Hey wonderful humans and welcome back to another video! My name is Lucy and I’m a
PhD student at the University of Birmingham and I study queer Romance novels so I thought today
I would do, sort of an introduction to a Romance scholarship video in terms of what books I think
you could read if you are interested in studying this subject academically.
I have tried to pick books that are general starter ones, just to get you interested in
the topic, like maybe you've been reading Romance novels for a long time. No shade I’ve been reading
Romance novels since I was like 14. I’m now 27. So maybe you just want to make that transition,
you want to think a bit more critically about this topic then this is the video for you!
Or maybe you're just nosy and you want to know what books I read.
So the first book I want to talk about is Reading The Romance by Janice A. Radway. Now this book
was first published in 1984 and it's often considered the first critical academic book
on Romance scholarship that put it in a positive light. There was criticism before this,
you start to see discussions of Romance novels in academic circles from, even the 1950s, you know
there's a couple of surveys by Mills and Boon, in the 1970s a lot of lesbian or feminist critics or
lesbian feminist critics picked up on Romance in a particularly negative light. Saying how it was
damning women to worship the patriarchy and how it was tricking us into this heteronormative state.
So Radway was really the first to come along and say ‘whoa, hold on a minute. maybe there's a bit
more uh going on here with this genre that's so popular with women. They can't all be being
brainwashed by these books into worshiping the patriarchy’. The core concept of the book
is based on a survey that Radway did of a group of women I believe in Wisconsin, if I remember when
I read this book from my master's, and she does a survey. She asked them a bunch of questions,
she interviews a bunch of them and they're basically this group of regular Romance
readers who live in this one town and mainly get recommendations through this one person actually
who owns the local bookshop or works at the local bookshop. So it is a small sample, it is
not necessarily representative of everybody who, who read Romance in the 80s and it's certainly not
as representative of people who read Romance now because the genre has obviously changed a
lot as all genres have in the last 40 years. The reason it is a good place to start and why most
Romance scholars still to this day - either were introduced to Romance through Radway or
will go back and read Radway - is because this book is undeniably the most famous outside of
Romance (scholarship) circles. When you talk to someone and tell them that you are doing Romance
or studying Romance in some capacity they will probably mention Radway or they will know Radway,
like that's their baseline for Romance scholarship. So it's important to therefore
know what they're talking about. It's also arguably what started a lot of Romance
scholarship off today, so again it's important to go back and read that. That doesn't mean now
we consider it perfect, it doesn't mean you should hold it up on a pedestal, there are
obviously things that change. Looking back there were clear omissions, there was no kind of queer
Romance despite there being, certainly lesbian Romance publishers since the 1970s, that isn't
mentioned at all. It's a very heteronormative view of the Romance genre, but that doesn't mean there
isn't valuable lessons we learnt from there. I’m certainly incorporating some of the methodology
that Radway used. Certainly in how she looks at surveys and how she spoke to people and how she
incorporated her data, um the readership aspect, and I’m expanding that to talk to readers,
authors and hopefully publishers when I’m looking at queer Romance novels. So I think that's a
great place still to start if you want to start thinking about Romance scholarship critically.
A Natural History of the Romance Novel by Pamela Regis. So this book first came out in 2003 when it
was published by the University of Pennsylvania and this is another key text. For most people
it's Radway and Regis, they will be your introduction to Romance scholarship and Regis is
often credited with kind of kick-starting modern Romance scholarship. Radway published her book,
it sat on its own for quite a long time, not always there were books here and there that we
certainly shouldn't discount but it had died down again by the time Pamela Regis came to publish her
novel in 2003. So what Regis does in this book is she advocates for the creation of a Romance Canon
and she does this partly to increase the legitimacy of Romance novels,
but she also does it through comparing them to older tropes. So she talks about the Regency
being a really important subgenre within Romance and she looks at Georgette Heyer,
who obviously was heavily influenced by Jane Austen. So she kind of makes these more literary
parallels within Romance and she does this with a couple of different genres including too,
but not limited to, Science-Fiction and Crime etc. and in doing so she really advocates that these
Romance novels are worthy of study. That Romance novels can be feminist and that Romance novels
crucially focus on the heroine's journey and that they are a story of female empowerment,
that they are a story of feminism and that actually depending on the subgenre, in different
ways they reflect real worries that women had when the subgenres were popular. Looking back now, we
know she also left things out and she herself has acknowledged this saying her definition of what
constituted a Romance excluded queer people and also how she said that Romance had to end with a
marriage excluded queer people because when it was written same-sex marriage wasn't legal in
many countries at all. Obviously, it's become more (countries) now but then that also suggests a very
heteronormative version of a queer relationship and actually you don't have to have a marriage to
have a happy ever after in a Romance novel anymore and she's acknowledged this and I know she's
coming out with other stuff so I’m sure her future things will be more inclusive. If you did English
Literature as your undergrad you will be familiar with a lot of the people that she calls on. Regis
really traces the history of Romance novels from Pamela by Richardson, that came out in the 1700s
to Jane Austen to really modern-day examples like Nora Roberts. Georgette Heyer is also in there,
so if you like that historical chronological approach, which is also very canonized
this could be a good way to introduce you romance and it's very readable. I found myself
enjoying reading this even if I didn't necessarily agree with everything that Regis was saying.
Lesbian Romance Novels by Phyllis Betts, which came out in 2009. Now the reason I’ve included
this is as someone who's studying LGBT+ romance novels there isn't a lot of scholarship on queer
romance novels. There's a growing amount of scholarship on heterosexual romances, on diverse
romances in other ways but the romance scholarship for books, there's a lot of articles I would say,
but full-length books on queer romance novels is still quite limited and certainly Betts was one
of the first, I would feel quite confident in saying to address lesbian Romance novels
as a long-term project, to produce a book about, rather than a chapter or an article here or there.
Betts really traces the history of lesbian romance novels in this piece of scholarship, she goes
right back to the 1970s and the gay and lesbian rights movement that kick-started in America and
how that evolved into a lot of Lesbian Publishing houses of the 1970s and these publishing houses,
she argues were a really radical act for the time and they themselves partly evolved
out of pulp fiction that was hugely popular in the 1950s; even though (they) often featured
queer protagonists it often wasn't written by or for queer protagonists if that makes sense.
Betts argues that these 1970s lesbian romance houses were a radical act because they gave
queer women a form of representation that they controlled. You know these were romance novels
written by queer women for queer women and distributed only to queer women. it was a very
in the know sort of society and group they created, you know these publishing houses
would have reader distribution lists and if you weren't on that list you wouldn't get the book.
You couldn't necessarily go into a bookstore and find these books, you had to know about them and
she traces it right through to the 90s when we get to see lesbian representation on TV,
all the way through to pretty much when she wrote the book so the early 2000s.
And it's really interesting from a perspective of chronicalizing the history
of lesbian romances and I would say although it does focus on lesbian subculture more than
wider queer women culture, it's a starting point. That's what I'd say, like I’ve said with the Regis
book, like I’ve said with the Radway book, if you're interested in studying queer romance
novels, if you're interested in studying queer female Romance novels, this is a good starting
point. What it's not going to do is necessarily be as up-to-date and contemporary as, you know,
a similar book written in 2020, because times have moved on in the 11 years. This is still one
of the only full-length pieces of scholarship, and by that I mean a book, to exist exclusively
on lesbian romance novels, so in that sense it really is worth a read if you're interested.
Romance Fiction and American Culture edited by William Gleason and Eric Murphy Sellinger, this
book was published in 2015 and it is a collection of essays looking at how Romance novels and
American culture have merged over the years, the connections between them, that was, kind of, the
brief the people who submitted essays were given. Now the reason I'd recommend this is it's a great
selection of essays covering a really broad range of topics from queer romances to how Black people
have been represented in romances to Christianity and romances to BDSM practices in Romances. If you
have a topic on romance novels you're interested in you will probably find an essay within this
collection you will enjoy. That doesn't mean every single essay will be relevant to you,
but I think this is a great place to start and I personally really enjoyed a lot of the essays
in this collection and again this was written with an American context in mind,
so if you are interested in Australian Romances or Nigerian Romances or Romance publishing in India
or France, something like that, you might not find essays that are directly related but you
might find topics, like if you are looking at BDSM Romances around the world after the fall
out of Fifty Shades of Grey there is an essay that will be relevant to you in this collection.
I’m not going to go through all the individual essays, if you just want to dip your toe into,
because as I said these are essays so you can read one essay you don't need to read the whole
500 pages, however long it is, collection. So in that sense it's a lot more accessible than maybe
some of the previous things I’ve recommended where you might need to read the whole book
to get a full picture. I think the other thing that's quite good about this collection of
essays is it is kind of an undeniable fact that Romance that we know today, the Romance genre, has
been heavily influenced by American culture and American publishing because although Romance is
a global industry, and it definitely is becoming even more so with eBooks, self-publishing and kind
of the interconnectivity that we're seeing across the world in general, Romance that we know today
has its roots in American publishing I would argue or maybe not its roots because obviously
that was English writers like Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer etc but certainly the boom
of Romance novels and the kind of contemporary culture of Romance novels is very much an American
thing that started with the bodice rippers of the 1960s. So in that sense it's quite a good
little introduction because it puts it within that American context but then it does also broaden it.
So the last book I want to talk about is Happily Ever After: The Romance Story in Popular Culture
by Catherine Roach, this was published in 2016. So there are a couple of reasons why I want to talk
about this one, firstly I found it really easy to read. I actually read this before I started my PhD
to kind of get me to start thinking critically about romance novels. Roach has a really
approachable way of writing, she is both an academic and a romance author, so in this
book she admits this is kind of coming from both those perspectives and she admits at the start
that this book is kind of a merging of those two passions and I think that makes it so approachable
and so easy to read while still being really critical and interesting for a Romance academic
and that's kind of the reason I’ve put it on this list. Because if you are wanting to start thinking
critically about Romances this is potentially a really good starting point, because it's one of
the most approachable on this list, it's also very easily available because it was published
most recently and it's not stupidly expensive like some academic Romance books I could mention.
In particular the first few chapters of this book are really an introduction to the Romance genre,
an introduction to it both as a reader and an academic. So if this is a genre that you, maybe
just started reading, or you've read for a long time, but you've never thought about academically
I would say Roach gives a really good introduction to the genre from an academic perspective and kind
of sums up everything that's happened in the, in the Romance scholarship world when she published
this in 2016. She also focuses a lot on female sexuality and how female sexuality has been
represented in romance novels and that's something I’m very interested in because
she doesn't just look at heterosexuality, and female heterosexuality was actually
what I did my masters on. I looked at female heterosexuality in romance novels of the 1990s,
it was also interesting because she puts female sexuality into the context of queer
romance novels in particular M/M Romance novels, kind of as a way to explain their popularity
and to see how those two things relate considering romance novels are mainly read by
women and M/M romance has become hugely popular, I would say after about 2014, if not before then.
I could reel off a whole list of romance scholarship here and talk about all of them
but it would be a much longer video than we have time for. Down below I’m gonna put three links:
one of them is going to be a Goodreads list of Romance criticism books or non-fiction romance
books. Basically like the books I’ve been talking about today, but a much longer list.
I found this list useful, not every single book on there is useful, and not every single book is
accurate, because obviously this is a Goodreads list, but it's a good place to start if you want
to find more books just as a casual interest. The second link I’m going to put is a Romance
Scholarship Database created by Laura Vivanco, I really hope I pronounced her name right,
and this is a wonderful database. It's tagged, it's kept up to date, there's resources on that
up to 2021 which are expected to be published and one of the tags I particularly love, no surprise,
is the LGBT+ one and it literally has pretty much all the romance scholarship you could want. From
when they first started talking about it in the 1980s, I believe the first article,
is all the way through to 2021. So that is a really great resource if you are, I would say more
academically inclined, and want to find articles for an essay, for example. Whereas the Goodreads
list is more just casual interest, although there are some academic stuff on there, there's
also things by bloggers and stuff like that which ate a great introduction to thinking critically
about romance novels and the third link is going to be the Journal of Popular Romance Studies
and this is a fantastic resource. I obsessively stalked this journal when I was a master's student
constantly looking for new articles. Articles I thought would be useful, it's how I came across a
lot of the names in romance scholarship that I now know and read their work regularly, so definitely
worth checking out the back list of issues. So that's a great resource if you want to, kind of,
see the most up-to-date articles on Romance scholarship in one place. Obviously again not
exclusive, but it's as far as I know the only dedicated journal to popular romance studies.
I hope you found this video useful and interesting and it gives you a little taste of romance
scholarship and some of the books out there that you can read. As always feel free to leave a
comment, or a like, or subscribe to this channel and if you want to get in touch with me privately
feel free to check out my Instagram (@PhDLifeWithLucy) I’m always happy
to answer questions about PhD life or questions about romance scholarship or
anything really as long as they are polite. So with that I will see you next Sunday!
Byyyeeee