Many of my academic romance studies colleagues say that when they tell their non-romance colleagues that they are scholars and critics of popular romance fiction, the invariable response is, “Ah, Radway!”
Radway, of course, is Janice Radway, author of Reading the Romance, a study of romance readers and the novels they read published in 1984. Although Radway’s study has major flaws that legitimately question the validity of its conclusions, some of its conclusions do have value for the texts it studies. That is, I think Radway’s theories about what readers get out of reading romances are worth considering–for romances published thirty years ago. Very few fields would consider a twenty-five year old text the cutting edge of its criticism and for no other field would those outside the area assume that a twenty-five year old text is the only study of the field.
I recently received the RWA’s Academic Research Grant for 2008-2009; in order to receive the award, I need to write a short description of the “State of the Scholarship.” Both to jump-start the creation of that essay, and to share it with a much larger audience than RWA’s Board of Directors, I thought I’d summarize here what I will present there, and, in the process, hopefully update people’s immediate assumption that Radway represents the sine qua non of romance scholarship.
Eric Selinger, of course, has already done half my job for me. He wrote a review of recent scholarship for Contemporary Literature (Volume 48, Number 2, Summer 2007, pp. 307-324), which Laura Vivanco summarizes so ably here. So while Eric has covered the recent past, I will cover the present and the future.
The best in romance scholarship was on display two weeks ago at the Popular Culture Association conference in San Francisco. I blogged summaries of all the romance panels. Some of the scholarship we saw there was truly astounding, especially by the graduate students in the group. The future of romance scholarship is truly blindingly bright if they are any indication.
We have an active Romance Scholar listserv for up-to-the-minute discussions of issues affecting romance scholarship now. There is an up-to-the-minute Bibliography of Academic Romance Scholarship on the Romance Wiki.
I know that there are at least two anthologies of academic essays being actively worked on as we read, and I’m sure there are more. The contributors to these volumes include people in all the nooks and crannies of romance scholarship, including scholars, writers, publishers, editors, and bloggers. There are so many intelligent scholars and critics who are truly respectful of romances discussing romances today, which is such a relief, and sometimes truly humbling.
We also have in the works a peer-edited, on-line academic journal on popular romance fiction, academic conferences on romance scholarship, and an academic society for the study of popular romance fiction. All will be revealed (and marketed!) when they are more fully developed.
All this is to say that academic criticism of popular romance fiction has come a long way in the last twenty-five years. As an academic, it’s a one in a million chance to be able to build a field like this from the ground up, and the opportunity to do so now is both exhilarating and terrifying.
No related posts.
[DANCING WITH HAPPINESS AT THE WIKI I DIDN'T KNOW EXISTED]
I know and love the wiki, but I didn’t know about the plans for a journal. That’s wonderful news!
All of this scholarship is so heartening. One hesitates to hope that romance will someday receive the respect it deserves…but dang, this makes it hard not to. I’ve really enjoyed the summaries from the Popular Culture conference.
Well, maybe someday romance will get respect. Saturday evening we went to the WNO performance of Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman (premiered 1843). The program says that the audiences loved it, but the critics panned it.
Let’s see, it had
a tortured hero (really tortured)
paranormal elements, including a curse
a mercenary father
a pure and noble heroine
passion
rivalry for the heroine’s hand
and even some inspirational bits.
Unfortunately, in the next-to-the last scene, it also had a plot hole open up that was big enough to swallow the entire production. That may have been what bothered the critics.
The scholarship is indeed heartening. There’s more to this genre than most imagine.
I wonder, though, if romance novels and scholarship will always suffer the same social and academic stigma. Confronted with a work of science fiction which meets their standards of excellence, they either deny it’s science fiction or praise it for rising above its genre.