Popular Romance in the New Millennium Conference: Abstracts and Bios

Oct 05 2011 Published by under Academia

Registration is now open for the international conference Popular Romance in the New Millennium, hosted by McDaniel College in Westminster Maryland. The conference is hosted by Pam Regis, professor of English at McDaniel, author of A Natural History of the Romance Novel, and Vice President of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance.

The conference is supported in part by a grant to McDaniel College from the Nora Roberts Foundation.

The conference will begin on Thursday November 10 with a keynote address by NYT best selling romance author Eloisa James, who is also Associate Professor of English at Fordham University, at 5:30 pm. followed by a dinner.

On Friday, there is a full day of panels and presentations, beginning at 9:00am, and ending with Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches Trashy Books (6:30-7:30pm).

Yours truly will be co-presenting with a colleague in the English department. Some other Romanceland names you may know are Sarah Frantz and Angela Toscano (reviewers at Dear Author; Sarah is also the President of the IASPR), Eric Selinger, An Goris, Jayashree Kamble, Jonathan A. Allan, and Amy Burge (contributors to Teach Me Tonight; Eric is also Executive Editor of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies).

Click here to see who else is on the program, and read the abstracts.

Hope to see you there!

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Academic Talks on Nora Roberts, Mary Stewart, Laura Kinsale, and Grace Livingston Hill

Apr 10 2009 Published by under Academia, Genre musings

More summaries from the April 2009 Pop Culture Association Conference, this time a romance panel featuring some of the bloggers at Teach me Tonight! As usual with these posts, keep the possibility of human error (mine) in mind.

“Me, Myself, and I: Love As the Integration of selves in the romance fiction of Nora Roberts”, An Goris, doctoral candidate, U. of Louvain, Belgium

NR always engages with basic narrative conventions of romance genre, but also marred by numerous forms of diversity. Goris focuses on 8 books, out of NR’s 200. Love is presented as a complex, multifaceted, ambiguous emotions. Love as both huge and scary, disruptive, but also simple, basic, real – life’s basis. H/H experience love first as one, then as the other. Calls process the “integration of selves”. Can see this in NR’s writing in her representation of body, mind, and relationships.

Conceptual dichotomy, mind v. body, rational v. irrational, artificial v. natural. Body as vessel of emotional truth. Ex. Characters go pale when shocked, prior to even realizing cognitively they are shocked. Ex. Characters need to touch each other prior to recognition of feelings. H/H emotional journey from conflict to harmony b/t mind and body.

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