Happily Ever After

Catherine M. Roach

Description

2016 Foreword Indies Finalist, Popular Culture category

Silver Medal, Popular Culture, 2017 Independent Publisher Book Awards

Listen to a

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in by E.E. Cummings
Acknowledgments
Prologue: Journey into Romancelandia
1. Find Your One True Love: Book Lovers and the Romance Story
2. Going Native: When the Academic is (also) the Fan
3. Notes from the Imagination: Reading Romance Writing: Wherein Catherine Roach and Catherine LaRoche, in Feisty Dialogue, Comment upon LaRoche's Fiction
4. Sex: Good Girls Do, Or, Romance Fiction as Sex-Positive Feminist Mommy Porn
5. Notes from the Field: Romance Writers of America
6. Love: Bondage and the Conundrum of Erotic Love
7. Notes from the Writing: "Between the Sheets" and Other Moments toward Romance Novelist
8. Happily Ever After: The Testament of Erotic Faith
Epilogue: Lessons from Romancing the Academic
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Gender Studies
• Feminist
• Literary Criticism
• Popular Culture
• Women's studies
• Feminism
• Cultural Studies
• Romance

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 31 mars 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253020529
• Langue: English

Extrait

Happily Ever After

Happily Ever After
The Romance Story in Popular Culture
CATHERINE M. ROACH
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in . Copyright 1952, 1980, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust, from COMPLETE POEMS: 1904-1962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.
2016 by Catherine M. Roach All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Roach, Catherine M., author. Title: Happily ever after : the romance story in popular culture / Catherine M. Roach. Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015033975 | ISBN 9780253020444 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253020529 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH : Love stories, American-History and criticism. | Love stories, English-History and criticism. | Women in literature. | Love in literature. | Popular literature-United States. | Popular literature-Great Britain. Classification: LCC PS 374. L 6 R 58 2016 | DDC 813/.08509-dc23 LC record available at http:// LCCN .loc.gov/2015033975 1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 17 16
To Theo
Such is my lover and such my friend
i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
E. E. CUMMINGS
i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart) i am never without it (anywhere i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true) and it s you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that s keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
Contents
Acknowledgments

Prologue: Journey into Romancelandia
1
Find Your One True Love: Book Lovers and the Romance Story
2
Going Native: When the Academic Is (Also) the Fan
3
Notes from the Imagination: Reading Romance Writing: Wherein Catherine Roach and Catherine LaRoche, in Feisty Dialogue, Comment upon LaRoche s Fiction
4
Sex: Good Girls Do, or, Romance Fiction as Sex-Positive Feminist Mommy Porn
5
Notes from the Field: Romance Writers of America
6
Love: Bondage and the Conundrum of Erotic Love
7
Notes from the Writing: Between the Sheets and Other Moments toward Romance Novelist
8
Happily Ever After: The Testament of Erotic Faith

Epilogue: Lessons from Romancing the Academic
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
I ve been working on this book since 2007 and spent the last year finishing it during a sabbatical in England. Accordingly, I have a lot of people and institutions to thank for their help.
To start with, I d like to thank everyone in the UK who ever called me luv. May I say that I love being called luv? As George Bernard Shaw is reputed to have quipped, England and America are two countries separated by a common language. In the romance fiction world, perhaps the best proof is furnished by the example of the spunky heroine. A gal full of spunk means something startlingly different in our two lands. Thanks to new colleagues overseas for that lesson learned. Thanks also to our Roundhay neighbor who offered me a Pimm s Cup, the Cornish bartender who pulled me a real cider, and our Yorkshire butcher who kept us well fed on local lamb. I have never passed a happier year.
I gratefully acknowledge the generous support that made this book possible from the Romance Writers of America (Academic Research Grant, 2009-10) and the Research Grant Committee of the University of Alabama (2012-14), as well as ongoing research support from the College of Arts and Sciences Dean s Office and my home program of New College at the University of Alabama. I am especially grateful to the Fulbright Program of the US Department of State and to their British partners in the US-UK Fulbright Commission for granting me the Fulbright-University of Leeds Distinguished Chair (2013-14). My year in residence at Leeds s Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies in the School of Sociology and Social Policy allowed me to complete the research and finish the book manuscript. Thanks as well to the Greece Fulbright Commission and Aristotle University of Thessaloniki for a Fulbright Inter-country Lecturing Award that year.
Many of the book s arguments took shape in thirteen different talks that I gave over the past five years. I owe a debt of gratitude to the innumerable audience members and fellow conference-goers whose questions and conversation contributed to my thinking on this project. I mention in particular the conferences of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance, the Popular Culture Association, the UK Romantic Novelists Association ( RNA ), and the Romance Writers of America ( RWA ).
I am equally grateful to a long list of colleagues who contributed in varied and crucial ways to this project: Sally Hines and Ruth Holliday, my brilliant hosts at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies (with special thanks to Ruth for letting me use the sex in your eyes line); Julia Cherry, Barbara Brickman, Michael Steinberg, Ted Trost, Natalie Adams, Jim Hall, Jennifer Purvis, Tom Fox, Lane Busby McLelland, Fred Whiting, Jeremy Butler, Deborah Weiss, and Carmen Mayer, among a slew of wonderful colleagues in Tuscaloosa, for conversation and valuable suggestions on the project; Eric Murphy Selinger, Sarah Frantz, Bill Gleason, An Goris, Pam Regis, and Betty Kaklamanidou for their leadership in the field of popular romance studies and their individual support; Pia Fenton, Sue Moorcroft, Linda Hooper, and Jo Beverley of the British RNA and my fellow writers in the Yorkshire Flying Ducks chapter, who all generously welcomed me to the UK and enlightened me about romantic fiction there; and many others whose aid, encouragement, or insight benefited the project, such as Mary Bly/Eloisa James, Madeline Hunter, Kate Dresser, Courtney Miller-Callihan, Jonathan Rowe, Samantha Holland, Mark Priestley, Dave Bauer, and Naomi Goldenberg. My thanks to you all.
I d like to express my gratitude as well to anonymous peer reviewers at the Journal of Popular Romance Studies and at Mosaic , where earlier versions of portions of this book appeared, for their careful readings that helped me to see my text more clearly, and especially to the two reviewers commissioned by Indiana University Press, whose astute feedback helped to sharpen and improve this book.
My undergraduate students in the New College seminar Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Culture read drafts of this book material and provided useful critiques; I thank especially Chris Chirino and Tiffany Brown. For several years now, the seminar students and I have read and discussed popular romance together; we ve created romance fiction cut-up projects, experimented with online collaborative romance writing, and run a romance lending library. I thank all these students, and many others who have come through my office, for their help in thinking through this book project and for providing me with endless examples of the romance narrative in popular culture.
I thank my family in Ottawa, Canada, and in Tuscaloosa for encouragement and support: my parents for always believing in me, my sons for reading romance fiction out loud in goofy voices, and my husband to whom I dedicate this book.
Finally, as this book s research is rooted partly in ethnographic and participant observation work conducted at annual conferences of the Romance Writers of America and other sites of popular romance authorship and readership, including a year spent as a participating member of the UK Romantic Novelists Association, I thank the many readers and writers who talked with me about this project. To everyone who answered my question, What do you think about romance? -thank you for your stories.
Earlier versions of this book material appear in:
Catherine M. Roach. Getting a Good Man to Love: Popular Romance Fiction and the Problem of Patriarchy. Journal of Popular Romance Studies 1.1 (August 2010), http://jprstudies.org/2010/08/getting-a-good-man-to-love-popular-romance-fiction-and-the-problem-of-patriarchy-by-catherine-roach/ .
Catherine LaRoche [Catherine M. Roach]. Master of Love . New York: Pocket Star-Simon and Schuster, 2012. The Society of Love , Book 1.
Catherine M. Roach. Going Native : Aca-Fandom and Deep Participant Observation in Popular Romance Studies. Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature , special issue, Romance . 47.2 (June 2014): 33-49.
Catherine M. Roach. Love as the Practice of Bondage: Popular Romance Narr