Popular Romance Project

Everyone knows the story: a young, Western heroine meets a swarthy sheikh, is abducted to his desert kingdom where they (eventually) fall in love and live happily ever after. This is the quintessential “sheikh romance,” a distinctive sub-genre of contemporary Harlequin Mills & Boon romance.

The number of sheikh titles published has increased exponentially, with more original titles published in the UK since 2000 than in the first 80 years of Harlequin Mills & Boon publishing. This increase in popularity is paradoxically set against a backdrop of heightened tension between the Western world and the East, stemming from the events of 9/11 and culminating in active warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan.

E. M. Hull’s The Sheik (1919) has been credited as a major influence for the contemporary sheikh romance. But the modern sheikh romance is not the only genre in which a romantic relationship between East and West is imagined against a background of conflict. Today’s sheikh romances share their themes of desire and conflict Read More

As a historian of the modern American wedding, I keep my ear to the ground when it comes to contemporary wedding trends. Anyone familiar with the world of weddings would attest that wedding photography has changed—and fairly dramatically—over the last several years. Gone are the days when a wedding photographer’s job consisted of arranging rows of attendants, setting up poses with the bride’s family and then the groom’s, and taking a few snaps of the toasts, the first dance, and the bouquet toss. There is artistry to today’s craft. Soft lighting. Silhouettes. Fantastic backgrounds. I like these things. The wedding album no longer holds photographs that look like the senior versions of the prom picture. Good for modern day brides and grooms, I say (and, of course, brides and brides and grooms and grooms).

This past December, I became aware of another trend in wedding photographs: bridal boudoir. Essentially, contemporary brides are taking advantage of the permissiveness of American wedding culture (which justifies a certain degree of narcissism) by posing seductively in a bedroom setting, clad in any given stage of undress. In defense of Read More

Admittedly, there is something comforting about reading mass market romance. I know what I am in for; it’s a quick fix; wham bam, thank you, Mills & Boon. As a romance critic, however, I resist this lulling pull. Instead, I focus on discovering complex ploys and unheard-of depths in what seem, on the surface, run-of-the-mill romances, and I love getting my teeth into romances that don’t just comfort, but also surprise me. Reading niche romances, which extend the genre, I can never be quite sure who or what may trigger romantic titillation.

Erotica and erotic romance have led the way in this opening-up of the genre. In the “romantica” published by Ellora’s Cave or the female-centered erotic Read More

“Fifty-two pages of real life stories, designed for the more adult readers of comics!”

When comic book super-duo Joe Simon and Jack Kirby published Young Romance #1 in late 1947, they hoped to capitalize on a market for older female readers: the girls and young women who had outgrown comics starring funny animals, Disney characters, and Archie’s lighthearted teen high jinks. Earlier in the 1940s, soap-opera comic strips like Brenda Starr and Mary Worth had indicated that more adult themes could succeed, but the true parent of the first romance comic was a magazine, True Story. It had first been published in 1919 and was known to sell 2,000,000 copies per issue. Simon recalled that the “youthful, emotional, yet wholesome Read More

Every Sunday morning when I turn to the New York Times Book Review, I read the bestseller lists looking for familiar names from the early 1980s, when burgeoning new series of American category romances redefined the genre. I almost always find one or more: Nora Roberts (or J.D. Robb), Iris Johansen, Fern Michaels, Jayne Ann Krentz (or one of her pseudonyms), Debbie Macomber, Sandra Brown, and others. These writers started on the road to publishing success while writing category romances for the new series by Silhouette, Bantam Loveswept, or Dell Candlelight Ecstasy.

• Nora Roberts published her first novel, Irish Thoroughbred, as Silhouette Romance #81 in May 1981. Today, her romances and futuristic J.D. Robb novels are frequently listed, most recently a debut for Chasing Fire at #3 on the Mass Market Paperback list of April 22, 2012.
• Debbie Macomber, whose recent novels have centered on women’s friendships, appears on the same list at #8 for her book A Turn in the Road. Her first category romance for Silhouette was #316, That Wintry Feeling, in September 1984.

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Who were the troubadours? Many people have heard of them, but a popular misconception is that the troubadour was a wandering minstrel who sang for his supper.

Far from it! The troubadour was a medieval rock star. From approximately 1100 to 1300, there were troubadour kings and dukes, many were nobles, some wealthy and some not, but some rose from the ranks to achieve fame and fortune. At the end of the meal the lord or lady of the castle would coax the troubadour to honor the company with a song. He never sang before or during the meal, that was left to jongleurs, who juggled, conjured, danced, or played music. A good definition of what a troubadour wasn’t Read More

The sheik or desert romance category is dominated by American authors these days but this was not always the case. The British invented the desert romance subgenre in the early 1900s with novels such as Robert Hichens’ The Garden of Allah (1904). E.M. Hull famously transformed both the subgenre as well as (arguably) the romance genre when The Sheik was published in 1919 and turned into a film starring Rudolph Valentino in 1921. Sheik novels were popular in the 1920s but fell out of fashion by the end of the decade. They would not be revived until Mills & Boon published Violet Winspear’s Blue Jasmine in 1969. Winspear and other British romance novelists produced a handful of sheik romances in the 1970s and 1980s, but most American novelists did not jump on the desert bandwagon until the 1990s.

Barbara Faith, however, was one of the earliest American romance novelists to write sheik romance novels, beginning in the mid-1980s. Barbara Faith de Covarrubias (1921-1995) produced over 40 romance novels during her lifetime, winning a RITA Award in 1982. She wrote five desert romances under the Read More

William Shakespeare’s works seem to be everywhere in popular culture. In Suzanne Enoch‘s Sins of a Duke the hero thinks that “Shakespeare’s ‘tangled web’ didn’t even begin to describe the mess he’d fallen into” (226). The problem is Shakespeare did not say this. This quotation is actually from Sir Walter Scott‘s Marmion.

In analyzing the ways that romance authors reference Shakespeare, I have noticed patterns in how they misquote Shakespeare as well. While it is not uncommon for characters to quote a famous Shakespearean saying, some authors also attribute quotations to Shakespeare that are not from his works. Another example occurs in Meredith Duran‘s A Lady’s Lesson in Scandal where the hero thinks Read More

A kiss is just a kiss. . . or is it?

No single fairy tale motif is more pervasive in American popular culture than “true love’s kiss.” It is the archetypal mechanism of transformation in our contemporary fairy tale tradition, with the power to wake comatose maidens, change animals and monsters into handsome princes, and prevent foolish mermaids from turning into sea foam (in the Disney version, anyway).

And clearly this comes from the authentic fairy tale tradition, right? Not so fast. Behind these chaste kisses is a rich history of sex and violence.

In the Brothers Grimm’s version of “The Frog King, or Iron Henry” (tale type ATU 440)—the first tale in their classic Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812), which celebrates its bicentennial later this year—the disenchantment occurs thanks to an act of passion and rage after the frog demands to join the princess in her bed: “This made the princess extremely angry, and after she picked him up, Read More

While growing up in India in the eighties and nineties, I read hundreds of romance novels published by the British firm of Mills and Boon, many featuring “sardonic” heroes and young British heroines. It was not until graduate school that I realized that these novels, with titles like Lucifer’s Brand and Falcon’s Prey, resembled the myth of Hades and Persephone. Mills and Boon appears to have adopted the idea after World War II and Harlequin continues to publish variations of the myth. Lest this be taken as proof of “formula fiction,” however, I want to highlight some category romances—short, numbered novels marketed under an imprint like Harlequin—that adapt the myth elegantly. Such novels demonstrate the time-honored tradition of refining older tales—a tradition that fell out of critical favor following the rise of Romanticism.

In Susan Napier’s Love in the Valley (1985), cheerful chef Julia Fry is hired to cook for the annual gathering of a family of eccentric artists at their rambling home in the New Zealand countryside. The least (or most) eccentric of the lot is the oldest son, corporate lawyer G.B.H. Walton. Though a beloved adopted child, he holds himself apart from the world Read More