Passage - Tidsskrift for litteratur og kritik

Kvinder, der læser romancer

Janice A. Radway — 2024-06-18

In this article from 1981, Janice Radway presents and discusses a study of a group of American women who read romance novels. The article is a preliminary study related to Radway’s first book, Reading the Romance (1984), which has become widely acknowledged for its approach to romance, focusing specifically on the romance readers and thus renewing how the genre is perceived within a feminist framework. In the article, Radway presents her approach of combining text readings with ethnographic methods in order to capture the experiences and uses of romantic fiction among the women, focusing on the interaction “between text and context”.

“Jag skulle våga kräva alt"

Elin Abrahamsson — 2024-06-12

The article examines how popular feminist discourses on confidence are expressed in contemporary Swedish popular romance literature through a close reading of Simona Ahrnstedt’s novel Allt eller inget from 2017. It is argued that the novel relies heavily on an individualized and commercialized popular feminist message, but that it also nuances, questions and presents alternatives to it.

Finansiering: Artikeln är skriven inom forskningsprojektet Vad sägs om romance? Om konstruktionen och främjandet av samtida svensk populärromantik (2018-06798) finansierat av svenska Vetenskapsrådet.

At læse imod det victorianske ægteskabsplot

Camilla Schwartz — 2024-06-18

The majority of canonized female Victorian writers never formed a nuclear family. They remained unmarried and had no children. Yet, paradoxically, these writers are still the women we turn to when we want to read about romantic love. By rereading selected novels by e.g. Jane Austen, the Brontës, and George Eliot as capacious carrier bags (in Ursula K. Le Guin’s sense) rather than predictable heteronormative love stories, this article traces a marked critique in these works of the traditional marriage plots they were supposedly constructed around. In so doing, it identifies a strong queer potential in a series of key Victorian novels.

Lyst(op)læsning

Sara Tanderup Linkis — 2024-06-18

Following recent years’ “audiobook boom”, audio fiction apps have emerged that focus on romantic and erotic content. The article examines how the audio format and its associated uses shape or reshape existing concepts of romantic fiction. Focusing on the case of the app Blanche Stories, the article analyzes new romantic texts, written for the app, along with older texts, love letters, and excerpts from classics, which are adapted into sound. Drawing on theories on “bookishness” (Pressman), along with established work in audiobook and romance studies, it is argued that a “romantization” of literary tradition and book culture takes place in the app: partly through the way book culture is represented in the new romantic texts, and partly through the selection and adaptation of older texts in the app. At the same time, the audio format is also used in the app to reinterpret the texts and adapt them to modern uses of audiobooks, following the app’s goal of providing a “15 minutes of pleasure” in everyday life.

Noder i kärlekens nätverk

Karl Berglund — 2024-06-18

The essay investigates different kinds of romantic fiction from a reader’s perspective by means of data covering logged session of audiobook streaming. Through three examples – readers dedicated to either Lucinda Riley, E.L. James, or Jenny Colgan – it is shown that these groups of readers overlap to small extents. While there are larger overlaps in terms of literary preferences they exemplify distinct nodes of readers interested in romantic fiction.

Enkelsängar, äkta fiendskap och oplanerade graviditeter

Tuva Haglund — 2024-06-18

Booktok is currently the most influential online community for social reading, and romance is one of its most talked about genres. This article examines how the use of tropes shapes the conversations about books among romance readers on Booktok. By combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, the study offers a comprehensive overview of romance tropes and the various ways in which they are communicated, including an analysis of specific practices. The tropes are used both as a terminology and as a concept which provides the readers a common framework for formulating their own trope-like statements about the romance books. By incorporating humor and presenting affective readings, a considerable portion of the communication regarding romantic tropes seems to point inward, back to the community, providing and maintaining a collective identity and a sense of belonging.

Romancegenren i Danmark i dag

Helle Vibeke Lysdal — 2024-06-12

Helle Vibeke Lysdal, editor in chief of Gyldendal’s romance imprint, Flamingo, explains what it means to be specializing in publishing modern romances. Interviewed by Simona Zetterberg-Nielsen, she dives into questions such as gender, publishing strategies, the recent booming of romances, and the many plots of modern romances. Lysdal explains how the romance genre has moved with the times, especially in terms of embracing a modern look at gender roles, and how the publishing companies target romances according to the preferred theme of certain reading audiences.

Generisk kærlighed, eller, romancens realisme

Mark McGurl — 2024-06-18

In this chapter from his 2021 book Everything or Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon, Mark McGurl focuses on the romance novel in relation to, and as a reflection of, contemporary consumer economy. Reading E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey together with theories and figures of economic theory, he argues that the “realism” of the romance lies in how its representation of love and its “generic” and repetitive form can be related to the logics of an “on-demand” culture associated with Amazon and the consumer economy. The chapter is part of McGurl’s overall analysis of how Amazon and contemporary consumer economy impacts not only the production and consumption of literature but also the novel itself.

Call for papers

Redaktionen — 2024-06-18

Anmeldelser

Marie-Elisabeth Lei-Pihl — 2024-06-18

Forord

Redaktionen — 2024-06-18