Mary Bly leads two lives. By day she teaches Shakespeare and freshman composition at Fordham University, where she’s a professor of English. By night, or whenever she can make time to write, she turns out best-selling romance novels under the pen name Eloisa James.
Ms. Bly (daughter of the writers Robert Bly and Carol Bly) has more than 20 published novels to her credit but kept her creative life a secret from her academic colleagues until she’d earned tenure. For a scholar to admit that she took pop romance seriously was for a long time the literary equivalent of frequenting the red-light district. It was something respectable people just didn’t do, unless they ventured in as moralists or ethnographers, as the literary scholar Janice A. Radway did 30 years ago with Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Culture.
Decades after Radway, the “academic study of popular romance fiction is clearly in its infancy,” Ms. Bly wrote in her contribution to New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction, a collection of critical essays published last year and edited by two literary scholars who are also fans of romance, Sarah S.G. Frantz and Eric Murphy Selinger.
In the past few years, though, a fresh generation of scholars has been giving popular romance a second look. They’re intrigued by it as an object of passionate readerly devotion, as a literary endeavor worth looking at in detail, and as a wildly successful global enterprise with a robust community of fans and writers.
Now the Popular Romance Project, a new undertaking with a strong public-scholarship component, is drawing on that energy to build a place where romance authors and academics, critics and readers, can mingle and get to know one another better.
The project has four major components: a Web site developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, at George Mason University; a conference planned for Valentine’s Day 2015 at the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book; a nationwide series of library events sponsored by the American Library Association; and a documentary film, Love Between the Covers, being shot by Laurie Kahn, whose previous work includes the well-received documentaries Tupperware! and A Midwife’s Tale.
Ms. Kahn, the driving force behind the Popular Romance Project, turned to the center at George Mason because she knew its late director, Roy Rosenzweig. Popular romance attracted her as a subject because it’s a female-driven phenomenon, a model of author-reader community-building, and a big commercial enterprise.
“More than half of the mass-market paperbacks sold in this country are romance novels,” Ms. Kahn says. “It’s the behemoth of the industry.”
Statistics from the Romance Writers of America support that claim. Romance sales totaled $1.44-billion in 2012, according to the group, and the genre is the top-selling category on the major bestseller lists. The books are obsessively, passionately reviewed and debated on Web sites like Smart Bitches, Trashy Books.
Devoted fans read dozens or even hundreds of romances a year, and they have every sort of setup to choose from: not just the stereotypical Harlequins and perennially popular Regency historicals (one of Eloisa James’s specialties) but gay/lesbian/transgender, paranormal, Amish, S&M—the list goes on.
Romance authors sometimes turn out two or three books a year, and they’re adept at developing relationships with readers via social media and in-person encounters. For instance, Beverly Jenkins, who has written many romances set in 19th-century American settings, takes regular trips with readers to visit places that she features in her novels. And while Ms. Jenkins and many others have built big careers with traditional publishing houses, others, like Bella Andre, have gone out on their own and become self-publishing phenomena that writers in any genre might well envy.
“It’s not just about the authors,” Ms. Kahn says of her desire to capture some of this exuberant activity on film. “It’s about these communities that they’re building, and the stories that they’re telling and why they’re so powerful.”
Significant support for the film and the development of the Popular Romance Project’s Web site came from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which has contributed more than $900,000 in grant money toward the project. Ms. Kahn says the NEH was drawn to the project’s cross-platform approach, including a Web site that would bring researchers and the public together.
“It’s working,” she says. “We really are getting a conversation started between scholars and people who are in the field.”
Intellectual Credibility
Strands of that conversation can be seen unspooling on the “Behind the Scenes” and “Talking About Romance” sections of the site. Ms. Kahn posts some of the footage she’s collected. Authors, editors, and scholars post on all manner of topics related to the writing, reading, and critiquing of romance, both as a contemporary literary activity and in its many historical manifestations.
One recent post features a video of prominent authors, including Mary Bly/Eloisa James, talking about their childhood reading and where it led them. In another recent post, a librarian discusses romance as part of public-library collections. (“If you want better circulation at your library, buy more romance. It’s that simple,” another librarian says.) And in a July 30 entry, Susan Rensing, an assistant professor of history and women’s and gender studies at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, writes about eugenics and “suitable” matches in early-20th-century America.
Since it went live, a little more than a year ago, the Web site has gotten some half a million page views, says Kelly Schrum, the center’s director of educational projects. Ms. Schrum, who’s also an associate professor in George Mason’s higher-education program, adds that visits to the site have grown every month.
Giving the project extra intellectual heft is an advisory board including Ms. Bly and 11 other scholars, several of whom have emerged as leaders in the recent critical wave of interest in popular romance.
Eric Murphy Selinger, a professor of English at DePaul University, is executive editor of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies, an online, peer-reviewed journal. He sits on the board of the Popular Romance Project.
“In many ways, it’s the most visible public face of changes in the academic engagement with popular romance,” he says. The past six or seven years have been “a crucial period,” according to Mr. Selinger.
He thinks of the work on pop romance done in the 1980s, most famously Reading the Romance, as the first wave of academic pop-romantic criticism. Radway’s book argued that fans enjoyed the genre because it offered them strategies for living in a man’s world. Other notable first-wave work includes Tania Modleski’s Loving With a Vengeance: Mass Produced Fantasies for Women and Kay Mussell’s Fantasy and Reconciliation: Contemporary Formulas of Women’s Romance Fiction.
Those critics’ approach “was to say there’s real complexity in the cultural use of these books by the women who read them,” Mr. Selinger says. But Radway et al. were drawn to what they saw as the genre’s subtexts, not to the authors and books themselves. “The romance authors, as individual artists, got very little attention,” he says.
Romance writers, however, paid attention to what critics were saying about their genre, Mr. Selinger says. In the late 1980s and 90s, “you can see these ideas being chewed on and mulled over by the authors themselves.” Some authors played with notions of romance in their novels; others wrote essays defending the genre.
In the 1990s, some academics in turn began to pay closer attention not just to the sociology of romance but also to the literary effort and craft involved. Studying romance led some writers with academic backgrounds into new careers as romance authors. For instance, Jennifer Crusie is the pen name of Jennifer Smith, who studied 100 romance novels as part of her research on gender and narrative approaches. Having analyzed so many love stories led her to write one herself and enter it in a contest, which she won. Like Eloisa James, she’s now a New York Times best-selling author. She’s also written “a series of defenses of the genre” that have been very influential, Mr. Selinger says.
Romance, after all, has been part of human storytelling since the very beginning. Jane Austen casts a long shadow in popular as well as “literary” treatments of romance.
In the early 2000s, Pamela Regis, a professor of English at McDaniel College, published A Natural History of the Romance Novel, which Mr. Selinger describes as “a book that wants to break down the distinctions between the literary and the nonliterary romance novel.” Ms. Regis says she appreciates the genre in part because of its infinite variety, which she calls “one of the challenges of studying it.” She has little patience for the ethnographic approach. “I am very suspicious of people who talk about ‘the romance reader,’” she says. “Who is this mythical creature?”
An Institutional Home
As Ms. Regis and other scholars were trying out new critical approaches to the genre, the Romance Writers of America got interested as well and in 2005 began to offer research grants to academics. Mr. Selinger was an early recipient. He set about building an infrastructure for romance scholarship, including an e-mail list, Romance Scholar, and a wiki-bibliography. He joined forces with Sarah S.G. Frantz, an associate professor of English at Fayetteville State University. (She is on leave to work as an acquisitions editor at Riptide Publishing, a romance house.) Ms. Frantz had an ambitious plan, which included a new scholarly association and a peer-reviewed journal.
“We really needed to professionalize and institutionalize the study of romance,” Mr. Selinger says. The International Association for the Study of Popular Romance came to life in 2009, followed by the journal that Mr. Selinger edits. The association has held several conferences and now has about 130 active members worldwide, he says.
He hopes that the Popular Romance Project will help amplify and preserve the dialogue among scholars and the romance community. He likes the egalitarian spirit of the enterprise, in which critics, fans, and authors have equal voices. “Nobody gets to have the final word,” he says. Ms. Regis, who also sits on the project’s board, says it “addresses what popular romance is in the most sophisticated, accurate, and comprehensive way that I have seen.”
With its NEH money and a board of eminent scholars, the project may also help elevate romance as a reputable subject for academic study. “This may be some kind of turning point,” says Ms. Frantz.
At least she hopes so. Almost every other pop genre—science fiction, detective novels—has worked its way into literature programs. Promising graduate students can find departments and mentors happy to support their explorations of those once-disparaged styles. In spite of the scholarly turns of the past few years, however, students of romance have fewer options. “My sense is that it is still, at least in the U.S., a risky topic,” Mr. Selinger says.
If you say you want to do your dissertation or your next monograph on popular romance, you still encounter “that little instinct to sneer,” Ms. Frantz says. Like a hot but slightly disreputable date, popular romance is still waiting for an invitation to sit down to dinner with the family.
