![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutThis is Not a Book Review — this is me commenting on things that really strike me as I read. It _may_ turn into liveblogging. Hopefully not; liveblogging is usually a bad sign for m.
Anyway.
This is a book by Pamela Regis, earlier than Kamble (2003 for original; 2007 for pb — I have the kindle of unknown vintage / update; there are some oddities in the text that suggest that there may have been some OCR’os.).
Early in the book, Regis does an overview of other academic/critical work on romance novels, and I found at least one additional text to buy from that overview, but did not buy all of them. One of them, in French, was the first I’d ever heard of the sibling pair who wrote in France under the name M. Delly. The title of the book in Regis is given incorrectly (the first noun is plural in Regis, but not in reality). Also, while I have not yet read any of the books she refers to somewhat caustically, the quotes she uses from the books to justify her critique of those works do not … do what she says they do. And if you go actually read more reviews of the books, they _really_ don’t say what she says they say, so I’m treating this particular text with a great deal of care.
Where Kamble took a Bakhtin inspired approach to reading through the text to understand how the popular romantic fiction community of readers, writers and editors responded to events occurring in the world around them Regis’ approach is, at least so far, 100% Northrop Frye. I was not overly impressed by Northrop Frye in 10th grade; age has not inspired any increasing affection for sweeping typal structures which selective examples of the type are then wedged into with the assistance of corsets, tight lacing, Spanx, whatever is to hand.
Anyway. Enough of me being all snarky and arch and whatever. That’s just annoying, but I need to get that out of my system before I introduce you to what I came here for. It is not _as_ bonkers as Kamble’s Hero is the Ownership Class / Heroine is the working / petite bourgeoisie, conflict between them is the class struggle analysis. But hot damn, it’s pretty nuts!
“The heroine is often the target of ritual death, and beneath her very real trials in the narrative is the myth of death and rebirth, which echoes, however remotely, the myth of Persephone. … [summary of myth] … Just as Persephone must escape the kingdom of death to restore fruitfulness, increase, and fecundity to the entire earth, the romance novel heroine must escape her “death” to live to see her betrothal and the promise of children that it brings.”
OK, but let’s think about that in terms of the story structure — Persephone is rescued from the man who loves her enough to kidnap her from her mum … and every year she goes back to him for one month for each seed she ate. I mean, _how is this a good analogy for anything we love about romance novels_?!? Romance novels are supposed to be about the formation of a new family unit, and about leaving old relationships and roles and starting new ones and, I mean, lots of ways to formulate romance fiction, but I just am NOT seeing Hades and Persephone as appropriate and Persephone and mum is even weirder.
(TIL that Northrop Frye ripped off and oversimplified Maud Bodkins. I don’t think I’m going to read her book — it seems really far afield — but it’s nice to know that she seems to have had a much more flexible approach than Frye. Also, one of the reviews of her book on Amazon is hysterical, as, in addition to finding her work nearly unreadable, the reviewer appears to think that Maud was a man. Dude, you are minoring in English. How did you fail to notice that Maud is a woman’s name? Also, her first name was Amy. Sort of a giveaway?!? Also, I am uninterested in being told that I have misrepresented what Northrop Frye did.)
Very detailed analysis of Kathleen Gilles Seidel’s 1994 _Again_ (several books into a series, no less, altho that is not mentioned). This author is an academic and a romance fiction writer. Regis carefully goes over the 8 essential components of the romance article (according to Regis, natch) and what they are in _Again_. Regis wraps up with this telling paragraph: “The romance novel form is continuous from Jane Austen (and, as we shall see, from the birth of the novel in English) through Kathleen Gilles Seidel. Although writers will employ the form in different ways, Seidel in _Again_ creates a complex, formally accomplished, vital romance novel. The form is neither moribund nor corrupt. Arguments about hack-work must confront _Again_ and others like it being written and published today.”
Wow. Just, wow.
There is a lot to unpack here, but clearly Regis isn’t going to be happy until she establishes popular romantic fiction as either Literature or something akin to it. I mean, she does a blow-by-blow of _Pride and Prejudice_ and then does the same for _Again_. *sigh*
Why, exactly, can’t we have academic analysis of trashy cultural artifacts? Please, goddess, that’s all I really want.
Regis has a _high_ degree of commitment to the idea that sex scenes Don’t Matter in romance novels.
“Focus a romance novel through the lens of barrier and point of ritual death, and the result is a snapshot of what is at stake in that novel. Focus a chronological series of romance novels through this lens and it yields a moving picture of the concerns of the genre itself as it develops and changes through time. This method avoids the two primary pitfalls of earlier attempts to characterize the genre — it evaluates essential elements rather than accidental ones such as sex scenes (for most of its history, the romance novel did not have sex scenes), and it addresses texts across the whole span of the romance novel’s history.”
Sooooo, sex doesn’t count as even an occasional concern of the genre itself? Please.
Anyway, the next batch up for consideration are Pamela, P&P (again), Jane Eyre, Trollope’s Framley Parsonage and Forster’s Room with a View. *sigh* Yes, this is _definitely_ what everyone thinks of when they think of romance novels. Also, here is the justification for why we get to do P&P _again_ rather than, you know, anything else. “I passed by the good novels of Fanny Burney in favor of a truly great one of Austen.”
Another factor is whether the novel still moves copies today, which is pure, unadulterated bullshit, because of the heavy critical filter on old stuff that moves now. She’s letting a highly critical academy determine which romance novels she is going to consider from the past. And yet she only addresses that she is concerned with making sure she is comparing popular now to popular then, and thinks that somehow this filter makes sense for that purpose?
Anyway.
This is a book by Pamela Regis, earlier than Kamble (2003 for original; 2007 for pb — I have the kindle of unknown vintage / update; there are some oddities in the text that suggest that there may have been some OCR’os.).
Early in the book, Regis does an overview of other academic/critical work on romance novels, and I found at least one additional text to buy from that overview, but did not buy all of them. One of them, in French, was the first I’d ever heard of the sibling pair who wrote in France under the name M. Delly. The title of the book in Regis is given incorrectly (the first noun is plural in Regis, but not in reality). Also, while I have not yet read any of the books she refers to somewhat caustically, the quotes she uses from the books to justify her critique of those works do not … do what she says they do. And if you go actually read more reviews of the books, they _really_ don’t say what she says they say, so I’m treating this particular text with a great deal of care.
Where Kamble took a Bakhtin inspired approach to reading through the text to understand how the popular romantic fiction community of readers, writers and editors responded to events occurring in the world around them Regis’ approach is, at least so far, 100% Northrop Frye. I was not overly impressed by Northrop Frye in 10th grade; age has not inspired any increasing affection for sweeping typal structures which selective examples of the type are then wedged into with the assistance of corsets, tight lacing, Spanx, whatever is to hand.
Anyway. Enough of me being all snarky and arch and whatever. That’s just annoying, but I need to get that out of my system before I introduce you to what I came here for. It is not _as_ bonkers as Kamble’s Hero is the Ownership Class / Heroine is the working / petite bourgeoisie, conflict between them is the class struggle analysis. But hot damn, it’s pretty nuts!
“The heroine is often the target of ritual death, and beneath her very real trials in the narrative is the myth of death and rebirth, which echoes, however remotely, the myth of Persephone. … [summary of myth] … Just as Persephone must escape the kingdom of death to restore fruitfulness, increase, and fecundity to the entire earth, the romance novel heroine must escape her “death” to live to see her betrothal and the promise of children that it brings.”
OK, but let’s think about that in terms of the story structure — Persephone is rescued from the man who loves her enough to kidnap her from her mum … and every year she goes back to him for one month for each seed she ate. I mean, _how is this a good analogy for anything we love about romance novels_?!? Romance novels are supposed to be about the formation of a new family unit, and about leaving old relationships and roles and starting new ones and, I mean, lots of ways to formulate romance fiction, but I just am NOT seeing Hades and Persephone as appropriate and Persephone and mum is even weirder.
(TIL that Northrop Frye ripped off and oversimplified Maud Bodkins. I don’t think I’m going to read her book — it seems really far afield — but it’s nice to know that she seems to have had a much more flexible approach than Frye. Also, one of the reviews of her book on Amazon is hysterical, as, in addition to finding her work nearly unreadable, the reviewer appears to think that Maud was a man. Dude, you are minoring in English. How did you fail to notice that Maud is a woman’s name? Also, her first name was Amy. Sort of a giveaway?!? Also, I am uninterested in being told that I have misrepresented what Northrop Frye did.)
Very detailed analysis of Kathleen Gilles Seidel’s 1994 _Again_ (several books into a series, no less, altho that is not mentioned). This author is an academic and a romance fiction writer. Regis carefully goes over the 8 essential components of the romance article (according to Regis, natch) and what they are in _Again_. Regis wraps up with this telling paragraph: “The romance novel form is continuous from Jane Austen (and, as we shall see, from the birth of the novel in English) through Kathleen Gilles Seidel. Although writers will employ the form in different ways, Seidel in _Again_ creates a complex, formally accomplished, vital romance novel. The form is neither moribund nor corrupt. Arguments about hack-work must confront _Again_ and others like it being written and published today.”
Wow. Just, wow.
There is a lot to unpack here, but clearly Regis isn’t going to be happy until she establishes popular romantic fiction as either Literature or something akin to it. I mean, she does a blow-by-blow of _Pride and Prejudice_ and then does the same for _Again_. *sigh*
Why, exactly, can’t we have academic analysis of trashy cultural artifacts? Please, goddess, that’s all I really want.
Regis has a _high_ degree of commitment to the idea that sex scenes Don’t Matter in romance novels.
“Focus a romance novel through the lens of barrier and point of ritual death, and the result is a snapshot of what is at stake in that novel. Focus a chronological series of romance novels through this lens and it yields a moving picture of the concerns of the genre itself as it develops and changes through time. This method avoids the two primary pitfalls of earlier attempts to characterize the genre — it evaluates essential elements rather than accidental ones such as sex scenes (for most of its history, the romance novel did not have sex scenes), and it addresses texts across the whole span of the romance novel’s history.”
Sooooo, sex doesn’t count as even an occasional concern of the genre itself? Please.
Anyway, the next batch up for consideration are Pamela, P&P (again), Jane Eyre, Trollope’s Framley Parsonage and Forster’s Room with a View. *sigh* Yes, this is _definitely_ what everyone thinks of when they think of romance novels. Also, here is the justification for why we get to do P&P _again_ rather than, you know, anything else. “I passed by the good novels of Fanny Burney in favor of a truly great one of Austen.”
Another factor is whether the novel still moves copies today, which is pure, unadulterated bullshit, because of the heavy critical filter on old stuff that moves now. She’s letting a highly critical academy determine which romance novels she is going to consider from the past. And yet she only addresses that she is concerned with making sure she is comparing popular now to popular then, and thinks that somehow this filter makes sense for that purpose?
no subject
Date: 2021-10-31 04:46 am (UTC)I had not thank you!!!
Date: 2021-10-31 01:47 pm (UTC)ETA:
That is super awesome!
I’ve skimmed about a third of it, and for things before 2003 especially, there is huge overlap with what I am already familiar with; less so, but still present between 2003 and 2012ish. After 2012, there is only overlap with things that I found on my recent surf through JSTOR. A lot of the non-overlap are things that I am not interested in for this project (close reads of any sort, and things primarily focused on “precursor” forms).
It’s a nice presentation. For texts with chapters from various authors, the item is listed both as the overall text AND there are entries for each of the chapters, which makes good sense (different authors, and each is essentially a journal article published as a chapter in a text); also, when a relevant chapter appears in a text that is otherwise not particularly relevant, the chapter still appears, which is nice. The creator made it sortable in several ways including pub date, which is awesome.
I can already tell that the Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction (it’s about 3 books away currently) is going to be useful, and once I’m through that, the database should be _mostly_ familiar to me (at least the relevant slice of it).