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Basic Definition of Romance

As a genre, romance novels are defined as having a satisfying emotional conclusion, in the format of a “happily ever after” or “happy for now” ending.

The concept of “Happily Ever After,” also known as HEA, has become a staple in the genre, including modern contemporary romance novels. Sometimes the story culminates with a “Happy for Now” situation between the couple, also known as HFN.

RWA defines the romance genre as having, “two basic elements comprise every romance novel: a central love story and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending. A Central Love Story: The main plot centers around individuals falling in love and struggling to make the relationship work. A writer can include as many subplots as he/she wants as long as the love story is the main focus of the novel. An Emotionally Satisfying and Optimistic Ending: In a romance, the lovers who risk and struggle for each other and their relationship are rewarded with emotional justice and unconditional love.”

Source: https://www.rwa.org/Online/Resources/About_Romance_Fiction/Online/Romance_Genre/About_Romance_Genre.aspx?hkey=dc7b967d-d1eb-4101-bb3f-a6cc936b5219

 

The Romance Genre Formula

Romance novels are formulaic in nature to some degree: the characters meet one another sparking a romantic interest, their feelings grow over the course of the narrative, an eventual hiccup in the relationship has them facing a decision of some kind, and finally their love for one another overcomes any obstacles, culminating with the pair living happily ever after. While this is the general narrative format, writers do play with their characters, dialogue, setting, and adapt situations along the way. Unlike fiction novels that have a romantic undertone, romance genre stories focus solely on a relationship. The hero and heroine falling in love is the plot. But it is difficult to fault the genre for having a basic premise since other books have formulas to some degree too. For instance, in murder mysteries, something goes awry and a character dies, the main character investigates, draws a conclusion (sometimes incorrectly), then the murderer and circumstances surrounding the death is revealed. In a romance novel, readers pick up the story knowing that the couple will end up with one another, thus allowing them to enjoy the journey, not focus on the conclusion. The romance novel is set up to offer leisure and enjoyment in this way.

This formula also speaks to the emotional attachment readers have towards the romance genre, wanting to follow along on a passionate quest. A reader can witness dramatic dialogue, heated confrontations, and suspenseful scenes with the knowledge that everything will be satisfactory in the end.  As a genre, romance novels are defined as having a “happily ever after” or “happy for now” ending.

Why Read Romance?

Readers have certain expectations when selecting a romance novel, demonstrating their uses and gratifications in regards to their reading experiences. Romances have clear standards that encourage this established formula and readership.

 

In Dangerous Men & Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance, Jayne Ann Krentz wrote, “Romance novels invert the power structure of a patriarchal society because they show women exerting enormous power over men.”

Krentz, Jayne Ann. Dangerous Men & Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance. HarperPaperbacks, 1996.

 In My Dissertation, I Address: Entertainment, Escapism, Fantasy, Inspirational, Leisure, Relaxation, The Happily Ever After, Wish Fulfillment, Steamy Parts, and Lots of Other Reasons. 

Janice Radway's Thoughts on Why Read Romance:

According to Janice Radway, readers were drawn to romances due to “the opportunity to project themselves into the story, to become the heroine, and thus to share her surprise and slowly awakening pleasure at being so closely watched by someone who finds her valuable and worthy of love.”

 

Janice A. Radway’s ethnographic study of Midwestern romance readers from Smithton, in her book Reading the Romance, noted that readers were attracted to following the development of a romantic and loving relationship between the main characters. Readers in her study noted that they were drawn to smart heroines and gentle heroes who realize their need for the heroine by the end of the narrative. According to Radway, readers were drawn to romances due to “the opportunity to project themselves into the story, to become the heroine, and thus to share her surprise and slowly awakening pleasure at being so closely watched by someone who finds her valuable and worthy of love” (Regis 2013). At the time of her study, readers in the 1980s, were drawn to less detailed sexual encounters, wanting to imagine and fill in the blanks rather than be told about the encounter in great detail.

 

Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. The University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Regis, Pamela. A Natural History of the Romance Novel. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania, 2013. Print.

Uses and Gratifications Theory

Uses and gratifications theory is a mass communication approach to analyzing what motivates people to use particular media and what audiences do with media. It assumes that audience members are active participants (typically selecting their media for a reason). Unlike other approaches that seek to study the effects on people, uses and gratifications offers them agency, studying their reasons for interacting with certain media.

 

Katz, Elihu. “Mass Communication Research and the Study of Popular Culture: An Editorial Note on a Possible Future for this Journal.” Departmental Papers (ASC). p1-6, 1959.

Active Audience

I am defining romance readers as active audience members. Readers choose which books they wish to engage with, check-out from the local library, spend money on, etc. There is a sense of agency among them. Some of the romance readers will also be “active” online as well. As soon as readers click the “like” button on Twitter or the “to be read” button on Goodreads, they are “active online.” 

 

Jenkins, Henry. Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York University Press, 2006.

Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Routledge, 2013.

Participatory Culture

Henry Jenkins, has cited in his own work over the years such as media convergence, (which allows consumers to “archive, annotate, transform, and recirculate media content”) as well as participatory culture (when examining the online spaces that romance readers take part in). If romance readers are romance genre bloggers, reviewers, aspiring writers, and involved in the industry in some way, shape, or form, participatory culture is relevant since participatory culture occurs when consumers not only purchase something, but contribute or produce content. According to Jenkins, there is a low barrier to entry, when analyzing participatory culture, allowing/offering contributors the chance to partake in civic engagement. Within participatory culture, there is support by others in the community, an informal hierarchy of knowledge (with people with experience acting as mentors), contributors who feel as though their personal pieces matter, and a social connection amongst other members of the same group. Participatory culture has a long-standing history of lacking female representation, the fact that the romance genre is mostly women makes this even more important and noteworthy.

 

Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Routledge, 2013.

Cultural Studies

In Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Jenkins wrote:

Recent work in cultural studies directs attention to the meanings texts accumulate through their use. The reader’s activity is no longer seen simply as the task of recovering the author’s meanings but also as reworking borrowed materials to fit into the context of lived experience. As Michel de Certeau (1984) writes, “Every reading modifies its objects…the reader takes neither the position of the author nor an author’s position. He invents in the text something different from what they intended. He detaches them from their (lost or ancestry) origin. He combines their fragments and creates something unknown.”

As Jenkins noted, fans can interpret meaning based on their own needs, wants, and experiences; therefore, the reasons for being fans may vary from person to person. Yet the unifying genre (the romance genre for my study) or text could lend themselves to noting overarching themes. Participatory culture lends itself to resistance; Jenkins wrote, “fandom’s very existence represents a critique of conventional forms of consumer culture. Yet fandom also provides a space within which fans may articulate their specific concerns about sexuality, gender, racism, colonialism, militarism, and forced conformity.

Defining Stigma

In this manner, romance readers and writers suffer a stigma, which Goffman defined as when people “fall short of what [they] really ought to be . . . [s]hame becomes a central possibility.” Goffman created three distinct categories in which stigma arises; character traits, physically, and group identity. 

Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Simon & Schuster, 1986.

Scribbling Women

Nathanial Hawthorne’s perspective on women writing for other women also alludes to the issues of sexism within publishing, demonstrating a longstanding history of looking down on the romance genre. Hawthorne said:

America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash-and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed. What is the mystery of these innumerable editions of the “Lamplighter,” and other books neither better nor worse?-worse they could not be, and better they need not be, when they sell by the 100,000.”

Referring to romance writers as “scribbling women” undermines not only their value but the value of their work as well.

 

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “The Damned Mob of Scribbling Women.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 3 June 2011, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/06/the-damned-mob-of-scribbling-women/239882/.

“Production is the action of humankind on matter (nature) to appropriate it and transform it for its benefits by obtaining a product, consuming (unevenly) part of it, and accumulating surplus for investment according to a variety of socially determined goals. Experience is the action of human subjects on themselves, determined by the interaction between their biological and cultural identities, and in relationship to their social and natural environment. It is constructed around the endless search for fulfillment of human needs and desires. Power is that relationship between human subjects which, on the basis of production and experience, imposes the will of some subjects upon others by the potential or actual use of violence, physical or symbolic. Intuitions of society are built to enforce power relationships existing in each historical period, including the controls, limits, and social contracts achieved in the power struggles.”

Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. pp. 14-15.

“Nodes increase their importance for the network by absorbing more relevant information, and processing it more efficiently. The relative importance of a node does not stem from its specific features but from its ability to contribute to the network’s effectiveness in achieving its goal, as defined by the values and interests programmed into the networks…nodes only exist and function as components of networks. The network is the unit, not the node.”

Castells, Manuel. Communication Power. Oxford Univ. Press, 2011. p. 19-20.

 “Communication is the sharing of meaning through the exchange of information. The process of communication is defined by the technology of communication, the characteristics of the senders and receivers of information, their cultural codes of reference and protocols of communication, and the scope of communication process. Meaning can only be understood in the context of the social relationships in which information and communication are processed.”

Castells, Manuel. Communication Power. Oxford Univ. Press, 2011. p. 54.

The three forms of communication (interpersonal, mass communication, and mass self-communication) coexist, interact, and complement each other rather than substituting for one another.

Castells, Manuel. Communication Power. Oxford Univ. Press, 2011. p. 55.

Sarah Hoagland wrote, “There is a practice among many who are marginalized by dominant logic of promoting ignorance among competent practitioners of dominant culture and in the process, destabilizing oppressive relationality. For example, at times women keep men ignorant about certain things, and at times blacks keep whites ignorant about certain things.”

“Black women’s long-standing sexual silence has been due not only to the lack of opportunities and resources to talk about sexual matters, but also and more importantly to the need to protect others and to protect themselves.” Pg 102

Medina José. The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. Oxford University Press, 2013.

“Bilgrami assumes an overly narrow view of self-knowledge, which focuses exclusively on its casual aspects. For Bilgrami, having self-knowledge is tantamount to having the ability to give correct casual explanations of one’s action by appealing to one’s mental states as their causes. As Bilgrami puts it, in order to be responsible, “we must, in general, know our beliefs and desires and our intentions because it is these states which bring about and explain our doing.”

“While like-minded spheres can serve important functions such as consolidating collective identity, they also risk promoting one-dimensional mentalities.”

Dahlgren, Peter. Media and Political Engagement: Citizens, Communication, and Democracy. Cambridge University Press, 2011.

“Narcisstic or not, young people are doing many things with the Internet, but among the key activities is socializing – spending time with others online who in some way are a part of one’s social circles. Some of these contacts may be people they meet face-to-face, others may be persons they have only encountered in cyberspace.”

Dahlgren, Peter. Media and Political Engagement: Citizens, Communication, and Democracy. Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Nancy Chodorow wrote, “the reproduction within each generation of certain general and nearly universal differences that characterize masculine and feminine personality and roles…women, universally, are largely responsible for early child care…girls emerge from this period with a basis for empathy built into their primary definition of self in a way that boys do not.”

Women take on the role of carebringer, thus children are more exposed to women than men. Therefore, as Chodorow believes, “Girls emerge with a stronger basis for experiencing another’s needs or feelings as one’s own (or of thinking that one is so experiencing another’s needs and feelings). Furthermore, girls do not define themselves in terms of the denial of preoedipal relational modes to the same extent as do boys. Therefore, regression tot these modes tends not to feel as much a basic threat to their ego. From very early, then, because they are parented by a person of the same gender…girls come to experience themselves as less differentiated than boys, as more continuous with and related to the external object-world, and as differently oriented to their inner object-world as well.”

Stigmatization of Romance

In their piece, Sneers and Leers: Romance Writers and Gendered Sexual Stigma, Jennifer Lois and Joanna Gregson noted that writers have been made to feel “belittled.” After a four-year ethnographic study, consisting of forty-three interviews, Lois and Gregson found that writers believed that those who judged the genre operated under the misconception “that writers lacked the appropriate amount of shame toward women’s sexuality.” Lois and Gregson found that the romance stigma pertains to those who produce it as well as those who read it. Many (mistakenly) believe that romance writers are relaying their personal conquests or desires, not simply writing a story. There is the thought that if someone is writing about sexual acts, they are drawing upon personal experiences. Writers are then asked about their dating histories, marital status, bedroom preferences, and much more.

The main finding from their four-year study was that romance writers were, in fact, being slut-shamed. Similarly, Maya Rodale noted that “romance is looked down upon, and that it’s something they are expected to feel ashamed of.”

I argue that romance readers and writers suffer from a stigma pertaining to group identity.

Lois, Jennifer, and Joanna Gregson. “Sneers and Leers.” Gender & Society, vol. 29, no. 4, 2015, pp. 459–483., doi:10.1177/0891243215584603.

Rodale, Maya. Dangerous Books for Girls: The Bad Reputation of Romance Novels Explained. United States: CPSIA, 2015. Print.

Shame-Resilience Theory

While Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance (1984) has been a pivotal book in romance studies, at this point in time, it is outdated and needs to be elaborated upon, especially taking into account that shame-resilience is a rather new concept. Dr. Brené Brown developed “shame-resilience theory” in her book I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn’t): Making the Journey from “What Will People Think?” to “I Am Enough” which was published in 2008. I find shame-resilience theory particularly noteworthy given the fact that Brown developed the concept studying women. Since the publication of her book, Brown has studied men, but I appreciate her emphasis on the female experience. Brown wrote, “women experience shame as a web of layered, conflicting and competing expectations and messages… Men don’t have the same web of conflicting or competing expectations. Men have one weighty, huge expectation, which is the small box of being seen as strong/not weak. 

Considering the romance readership is predominantly women, shame-resilience is particularly relevant due to how different genders are perceived and then act.

 

Brown, Brené. I Thought It Was Just Me (but It Isn’t): Telling the Truth about Perfectionism, Inadequacy, and Power. Gotham Books, 2008.

Academically Studying Romance

Best-selling romance writer, Eloisa James, claimed that the “academic study of popular romance fiction is clearly in its infancy.”

The International Association for the Study of Popular Romance was only founded recently in 2009.

There is a void in romance-related research and a real need for further inquiry. One of the reasons for this may in fact be the same stigma that readers and writers grapple with. Academics would not be able to write under a penname in the same manner as a romance author. They may face difficulties and challenges as well.

 

International Association for the Study of Popular Romance, iaspr.org/about/history/.

During a MeetUp, on November 17, 2017, one woman in attendance said, “I like shape-shifters…I don’t know. Maybe because I’m single again, and I’m away from my family. Like, I really like the idea of having a pack; there’s a hierarchy – there’s somebody in charge looking out for me – kind of like God – I like that; we all work together, and we put our money together; we all prosper and we all go through hardship..I just like that idea of having a mate for life.”

“In stories we find hope, inspiration, and examples of how to live our own lives better. To divide imagination from reality as starkly as romance nay-sayers seem to want to do is an awful tragedy. And to believe that women who read romance novels expect to marry vampires, dukes or Special Ops agents is not only disrespectful, it’s just plain silly.”

– Katharine Ashe 

“Sometimes we all need a little escape from real life and the 24-hour news cycle, especially when the tragic updates are just relentless. We need a break from the stress, the fear, the hopelessness. So I—like millions of other readers around the world—turn to romance novels.”

– Maya Rodale

Blog Post

“I can relax knowing that this story will end happily. There will be black moments, darkness, and tremendous obstacles. But complicated characters will figure out a way for love to triumph and justice to be served.”

– Maya Rodale

Blog Post

“MacLean says her novels are feminist because “the heroine is the hero of the story and she is taking action.” 

ATlantic Article

Sarah MacLean argues that “we have to give ourselves permission as women to have fantasies. We aren’t saying that men should threaten sexual dominance or harassment or abuse. But it’s okay if we, at some point, find the idea of that threat hot.” In a society that often wants to boil women’s sexual experiences into the polar opposites of purity or sluttiness, romance novels, even when we may as individuals judge their plots to be problematic, are the largest cultural space available for women to read about and imagine their own sexual fantasies.”

Atlantic Article

“We’re in such dark times right now. People want movies that feel good.” – Lindsey Beer

“Netflix’s rom-com renaissance isn’t an accident: More than 80 million user accounts have streamed a romance film in the last year, according to data provided by the streaming service. That’s nearly two thirds of Netflix’s global audience, so executives at the helm are just creating content they know their audience wants. “It’s pretty simple: We want to make more of what our members want to watch. And we’ve seen that our members around the world are watching a lot of rom coms,” a representative for Netflix told Glamour in an email.”

Glamour Article

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that romance novels get a bad rap in popular culture. Literary critics and general readers imagine romance novel readers and writers as sexually repressed, white, suburban moms. But, in reality, romance writers and readers are a diverse group of critical thinkers.”

Article Link

Feeling Guilty?

“So, what does it mean when we call something a “guilty pleasure?” There’s a faux aura of empowerment around that phrase…ut it’s “empowering” only in the same sense that the phrase “not like other girls” is empowering: It’s a way to elevate oneself above mockery or the negative associations people have toward women.”

Article Link

$ Romantic Deals $

When I first began studying the romance genre, years ago, I signed up for a number of blogs, author newsletters, bookstore newsletters, and a number of other email notifications. I regularly receive emails informing me about the “deal of the day,” which books are marked down from their original prices or are free altogether.

– Angela Maria Hart

Newsletter Alerts

RWA sends a newsletter exclusively to members noting recent article publications pertaining to the romance genre, romance-related events and opportunities, upcoming workshops, and other organizational details. Another free resource I regularly receive for romance writers is from Romance University. Romance genre contributors, writers and editors alike, will write pieces for the platform that they publish and send out via email as well. Carina Press sends email subscribers updates about pitching opportunities, recent releases, organizational updates, and so forth.

Free Advertizing

Authors will send out teaser chapters to keep readers interested in their work, upcoming book tour dates, upcoming publication dates, and personal blog posts.

Romance Novellas for Free

Alexa Riley and Tessa Bailey created a free podcast for romance readers, Read Me Romance. To coincide with the podcast, they send out regular email newsletters, created a Twitter and Instagram to post content, and launched a website for Read Me Romance with bonus materials.

In Textually Promiscuous, Sarah J. Robbins spoke with Beth Anne Steckiel of Anne’s Book Corner in Colorado Springs. Steckiel said, “The majority of my sales are romance – I often can’t keep new books in stock, and they don’t come in used because people hang on to them.”

“I knew that publishing an article or a book was a slow, involved, and often frustrating business. You slaved over a manuscript, sent it off to a publisher, and, assuming it wasn’t sent back with a rejection slip, went through rounds of editing, fact checking, and proofreading. The finished product wouldn’t appear until weeks or months later. If it was a book, you might have to wait more than a year to see it in print. Blogging junked the traditional publishing apparatus. You’d type something up, code a few links, hit the Publish button, and your work would be out there, immediately, for all the world to see.” – Nicholas Carr

The Good e-reader posted an article by Mercy Pilkington, Trump is Ruining Romance for Us All. Pilkington wrote, “Thanks to a changing climate that is growing increasingly fed up with the Washington, DC Circus, even literature is changing, specifically the romance genre.” Pilkington concluded her brief post writing that Trump might be inspiring more “compassionate, supportive, and intelligent” characters in the romance genre as a form of opposition against the political and social climate he has cultivated.

CBC explored this notion in their piece How Romance Novels are Getting a Makeover in the Trump Era by Alice Hopton. “The genre’s brooding Heathcliff’s are getting makeovers and storylines are being tweaked to better reflect feminist values around sexual equality and inclusiveness, as writers work to recast the heroes into characters they want to celebrate.” Sarah MacLean verbalized this in her decision to rewrite her latest draft. MacLean felt as if she “had two-hundred and seventy-five pages of a character who would have probably voted for Donald Trump.” Realizing this, she discarded this character and began again.

In How Romance Novels are Getting a Makeover in the Trump Era, Alice Hopton noted that the Toronto Public Library lists romance as its most popular fiction genre. “Without the romance genre, they say the library’s e-book collection wouldn’t be viable, and they couldn’t offer the more expensive library and non-fiction e-book titles.”

Newsweek’s Working Women’s Fantasies by Katie Roiphe explored the popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey. Roiphe wrote, “It has a semipronographic glamour, a dangerous frisson of boundary crossing, but at the same time is delivering reassuringly safe, old-fashioned romantic roles.”

Romance writers have not kept quiet during Trump’s time in office. Tessa Dare, Courtney Milan, Sarah MacLean, and Beverly Jenkins are among the many romance authors who have expressed their beliefs via Twitter.

In Everybody Falls in Love: Diversity in the Romance Industry by Paulina Velasco and Lizzie O’Leary, Bea Koch was quoted as saying that The Ripped Bodice is her and her sister’s love letter to the romance genre as well as the romance readers. In 2015, Leah and Bea Koch began a Kickstarter campaign to launch their romance genre-only bookstore. Their dream came into fruition one year later in March 2016, when they opened their store.

In At the Library: E-romance at Your Fingertips, Krystal Corbray, connected her sixth grade crush to her introduction to Jane Austen. In the article, Corbray noted that she believes that there is a correlation between these two events.

As an academic, I appreciated Love Between the Covers more so for the ethnographic approach following Eloisa James, Beverly Jenkins, Celeste Bradley, Susan Donovan, and Radcliff in their romance writing journeys. Within each woman’s story, romance readers were cited and depicted. Love Between the Covers did not just focus solely on these writers, however. The documentary did a wonderful job of including sound bites and interview clips from well-known and established writers (such as Nora Roberts) and additional people in the industry (such as Sarah Wendell).

“Jennifer Crusie writes in an essay called “Emotionally Speaking: Romance Fiction in the Twenty-First Century,” which you can read on her website: “All you have to do is convince the modern, jaded, ironic reader that your heroine and hero have not only fallen in love and surmounted all the barriers in their path, but that their love is unconditional and will last throughout time. You must, in short, give your reader not only good narrative, but also great emotional satisfaction.” But we live in a culture that’s very uneasy with emotion.”