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| Hearsay: |
Is it just me, or does there seem to be a glut of these articles lately, lamenting the reputation of romance in pop culture and the reception of the genre by mainstream critics? I’m a little confused. Do they actually EXPECT to be taken seriously? Isn’t enough to just sell more copies than everyone else and leave it at that? It seems a bit like McDonald’s complaining that food critics don’t visit often enough. Why invite disaster into your home?
Readers apparently feel a little embarrassed about romance novels, too. An editor at Harlequin told me that in the Bible Belt, inspiration and romance are the bestsellers — strange bedfellows indeed. “They buy their inspiration at the bookstore, and they order their romance novels online.”
In a sense, romance still labors under the burden that used to weigh on all fiction. Puritan sermons in the 17th century were spiked with warnings about reading novels. Thomas Jefferson railed against novels, too, claiming they were “a great obstacle to good education…a poison [that] infects the mind. The result is a bloated imagination, sickly judgment, and disgust towards all the real businesses of life.”
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July 23rd, 2009 at 9:57 am
Invite disaster? I can only imagine the groundswell of backlash if the London Review of Books reviewed a romance novel and pointed out that the prose is surely crafted to meet the attention span of a 4 month old beagle; that even the distribution of cliches seems to have been based an adapted druidic calendar; that neither Olympic gymnasts nor the laws of California bend that far.
“Pretentious, robotic, literary facists hate sex!”
July 23rd, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Watch it! Many romance novels are well-written and have well-crafted plots. Women (and some men) with educations and taste and talent are reading and writing them.
Open your mind. Or visit smartbitchestrashybooks.com and let them open it for you.
July 24th, 2009 at 8:00 am
I have to agree with Phyllis. The genre is not taken seriously, but there are those books that are very well written, with compelling plots. (the dirty bits are just an added bonus)
July 25th, 2009 at 12:12 am
I think the large goal is to cut back on the widespread deprecation of romance novel readers. A lot of
potshots are thrown at the readership, and it starts to smack and echo of classist misogyny. Look
at those silly silly women who aren’t educated enough to read REAL literature. And as the smartbitches
site shows, there’s a whole lot of intelligent women who take offense at something they love being so maligned.
July 25th, 2009 at 12:13 am
Goldang weird formatting.