Shelf Love: Romance Novel Discourse

I own 91 Candlelight Ecstasy Romances, so it was high time I read one... then I read another 13 for good measure. In December, 1980, Vivian Stephens launched a new line of contemporary category romance at Dell called Candlelight Ecstasy. The line pushed the envelope when it came to sex and sensuality on the page. But how sexy are they and how do these books hold up in 2023? 

Shelf Love:

• NEW! Substack for original writing and stuff | Website | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
• Email: [email protected]

Shelf Love:

• NEW! Substack for original writing and stuff | Website | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
• Email: [email protected]

Mistress of Mellyn by Virginia Holt is often hailed as responsible for kicking off a boom of modern gothics in the mid-20th century. In this crossover with Reformed Rakes, we ask: is this a gothic first and a romance second? Is our plucky main character in love with the man of the house, or just the house? How does Mistress explore transgression of boundaries, gender, eight-year-olds, and heroines “ahead of their time”?

Shelf Love:

• NEW! Substack for original writing and stuff | Website | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
• Email: [email protected]

Discussed: The Mistress of Mellyn (1960) by Virginia Holt

Guest: Reformed Rakes

Website | Emma | Beth | Chels

Shelf Love:

• NEW! Substack for original writing and stuff | Website | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
• Email: [email protected]

What makes a heroine in romance, a genre invested in exploring how can women be happy in culture? Is the genre a place where heroines create integrated identities that reject binaries of what society tells them to be? Dr. Jayashree Kamble discusses her latest book on romance scholarship, Creating Identity: The Popular Romance Heroine's Journey to Selfhood and Self-Presentation. Shelf Love listeners can use “UShelfLove” to get 35% off the book at Indiana University Press, from now until November 2, 2023.

Shelf Love:

• NEW! Substack for original writing and stuff | Website | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
• Email: [email protected]

Guest: Dr. Jayashree Kamble

Creating Identity: The Popular Romance Heroine's Journey to Selfhood and Self-Presentation

https://iupress.org/9780253065704/creating-identity/

Shelf Love Discount code: use “UShelflove” for 35% between September 15, 2023 and November 2, 2023.

Jayashree on Humanities Commons: https://hcommons.org/members/kamble/

Jayashree’s upcoming New York City book launch events:

• 9/24/23 - https://www.therippedbodicela.com/brooklyn-events
• 9/22/23 - https://aaari.info/23-09-22kamble/

Learn more about the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance at IASPR.org and the open access journal where you can find tons of romance scholarship: JPRStudies.org

Shelf Love:

• NEW! Substack for original writing and stuff | Website | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
• Email: [email protected]

Four romance reading friends embark on a romance history reading project, based on a BookRiot list, and in this episode, two of them — Leigh Kramer and Hannah Hearts romance — have Flames on the Sides of their Face when talking about the Flame and The Flower by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss. To keep things interesting, we talk less about the book itself and more about questions of reader reception and the relationship between the 1972 text and the romance texts that followed. Have we come a long way, baby, or are we still wallowing in the same whirlpool of sludgey emotions?

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Shelf Love:

• NEW! Substack for original writing and stuff | Website | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
• Email: [email protected]

Discussed: The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss

The BookRiot list that inspired the project: https://bookriot.com/most-influential-romance-novels/

Guests:

Leigh Kramer

Website | Instagram

Hannah Hearts Romance

Instagram | Goodreads

Shelf Love:

• NEW! Substack for original writing and stuff | Website | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
• Email: [email protected]

What happens when 35 romance scholars walk into a bar, after hours at the IASPR 2023 Romance Revitalised conference? They share their favorite romance scholarship, and why!

Shelf Love:

• NEW! Substack for original writing and stuff | Website | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
• Email: [email protected]

Thanks to all of the contributors to this episode!

Full list of romance scholarship mentioned on Substack: https://shelflovepodcast.substack.com/

Romance Reader Stereotype research: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQzi8fBB0R8

Shelf Love:

• NEW! Substack for original writing and stuff | Website | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
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The fabulous foursome (Morgan & Isabeau from Whoa!mance, Dame Jodie Slaughter, Andrea Martucci from Shelf Love) get meta textual as we reflect on our meta podcasting project on Dreaming of You by Lisa Kleypas. What’s this episode about? Take a guess from this collection of possible episode titles:

• Panopticon Alert: Meta Reflections on Dreaming of You
• The Internet Killed Romance
• Whoa! That’s Some Weird Romance
• Our Current Romance Panopticon
• Alienating Persons in Romance
• Love Us or Hate Us
• Here We Are Now, Offend Us
• Did you enjoy this podcast?

Be sure to listen to episode 140 and 141 before diving into the meta-ness and meta-mess of this text.

Shelf Love:

• NEW! Substack for original writing and stuff | Website | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
• Email: [email protected]

Guest: Dame Jodie Slaughter

Website | Twitter | Instagram

Guests: Whoa!mance (Morgan and Isabeau)

Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Website | Listen on any podcast app!

Morgan & Isabeau joined me in episode 076 to discuss Strange Love by Ann Aguirre

and

Episode 089 to Problematize Romance

and

108 She-Devil (1989): Who's Entitled To Be Selfish in Love & Life? (Whoa!mance spectacular)

Shelf Love:

• NEW! Substack for original writing and stuff | Website | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
• Email: [email protected]

This week, yr grls at long last encounter Derek Craven in "DREAMING OF YOU" by Miss Massachu herself LISA KLEYPAS. It is time for Morgan and Isabeau from Whoa!mance to wade into this collaboration with Shelf Love.

You probably already know this - but Sarah is a regency country mouse who is secretly a best-selling novelist. Facing the dreaded sophomore slump, she seeks out a real Gambling Hell to research her next novel and instead finds Derek Craven. Derek's a gutter baby cum Cockney made good by establishing the most luxurious gambling den in London. But, it turns out, his personal tastes skew a bit more bucolic if you catch our drift (they fall in love!).

What makes a character captivating and why doesn't Derek Craven have any of it? Is the sentimental version of the Culture Wars any more forgivable? It's 10 p.m. - is your child a Perry?

Take our "lump of ice" and tune in as we give this "weep and wail" its "early hours".

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Guests: Whoa!mance (Morgan and Isabeau)

Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Website | Listen on any podcast app!

Morgan & Isabeau joined me in episode 076 to discuss Strange Love by Ann Aguirre

and

Episode 089 to Problematize Romance

and

108 She-Devil (1989): Who's Entitled To Be Selfish in Love & Life? (Whoa!mance spectacular)

Shelf Love:

• NEW! Substack for original writing and stuff | Website | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
• Email: [email protected]

Discussed: Dreaming of You by Lisa Kleypas

Shelf Love:

• NEW! Substack for original writing and stuff | Website | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
• Email: [email protected]

Let’s talk about Joyce Ashby from Lisa Kleypas's novel Dreaming of You. We delve into the dichotomous portrayal of Joyce as an irredeemable villainess alongside her foil, the redeemable “hero” Derek Craven. We explore the parallel themes of violence, possessiveness, and animalistic sexuality resulting in problematically differing fates and treatment by the text. Belched from the underworld, Defender of Bisexual Villainesses Dame Jodie Slaughter joins Shelf Love in this special cross-over project with Whoa!mance - watch for the next episode, in which Morgan and Isabeau share their conversation about Dreaming of You.

Shelf Love:

• NEW! Substack for original writing and stuff | Website | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
• Email: [email protected]

Discussed: Dreaming of You by Lisa Kleypas

Guest: Dame Jodie Slaughter, Shelf Love’s Expert on Bisexual Villainesses

Website | Twitter | Instagram

Shelf Love:

• NEW! Substack for original writing and stuff | Website | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
• Email: [email protected]

Amanda Cinelli joins me to discuss representation of autistic characters in romance novels. Amanda shares how reading Helen Hoang’s "The Kiss Quotient" played a big part in her realizing that she was autistic, and talks about some other romances with autism representation that she loved. We also discuss why representing autistic love is important to Amanda as an author and her writing journey pre and post diagnosis.

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Shelf Love:

• NEW! Substack for original writing and stuff | Website | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
• Email: [email protected]

Discussed:

• The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang
• The Heart Principle by Helen Hoang
• The Brown Sisters Trilogy by Talia Hibbert
• Bergman Brothers’ series by Chloe Liese

Guest: Amanda Cinelli

• www.amanda-cinelli.com
• **https://twitter.com/AcinelliAuthor**
• https://www.instagram.com/amandacinelliauthor/
• https://www.tiktok.com/@amandacinelliauthor
• https://amandacinelliromanceauthor.substack.com/about

Shelf Love:

• NEW! Substack for original writing and stuff | Website | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
• Email: [email protected]

"Somebody’s Trying To Kill Me and I think it’s my husband" by Joanna Russ is a brilliant bit of 50 year old scholarship about modern gothics, but I say it applies just as well to romance novels of today.

In part one, I explore the theme of passive protagonists in adventure stories. Part 2, the personal is the problematic. In all parts: unpacking heteropatriarchy.

Discussed:

Adventure Stories with Passive Protagonists:

https://shelflovepodcast.substack.com/p/adventure-stories-with-passive-protagonists

The Personal is Problematic:

https://shelflovepodcast.substack.com/p/the-personal-is-problematic

Shelf Love:

• NEW! Substack for original writing and stuff | Website | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
• Email: [email protected]

Shelf Love:

• NEW! Substack for original writing and stuff | Website | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
• Email: [email protected]