1. I Occasionally Use the Term “Romance Novel” Interchangeably with “Genre Romance” and “Romance Fiction.” 2

Notes Preface 1. I occasionally use the term “romance novel” interchangeably with “genre romance” and “romance fiction.” 2. In The Theory of the Novel, Georg Lukács suggests that forms of art are burdened with the task of dealing with the loss of a sense of completeness, a loss that results from our fragmented reality under modernity (38). Introduction: What Does It Mean to Say “Romance Novel”? 1. Regis’s chapter “The Definition” recounts how the terms romance and novel have been used in the past and then turns to listing the eight elements that she considers “essential” to a romance novel (19–25). 2. Audio books have become an increasingly popular medium for romance novels but this is only a transposition of the narrative voice, without any significant ontological change. The narra- tor recites the prose that the reader might have read aloud or silently. 3. For more on Lifetime’s ascendance over the nineties, see Lifetime: A Cable Network “For Women.” 4. Amanda D. Lotz, in her analysis of the Lifetime series Any Day Now, documents the extent to which networks like Lifetime influence the writers of their media software. Lotz notes that not only did Lifetime insist on a significant change in the original script before agreeing to air the show, but its executives jostled with the show’s creators and producers regularly: Content that narrowed the potential audience (too focused on ethnicity issues, addressing women of certain age groups) and the series’ tone (“nice” women’s stories vs. “exploita- tion” themes) proved particularly contentious in the strug- gle over creative autonomy. Miller [one of the producers] followed conventional practice and received approval for plot ideas from Lifetime both 160 NOTES when the ideas existed as “broad stroke” episode outlines and through their development into scripts, which allowed the network some influence in the content and form of the series. (233) Acknowledging that the show’s creators were not in a constantly antagonistic position with the network, Lotz reiterates that “even though Lifetime allowed a more expansive presentation of stories with explicit anti-racist themes, Miller and her staff were not given carte blanche” 234–5. 5. Bly gave the keynote address at McDaniel College’s “Romance in the New Millennium” conference in 2011. 6. As Cardwell puts it “Obviously, adaptations and other dramas are hardly ever broadcast live, but television’s transmitted nature forms the basis of an extra-textual presentness unique to the tele- visual medium” (85). 7. Even in these days of Tivo and DVR, television scripts are written keeping the standard broadcast commercial breaks in mind. In the broadcast of Midnight Bayou, there were at least 3 commercial breaks, spaced 15 to 20 minutes apart: at 19:25, at 31:00, and at 41:15. The serial novel is closer to this format but even its cliffhanger structure can be overlooked by a reader who has the com- plete text. While software written directly for online broadcast is not yet a full-fledged form, a recent New York Times article by Brian Stelter noted that changes are afoot, and writers of shows are changing techniques (like recapping previous events) because they assume viewers are binge-watching entire seasons through online streaming or DVD box sets. It also quotes Damon Lindelof, a cocreator of Lost, claiming that, “it’s comforting to know that ‘ultimately the way your work is going to be viewed is more like reading a novel’.” Yet it points out that techniques like the episode cliffhanger are not going away. Furthermore, where most television shows are still concerned, the fade-to-black technique used at a scene’s end before a commercial break makes a seamless experi- ence impossible for the viewer. 8. In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau distinguishes between the force of the established order (the “strategy” and the little maneuvers that people practice on a daily basis (“tactic”) to evade that order (xix). 9. The Oxford English Dictionary offers “conducive to feelings of romance” as one of the meanings of the adjective “romantic” and locates the earliest usage of the noun “romance,” meaning “love affair” or the “warmth of feeling” associated with such a relation- ship in the mid-nineteenth century, and that of it as a sentimental story about love in the twentieth century. NOTES 161 10. The descriptors used for him in the 1992 edition include “piti- less,” “solitary,” “panther,” “a predator waiting all too patiently for the chance to attack,” “cold introspective smile,” “lean, chis- eled features,” “needle-sharp black lashes,” and “cruelty edged his mocking, beautifully shaped mouth.” 11. What is clearly dangerous in the 1992 edition is sexualized and eroticized in the 2002 edition in passages like “If the devil ever decided to assume a human guise, Lysette was certain he would look exactly like this . dark, handsome, with a bold nose, a hard, sullen mouth, and wicked dark eyes. He was a rampantly mascu- line creature . ” (17). 12. Here, I am calling on Jameson’s conception that “heterogeneous narrative paradigms” lie within the text of a novel and often do not have an ideological affinity to each other (144). 13. Bakhtin’s conception of the novel as the living form that consis- tently contests genre distinctions in its effort to show glimpses of fluid reality is central to my approach to romance novels (5). 14. Gramsci by no means praises commercial literature. His judgment of serialized novels, for instance, is far from complimentary. He does, however, concede that such literature is a useful source for social analysis: Indeed it has enormous value precisely in this respect because the success of a work of commercial literature indicates (and it is often the only indication available) the “philosophy of the age,” the mass of feelings and conceptions of the world predominant among the “silent” majority. (348) Also, in demythologizing romance novels, I call on Roland Barthes’s notion of “myth.” In Mythologies, Barthes conceptual- izes “myth” as that whose meaning is obscured by a deliberate or inadvertent lack of acknowledgment of its historical constitution. In speaking of mythic language and image, he refers to linguistic and social concepts that are often deployed in political struggles by groups that efface their construction and reconfiguration. 15. Romance novels are read around the world and increasingly, written by authors in different countries, but for the majority of the last century, Britain and North America have been the locus of the writing. 16. I write in detail about the cause of this elsewhere but in brief, this tendency comes from the generic appearance of the serialized romance novels as well as the bodice-ripper images of the eighties; a marketing tool that readers may factor into their purchase on occasion, it has done more to encourage nonreaders to imagine that the genre is nothing but recycled copies of the same sentimental pornographic tale. 162 NOTES 17. American pulp magazines also had a romance component but pulps died out by the forties, long before Harlequin started to make British romance reprints available in Canada and the United States. If there is an American genealogy to the American romance novel to be traced to the pulps, it lies more in the cover image and the reputation it conferred on the romance genre as developed by Harlequin and its later competitors. 18. See A Natural History of the Romance Novel for an analysis of Heyer’s Regency novels. 19. Lazarsfeld and Merton express reservations about the mass media’s ability to translate into a popular socially productive culture. Instead, they suggest that mass culture has a “narcotizing dysfunc- tion” that leaves people with no time for organized action, an effect desired by “chief power groups” composed of “organized business” (457–64). In Adorno’s discussion on television’s controlling influence, he speaks of multiple messages in cultural objects that work to “ensnare the consumer as completely as possible and . engage him psychodynamically in the service of premeditated effects.” He uses the example of a television show in which an underpaid char- acter is presented as funny and sympathetic at the same time: In terms of a set pattern of identification, the script implies: “If you are as humorous, good-natured, quick-witted, and charming as she is, do not worry about being paid a starva- tion wage. You can cope with your frustration in a humorous way; and your superior wit and cleverness put you not only above material privations, but also above the rest of mankind.” In other words, the script is a shrewd method of promoting adjustment to humiliating conditions by present- ing them as objectively comical and by giving a picture of a person who experiences even her own inadequate position as an object of fun apparently free of any resentment. (480–1) 20. The last argument is somewhat influenced by Sharon Stockton’s study of the sexual interaction between male and female charac- ters in twentieth-century novels as an enactment of the working of advanced capitalism. 1 Capitalism: Money and Means in Romance Novels 1. Patricia Wilson’s Powerful Stranger (1993) and Sara Wood’s The Italian Count’s Command (2004) are only two of hundreds of such examples. 2. See Passion’s Fortune: The Story of Mills and Boon (1999) for a com- prehensive history of Mills and Boon, including the editorial policy. 3. See my discussion on war for examples of this nationalist perspective. NOTES 163 4. See Sophie Cole’s Wardour Street Idyll (1910) or A Plain Woman’s Portrait (1912). 5. This chapter does not offer a narrative of how novels in the period between Bronte’s work and these Mills and Boon texts address the evolution of capitalism.

Load more