Reading Romance Fiction, One Book at a Time
I took the mission of the grant to heart: not simply to support my own research, but to nurture and promote the serious academic study of romance fiction by others as well.
My first step was to ask my university to host a listserv, RomanceScholar so that we could exchange ideas and spread the word about opportunities to publish and present our work. Within a week, it had 50 members; in two, it had doubled; and the list currently has 165 subscribers in the US, UK, EU, Australia, and New Zealand. A few months ago, when a young scholar in Belgium who had written her MA thesis on “how-to” guides for romance writers wanted to know where she could pursue her Ph.D., the RomanceScholar list put her in touch with supportive professors and programs on three continents!
Among the first tasks we set ourselves on the listserv was to make the world of scholarship on romance fiction more easily available to ourselves and our students. I suggested to the group that we collectively create an on-line bibliography of books, essays, and other materials. Kassia Krozser of the Romance Wiki set up a page for us, which has since grown to eight separate pages listing, and often linking to, academic books and essays, dissertation abstracts, scholarship in languages other than English, and more. It’s a one-stop shopping spree for romance scholars, and is continually updated by members of the listserv, romance authors, and others.
After the listserv had been up for several months, I suggested to several of the most frequent contributors that we start a collaborative blog about romance fiction specifically from an academic perspective. Teach Me Tonight now features seven named contributors—Sarah S. G. Frantz, Linda Hilton, Gwendolyn D. Pough, Pamela Regis, Sandra Schwab, Laura Vivanco, and myself—and has received over 13,000 page visits, with recent readers from the Netherlands, Barbados, India, Sweden, Finland, the Czech Republic, Poland, Brazil, Israel, Spain, Germany, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, the US, and (my favorite), “the Mumbles, Swansea, UK.”
Teach Me Tonight and the RomanceScholar listserv have also enabled me to contact other professors who teach courses on romance fiction, and to solicit material from them for another website hosted by DePaul. Resources for Teaching Popular Romance Fiction offers syllabi, lesson plans, paper topics, and other materials that those teaching the genre, especially for the first time, will find useful. They also enabled me to target interested academics when it came time to call for papers on romance for the 2007 Popular Culture Association conference. I wrote up our call for papers, sorted our best proposals into coherent panels, and am proud to report that this year the PCA national conference will have 25 papers in 5 panels dedicated to romance fiction.
While at work on these ancillary projects, I have continued to work on the essays I proposed to the RWA last year. The first piece I will complete was not on that original list—but it will, I hope, make it easier for the others to find a home in academic journals. As I thought about submitting my work to the journal Contemporary Literature—not a hotbed of romance fiction scholarship, I can assure you!—it occurred to me that the best way to “break the ice” for romance fiction there was to write about the dramatic changes now taking place in romance fiction criticism, of which my own work is a part. I therefore proposed, and had accepted, a major review-essay on the last ten years of work in romance fiction criticism: a piece that will look at such books as Pamela Regis’s A Natural History of the Romance Novel, From Australia With Love, the history of Australian popular romance by Juliet Flesch, Lynn S. Neal’s Romancing God, a study of evangelical women and Christian / Inspirational romance, Empowerment versus Oppression: 21st Century Views of Popular Romance Novels. edited by Sally Goade, among others. My hope is that, having run such a piece, Contemporary Literature will be a more natural home for future work in the field, whether that be a revised and expanded version of my Emma Holly piece from last spring, my upcoming PCA talk, “Brace Yourself, Bridget O’Shaughnessy: Jennifer Crusie Romances The Maltese Falcon,” or one of the many other essays that now seem to be in the works by my fellow romance scholars.
Stephanie Harzewski, University of Pennsylvania
The New Novel of Manners: Chick Lit and Postfeminist Sexual Politics
The New Novel of Manners: Chick Lit and Postfeminist Sexual Politics aims to be the first comprehensive treatment of the chick lit phenomenon. Originally a euphemism for Princeton University’s “Female Literary Tradition” course in the 1980s, chick lit mutated from a movement in American women’s avant-garde fiction in the 1990s to become, by the turn of the century, a humorous subset of women’s literature, journalism, and advice manuals typified by bestsellers Bridget Jones’s Diary, Cooking for Mr. Latte, The Devil Wears Prada, and Sex and the City. This offshoot of romantic comedy—which burgeoned commercially from a crisis in romance publishing— has established humorous fiction for women as a full-fledged marketing niche and functions as a sociological comment on British and American sexual politics since the late 1990s. These urban period pieces not only provide an ethnographic report on a shift in the climate of feminism, but also a displacement of the popular romance and a postfeminist alternative to the Harlequin. Chick lit is a partial parody to Harlequin romance modifying the latter through greater realism, a pícara-like relation to money, and a vast diminishment of the hero. While the courtship novel and its idea that its protagonist is entitled to choose a husband arose from the shift from arranged to companionate marriage, chick lit, our latest courtship fiction, reflects, in contrast, crises in marriage and partner search such as the phenomenon of the “starter marriage,” the “B.A. gap,” and declining rates of remarriage for women. The New Novel of Manners provides a history of conditions in publishing, consumer culture, and heterosexual courtship that have coalesced to produce this genre of veiled memoir, one that has monumentally changed the representation of single women in literature.
University of Missouri-Columbia
Librarian’s Perception of Romance Readers & Romance Novels
The Romance Writers of America's (RWA) 2004 Statistical Report reports that only 14% of romance novels were obtained in libraries (p. 6). Public libraries pride themselves on being places where patrons can find entertainment as well as information, and where they can find stories of all kinds. The RWA statistic, however, suggests that public libraries are not effective purveyors of romance reading. Why aren't more romance readers finding their books in public libraries? Two potential causes stand out: either public libraries are not making romance novels available, or public librarians are not making romance readers comfortable enough to borrow romance novels. To learn more about why readers are not using public libraries for romance fiction, we propose a nationwide, mixed-methods study of libraries' provision of romance fiction and librarians' attitudes toward romance fiction and romance readers. The broader issue of why romance readers do not use public libraries will be addressed through two narrower questions: (1) What is the current availability of romance fiction in public libraries? (2) What are the attitudes of librarians and library staff toward romance fiction and romance readers? This project has the potential to have a significant effect on public library services to romance readers nationwide. Results from this survey will raise librarian's awareness of intentional or perceived bias against romance readers. It will help librarians plan romance-friendly programs and activities, create communities of romance readers, and develop an understanding of a large group of readers who are not, by all accounts, receiving optimum library services at the current time.
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