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Some fear that romances might give readers unrealistic expectations about relationships and unhealthy attitudes about sex, a theory posited by relationship psychologist Susan Quilliam in a July essay in the Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care.

Not so, says Eric Selinger, associate professor of English at DePaul University, who uses romances in his research on love, desire and literary pleasure. “Every year or two someone sends up a warning flare: ‘Reading romance is bad for you!’ There’s no … data, no evidence — just a handful of anecdotes.”

To be fair, one could equally well say that there’s only a “handful of anecdotes” supporting the idea that romances are good for you (albeit a large handful).  It might be interesting to know whether Burnett and Beto’s findings would be replicated across larger groups of romance readers (they only interviewed “15 [...] womenbetween the ages of 18 and 55″), because they found mixed effects:

The women agreed with Alberts’ (1986)findings that the fictional conversations in romance novels informand reflect the actual male-female conversations of the social world.One participant described how she used the communication in thenovels to help her “communicate with the people around[her].” Some of the participants explained that they wereable to have the right expectations of their romantic partners, butone participant explained that she “sometimes compares” her husbandwith the hero, which “flusters” him. Other influences of the romancenovels include a change in their mood because “it helps you kind ofget yourself out of the context of whatever is going on.” A couple ofthe participants explained that romance novels help you tocommunicate better with your romantic partner, partly because thenovels give “a guy’s point of view.”The comments stating that conflict was handled similarly to thatin romance novels were divided almost equally between “yes” and “no.” [...]

The final question asked during each focus group was if theparticipants thought that romance novels have had an impact on theirrelationships. They explained that there were some comparisons intheir relationships to those in the novels, but even when there wasnot, they still stayed committed to their “real life” partners.However, two of the women said that they now knew why some of theirrelationships did not work out–because they were not “looking forreal substance.” They were “looking for the fairy tale romancenovel.”

The whole of that study is available here. Regarding the question of whether fictions are good or bad for us, Robert Sternberg argues that

All our lives we have heard stories of various kinds, many with love as a leitmotif. We thus have an array of stories we can draw on when composing our own. (26)

We come to relationships with many preconceived ideas. These ideas, or stories, are not right or wrong in themselves, although they may be more or less adaptive – that is, more or less healthy in promoting a good fit to the environment. What is viewed as adaptive varies over time and place. For example, one culture might view love as an indispensable part of marriage; another culture might view love as irrelevant to marriage. In both cultures, these values are likely to be taught not as somewhat arbitrary matters of cultural convention, but as matters of right and wrong. What are viewed as “realities” are rather perceptions of realities – stories. (7)

stories are so powerful in our lives, and also so hard to change. We may continue in a relationship that is dysfunctional in many respects simply because it does represent love to us, “sick” as that love may seem to others. We may even see the culture as supporting the kind of love we have. (221)

Tristan and Isolde – adulterous love

Cinderella waiting for her Prince

Lamb, Joyce. “Readers’ hearts remain true to romance novels.” USA TODAY, 14 February 2012.

Sternberg, Robert. Love is a Story: A New Theory of Relationships. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.

The first image is of John William Waterhouse’s “Tristan and Isolde with the Potion” and the second is of the cover of Louis Ferdinand Gottschalk, David Kilburn Stevens, Edward Warren Corliss and Robert Ayres Barnet’s Cinderella and the Prince; or, Castle of Heart’s Desire: A fairy Excuse for Songs and Dances. Boston: White-Smitz music pub. co., 1904. Both came from Wikimedia Commons.

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In Everything I Know About Love I Learned from Romance Novels, Sarah Wendell argues that

Inside those stories is everything you need to have a happy, loving relationship. [...] And what better way to learn about relationships and how they start, fracture, and become stronger once repaired, than to read about those relationships in many, many permutations and variations? (4-5)

In her review of EIKALILFRN Jessica Miller, a romance reader and a philosopher who teaches at the University of Maine, suggests that there’s something rather problematic about Wendell’s line of argument:

Though Wendell is writing a “gift book,” not a work of theory or literary criticism, her specific claims deserve some scrutiny, particularly around the issue of reader engagement, which is central to her arguments on the genre’s behalf. How, for instance, do romance readers manage to glean the good stuff but not the bad? [...] Wendell relies on reader testimonials for her claim that romance readers learn the real lessons, but merely enjoy the fantasy, but then what do we do about readers who testify that romance has harmed them [...]? To her credit, Wendell includes a few comments from readers who claim they learned what not to expect by reading romance [...]

But if savvy readers come to the genre ready and able to suss out what’s just fantasy, what’s worth emulating, and what not to do, then romance novels aren’t actually teaching these readers anything new. Wendell herself admits that the lessons romance teaches are “things you likely learned as a child when you were taught how to treat other people.” In that case, it would be more accurate to say that romance novels reflect or deepen moral beliefs readers already hold. This makes sense—but then it follows that if a reader holds pernicious or delusional moral beliefs (however we define those), given the sheer size of the genre, she can probably find some reinforcing of those bad moral beliefs in romance novels, too.

Miller argues that

It’s time to stop evaluating romance novels in terms of their putative effects on (women) readers, and to pay more attention to their literary merit and ability to provide pure pleasure.

So I’ll conclude with a reminder that the 2012 conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance takes as its subject “The Pleasures of Romance” and “asks one large question: What is the place of pleasure in popular romance?” The closing date for “proposals for individual papers, full panels, roundtables, interviews, or innovative presentations for peer-review consideration” is 1 May 2012.

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• Miller, Jessica. “A Fine Romance.” Open Letters Monthly. 1 Feb. 2012.
• Wendell, Sarah. Everything I Know About Love I Learned from Romance Novels. Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks Casablanca, 2011.

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1. The first chapter in Laura Vivanco’s For Love and Money sets out the five “modes” of literature identified by Northrop Frye and shows how attending to the “modal counterpoint” in a romance novel can make sense of its shifting tones, metaphors, and rhetoric. These modes (and modal counterpoint) can be understood from a purely aesthetic standpoint, in terms of the structure and individual character of any given novel, but they may also be looked at from other perspectives: for example, Vivanco argues that the use of hyperbolic metaphors and allusions to “romantic” and high mimetic mythoi might aim to capture something of the experience of “romantic illusion,” which demonstrably forms a part of falling in love, at least for some (see pp. 65-69).

Write an essay on the use of modal counterpoint in The Duke is Mine, using ideas from Vivanco, from class discussion, and from your own insight to understand how James deploys a variety of modes in the novel, playing them off against one another. Your essay can be comprehensive, drawing on scenes and passages from various parts of the novel to illustrate James’s use of various modes, or it can focus on the counterpoint between various modes in a single scene, attending closing to a single chapter or passage. In either case, please keep in mind the guiding principle of our class: you want to make the novel seem as interesting as possible, whether by showing that it is more complexly coherent and artfully constructed than it might seem at first glance or by showing that it is more interestingly self-divided, conflicted, and ambivalent.

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Joanna Chambers, who very kindly read draft versions of parts of For Love and Money, has extremely generously decided to promote the book too. She’s holding a competition on her blog this week and the prize is an e-copy of the book: “To enter, just post the name of your favourite category romance of all time – it doesn’t have to be a HQ/M&B (for all you Loveswept readers out there…).” [Edited to add: the contest has now closed.]

The good news for those of you who prefer paper books is that the price at Lulu has just decreased to £14.95.

As for me, I’ve been avoiding giving book recommendations at the Spurtle, talking about metafiction and the “rules” of romance at Liz Fielding’s blog and had my writing praised by my editor.

And if you’re bored of reading about my book, you might be interested in Joanna’s post about female impersonators and cross-dressing heroines.

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I’m very, very pleased to be able to announce that my new book, For Love and Money: The Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills & Boon Romance is now available.

Since this isn’t a time for modesty, I’ll share my back-cover quotes:

“Laura Vivanco’s For Love and Money is an impressive study of the popular fiction of Harlequin Mills and Boon that is a must read for any student of popular fiction and for those who write and love the genre” – Liz Fielding, author of over 50 Harlequin Mills & Boon romances.

“Deep learning, wide reading, and clear thinking are very much in evidence in Vivanco’s exploration of HM&B. A welcome addition to popular romance criticism.” – Professor Pamela Regis, author of A Natural History of the Romance Novel.

“Laura Vivanco’s For Love and Money is the book that scholars and fans have both been waiting for: a deft, attentive introduction to the Harlequin Mills & Boon romance novel as a work of art. [...] Vivanco traces the connections between these books and the classical myths and medieval romances they so often deliberately echo, and she shows how the novels use allusion and metatextual reflection to defend their genre. (“Scorn not the sonnet,” Wordsworth warned in a sonnet—Harlequin Mills & Boon novels have long taught readers to “scorn not the romance.”) Vivanco’s conversation with earlier critics, from the 1930s “Battle of the Brows” through 21^st century scholars like Pamela Regis, is lively, engaging, and good-humored, and she has a remarkable eye for the textual details that bring each novel to life. I am profoundly impressed.” – Professor Eric M. Selinger, author of What Is It Then Between Us? Traditions of Love in American Poetry.

My publisher, Humanities Ebooks, is (as their name suggests), an academic e-press, and the book is available from their site as a pdf. This is a format that deals particularly well with footnotes. A Kindle edition is also available at Amazon .at .com .de .es .fr .it and .uk .

HEB has teamed up with Lulu so that paper copies can be printed on demand. Lulu’s preview of the table of contents and the introduction is embedded below.

A brief summary of each of the chapters and a list of the HM&B romances cited, can be found at my website.

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There hasn’t been a lot of work done on the effect of translation on romances, and a fair proportion of what has been done isn’t accessible to me, so I was pleased to see Artemis Lamprinou’s article in issue 2.1 of the Journal of Romance Studies. Artemis Lamprinou looks at “British bestseller romances translated into Greek during the period 2000-2009, such as Gregson’s East of the Sun, Hislop’s The Island, and De Bernières Captain Corelli’s Mandolin,” and shows that translation is not just about the mechanical substitution of words in one language for words with the same meaning in another. Translators have to take into account cultural norms and these differ from one culture to another:

Emotions may appear to be a common experience to all people across the globe but this is a generalization that requires some refining. All people feel and convey emotions but different cultures have their own emotional repertoires and their own norms regulating not only the expression of emotions, but as some scholars argue, even the variety of the emotions experienced. [...] The more modern version of the cultural approach to emotions, and the one that this paper adopts, is that some basic emotions, such as happiness, sadness, anger, and fear, are indeed universal. However, culture plays a considerable role in the suppression or heightening of emotions and generates norms governing the when, where, and how these emotions can be expressed (Shaver, Wu, & Schwartz 183). These cultural norms affecting the communication of emotions cannot be ignored in the translation of romances, especially when experiencing the emotions is vital for the identification of the reader with the characters, on which reader satisfaction depends. (“Translated“)

Lamprinou’s initial findings are that

• when translating the word “anger,” “translators have a tendency to increase its force in the Greek translation”; there was a “tendency to translate ‘anger’ as rage.” Lamprinou suggests that this “could have been the result of the influence of Greek cultural textual norms which slightly differ in this case from the English ones as Greek authors value the production of more ‘dramatic’ passages.”
• similarly, translators may “raise the force of the described emotions [...] by altering the metaphor employed and [...] by introducing [...] personification.” This would support the “hypothesis that Greek romance authors prefer more intense emotional passages than their English counterparts.”
• “Greek translators seem to eliminate, or at least ignore, certain strategies that were absent from the Greek romances, such as allusions and alliterations.” Lamprinou rather tentatively suggests that “the translators may have eliminated the above-mentioned linguistic strategies in an effort to abide to the Greek textual norms, or, more possibly, they did not manage to recognize the importance of the strategies as they have not been often ‘exposed’ to such linguistic strategies through the Greek original romances.”

Lamprinou’s article draws attention to the importance of the translator and this is also emphasised in a 1998 article by Eva Hemmungs Wirtén, who interviewed members of Harlequin’s Stockholm office, including “Ewa Högberg, the editor with the overall responsibility for translationsin-house.” Högberg explained that

sometimes I would get a translation of a book that I had felt was a real tenpointer — and then a translator had taken it and it comes out like nothing. Then you’re so disappointed, because I had maybe laughed out loud when I read it or cried. It had made an impact — not all books do that, but these are the ones you remember and then you expect so much of them. Then there’s the opposite situation. Sometimes you have to take books that you don’t believe in to 100%, maybe because it’s a particular translator, maybe because the book contains certain parts that are supposed to work in contrast to others that month, so you get a good variation in contents. Sure, it’s okay, but not that great according to my way of looking at things — and then it comes back, and it’s just — YES! — the best story, dynamite language, and you just feel that…sometimes I’ve gone back to my notes to check — is this the same book? Can this really be? (Eva Högberg, Förlaget Harlequin AB, Stockholm, personal communication, May 20, 1996)

So the dullness and lifelessness of the first may become the vivaciousness of the next. As shetalks about her own reading, the enthusiasm is almost tangible. The book is not just “simply”translated into another cultural context, where it comes out clothed in another language, butessentially “the same.” Instead, the process of translation is hazardous territory and what she issuggesting is that translations do matter — so much so, in fact, that they can “make or break” thebook. (“They Seek“)

Swedish Harlequins were also reduced in length:

The most important direction given to thetranslator is that he or she needs to shorten the chapter by 10 to 15% since all Harlequin booksare shortened in translation from English to Swedish. Books in the Superromance and Historicalseries are cut from 304 pages to 272 pages, books in the Romance, Presents, and Desire series arecut from 192 pages to 160 pages. (“They Seek“)

 Further changes may occur because the advice given to translators

ishardly rigid: “it is allowed to distance yourself from the English text to a substantial degree”and even though the recommendation is to keep personal names as they are, they are not holy. At oneof the editorial meetings, the pros and cons of the names in the miniseries Calloway Corners (wherethe individual books are named after each of four sisters) were discussed extensively.Mariah was kept, Jo became Chris (due to a possible mix-up with a Swedish orangejuice sold under the name of JO), Eden was considered too foreign for Swedish ears andtransformed into Ellen, and the hero in Mariah, Ford (a car, not a name, according to theeditors), was rechristened Robert. (“They Seek“)

In her work Lamprinou mentions that some allusions may not translate well and she gives an example from the Greek translation of Rosamunde Pilcher’s

Winter Solstice, Elfrida, the heroine, is afraid to get out of her car because of a barking dog. The author of the text employs the phrase “a Baskerville hound” to express her fear by alluding to Arthur Conan Doyle’s story The Hound of the Baskervilles. The translator’s choice to render this passage into Greek word for word (literally “Baskerville hound,” as the article can sometimes be omitted in Greek) results in a Greek translation whose word order and phrasing remind readers less of the famous Sherlock Holmes book and sound more like the name of some strange breed of dog: a “Baskervillian hound” or simply “A Baskerville.” (“Translated“)

The issue of allusions which are lost in translation is also discussed by Wirtén:

Cultural allusions to people or particular phenomena are treated either by exclusion altogetheror by substitution. George Burns, George Strait, and Sadie Thompson are examples of characters thatare simply deleted, presumably because they will not be recognized as references by Swedishreaders; “Kleenex,” a brand name synonymous with a product in North America is far better known as”paper napkin” in Sweden; similarly, the expression “Lead on, Macduff” becomes “Lead on, Sherlock”in all likelihood because the translator deems the detective to be better known than the characterfrom Macbeth. References that require some previous knowledge of American culture to beunderstood at all, like a joke made on the concept of the Fifth Amendment or a pun on the word key(both as keys on a computer and the Florida Keys) are more problematic, either impossible to keepas they are or demanding an extra effort on part of the translator to come up with Swedishequivalents. (“They Seek“)

In addition, at least with regards to sex scenes, it would appear that in the Swedish-language editions “the overtphysicality of the text is substituted with a more reflective, metaphorical language” (“They Seek“); Lamprinou found that in the Greek-language editions of the novels she studied metaphors were also added (though the examples she gives were not taken from sex scenes).

Cumulatively, the cuts and alterations which are made to these texts leave Wirtén asking: “Is thisnot a new book? And where is the writer in all of this?” (“They Seek“).

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• Lamprinou, Artemis. “Translated Romances: the Effect of Cultural Textual Norms on the Communication of Emotions.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 2.1 (2011).
• Wirtén, Eva Hemmung. ” ‘They Seek It Here, They Seek It There, They Seek It Everywhere’: Looking for the “Global” Book” Canadian Journal of Communication 23.2 (1998). [This article is available online and is "based on a chapter in my dissertation which focuses in particular on Swedish translations," namely Eva Hemmungs Wirtén's Global Infatuation: Explorations in Transnational Publishing and Texts. The Case of Harlequin Enterprises and Sweden (Uppsala: Publications from the Section for Sociology of Literature at the Department of Literature, Uppsala University, 38, 1998) in which she looks at "the way in which the Harlequin book, through what I have termed transediting – or the combined process of editing and translation – is given a Swedish identity" (20). This is available online.]

The image came from Wikimedia Commons. It was created as an “Icon for translation projects” by Flappiefh.

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Eric has proposed a seminar for the American Comparative Literature Association’s 2012 Annual Meeting which

will take place at Brown University, Providence, RI from March 29th to April 1st, 2012. [...] The ACLA’s annual conferences have a distinctive structure in which most papers are grouped into twelve-person seminars that meet two hours per day for the three days of the conference to foster extended discussion. Some eight-person (or smaller) seminars meet just the first two days of the conference.

Here’s the call for papers for Eric’s seminar:

Since at least the 1920s, literary and cultural commentators have warned that modern lovers, hell-bent on investigating love, desire, and the self, would undermine all three. “We never say the word Love, do we; –we know it’s a suspect ideological construct” Maud Bailey shrugs in A. S. Byatt’s Possession, her symptoms shared by the patients Julia Kristeva discusses in Histoires d’Amour: men and women who suffer “crises of love. Let’s admit it: lacks of love.” In 1993, the New York Times announced the “Death of Eros” to readers of its Sunday magazine, and as ethnomusicologist Martin Stokes notes in The Republic of Love, Turkish novelists like Orhan Pamuk and Elif Şafak have recently suggested that love there, too, is “in a state of crisis.”

Yet is not love itself a sort of crisis? From Sappho to the Surrealists, Dante to Dil Se, Nizami to Jean-Luc Nancy, love seizes the body, shatters the heart, and annihilates the self, turning old life to new.    And what of other enduring discourses– psychological, theological, literary, and political–that frame love as a force that resists and rebuilds in the face of catastrophe? (Against the Nakba, Mahmoud Darwish thus declares himself a “Lover from Palestine.”)

This seminar invites papers on love in crisis, love as crisis, and love in the face of catastrophe, in literary texts, popular media, and works of critical theory. Ideally our seminar will span multiple periods, genres, traditions, and cultures of love, bringing them into productive conversation; all approaches are welcome.

Apparently “The Deadline for Paper Proposals has been extended to November 15, 2011.”

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The photo was taken by CarbonNYC and was made available under a Creative Commons licence at Flikr.

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The Journal of Popular Romance Studies is looking for essays, interviews, and pedagogical materials on love and religion in global popular culture, for a special issue guest-edited by Lynn S. Neal (Romancing God: Evangelical Women and Inspirational Fiction). How do film, fiction, popular music, and other media represent the complex relationships between love and religion? How do these representations compare across national, cultural, and theological divides, and what happens when they cross those boundaries? How have they changed over time? What can a sophisticated understanding of love in religious discourse—from whatever tradition—teach us about individual songs, films, novels, or other popular texts?

Topics of particular interest include:

• Theologies of love in popular song: Leonard Cohen, U2, Richard Thompson, Al Green, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Niyaz, Shye Ben-Tzur, etc.
• Sacred and secular love in popular culture: drawing boundaries, blurring distinctions
• Interfaith romance (Jewish / Christian, Hindu / Muslim, etc.) in popular culture
• Love, Religion, and Politics in popular culture
• Romance vs. Religion: warnings, advice literature, debates over idolatry, etc.
• Romantic love as a surrogate or secular religion
• Christian inspirational romance fiction, and its non-Christian equivalents: studies of individual novels, publishing lines, reader behavior, etc.
• Crossover texts and figures: Rumi, the Song of Songs, etc.
• God as lover and beloved in popular culture
• Sacred love stories in popular culture (Krishna / Radha, Majnun / Layla, Adam / Eve, etc.)
• One Love, or many? Rastafari, Wiccan, and other traditions of love in popular culture

Published by the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR), the peer-reviewed Journal of Popular Romance Studies is the first academic journal to focus exclusively on representations of romantic love across national and disciplinary boundaries. Our editorial board includes representatives from English, Comparative Literature, Ethnomusicology, History, Religious Studies, African American Studies, and other fields. JPRS is available without subscription at http://jprstudies.org.

Please submit scholarly papers of no more than 10,000 words by June 1, 2012, to An Goris, Managing Editor managing(dot)editor(at) jprstudies(dot)org. Longer manuscripts of particular interest will be considered on a case-by-case basis. Submissions should be Microsoft Word documents, with citations in MLA format.

The text came from Lynn S. Neal and JPRS. The images etc have been added by me. The YouTube video contains a song, “Who is the Loved One” by Sami Yusuf. The photo of Jewish Rhapsodies for Those In Love came from Flikr via The Contemporary Jewish Museum. The image of Kamadeva came from Wikimedia Commons, as did the photo of Sue McFarlane’s tombstone, which was taken by Alan Walker. It reads

HI. I’M SUE MCFARLANE (NEE LILLEY) BORN 26.8.1956 PASSED OVER 24.10.1995 THANK YOU FOR COMING HERE TODAY. MY SPIRIT IS WITH YOU AND I LOOK FORWARD TO MEETING UP AGAIN IN A WONDERFUL HEAVEN. I LOVE YOU ALL BE HAPPY AND MAY GOD BE WITH YOU. THERE ARE THREE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS; FAITH, HOPE AND LOVE BUT THE MOST IMPORTANT IS LOVE. AMEN. TO MY FAMILY X X X

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