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Popular romance fiction is the most prolific and profitable popular genre globally, a robust counter to narratives in the media and academia about the death of the book. Like all genres of fiction, romance has multiple dimensions. Popular romance is a sector of the publishing industry, a social formation, and a body of texts. To date, research has focused overwhelmingly on the third dimension, largely because of the dominance of the conceptual frameworks and analytical techniques of literary critics. To account for the genre’s size and growth, its dynamism and diversity, popular romance studies must not privilege a single academic discipline. Instead, the study of romance—and of popular fiction more broadly — should straddle literary and cultural studies (Butter 201), as well as publishing studies and book history. This article proposes a new theoretical framework for the study of popular fiction. It introduces the central concept of a "genre world," an adaptation of sociologist Howard S. Becker's definition of an "art world," and models the use of this concept through three interview‐based case studies that reveal key characteristics of popular romance in twenty‐first century Australia. First, the genre world is both national and international. It is attuned to these different contexts, particularly the permeable boundary between small and large publishing centers. Second, the genre world is highly professionalized, oriented toward the accumulation of what we call "genre competence." Popular fiction is a sector of the broader literary field that operates explicitly as a training ground for developing the knowledge and skills required by its members. Third, the romance genre world is built on a dynamic real‐and‐imagined sociality; therefore, people from its past and from its imagined storyworlds are routinely included in accounts of the romance community. The concept of the "genre world" and the methods it invites—reading the texts alongside interviews with authors and intermediaries and with the support of publishing data—thus yield new insights and a fuller, richer understanding of how genre fiction operates.

This article offers a survey of letters and poems by Friedrich Gundolf held in the Gundolf Archive at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London. Parts of the holdings, so far scarcely known, are presented here sorted by genre and chronology and by genre and recipient respectively. This provides a list of Gundolf's poetry, including dramatic, epic and humorous didactic works, as well as his correspondences stored in the London Gundolf Archive. A proposal for a reconstructed ‘History of German Literature’, based on Gundolf's lecture manuscripts, concludes the article. Die Miszelle bietet eine Ubersicht zu den Briefen und Gedichten Friedrich Gundolfs im sogenannten Gundolf-Archiv des Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London. Teile der bisher nur oberflachlich bekannten Bestande werden nach Autopsie generisch-chronologisch beziehungsweise generisch-adressatenalphabetisch geordnet, sodass sich ein Verzeichnis der Lyrik, der Dramolette (‘Zwiegesprache’), der Epyllien, der scherzhaften Lehrdichtung und der Briefe Gundolfs ergibt, die das Gundolf-Archiv in London verwahrt. Abgeschlossen wird der Beitrag von einem Vorschlag zur Rekonstruktion einer ‘Geschichte der deutschen Literatur’ von Gundolf aus dessen Vorlesungsmanuskripten.

This article offers a new interpretation of the development of insular romance, drawing on texts and events in the pre-Conquest period to suggest a much greater degree of cultural continuity across the Conquest than has previously been recognised. One strand of recent scholarship has elucidated the prevalence of the ‘exile-and-return’ theme in twelfth- and thirteenth-century insular French romance, and the political force of this ideology. Another has discussed the tendency of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Middle English romance to construct the Anglo-Saxon past as a legal golden age, using this trope to support a strong national identity. This article suggests that both of these tropes – the exile-and-return of the king, and the idea of good English Law – are in fact not post-Conquest inventions, as has been assumed, but are rather derived from pre-Conquest events and texts. This is a part of the author's general contention that a strong English identity can be seen to have survived the Conquest, and to have been expressed in French and Latin throughout the twelfth century, before the literary revival of English. Here it is argued that the two ideas are fundamentally intertwined, are essentially English, and are a genuine inheritance from the Anglo-Saxon past, in a manner which has not previously been acknowledged.

The Latin reflexive pronoun SE has undergone extensive semantic and grammatical reinterpretation in some of the Romance languages, notably in Italian, but far less in French. Within a comparative Romance framework that also refers to other Northern Italian dialects, this paper examines the extent to which so-called passive and impersonal SE structures exist in Piedmontese, and traces their development from the first vernacular attestations to modern usage.

New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction: Critical Essays Sarah S.G. Frantz and Eric Murphy Selinger, Editors. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012.In his pioneering study of popular fiction, Adventure, Mystery and Romance (1976), John Cawelti characterizes formulaic romance as the "feminine equivalent of the adventure story" (41). He concludes: "No doubt the coming age of women's liberation will invent significantly new formulas for romance, if it does not lead to a total rejection of the moral fantasy of love triumphant" (42). In 1982, Tania Modleski, author of Loving With a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women observes "One cannot find any writings on popular feminine narratives to match the aggrandized titles of certain classic studies of popular male genres" (11). Author of Love's Sweet Return: The Harlequin Story (1984) Margaret Ann Jensen explains fiction and literature scholars have failed to produce critical essays on romance fiction because it is "vilified as is no other category of popular fiction" (25). Nearly thirty years later, Jonathan Allen, in the June 2013 issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies notes "Popular Romance Studies is a new enough field that the canon of relevant scholarship has yet to be established" (1). Evidence of this is illustrated by the content of The Journal of American Culture's March 2013 special issue on love and romance-the guest editor describes popular romance novels as "the most recognizable media form of romance... so pervasive that it has its own genre with several subgenres and dominates the publishing field" (2). Yet this special issue contains no critical essays on popular romance fiction.No matter. In their introduction to New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction - Critical Essays, Frantz and Selinger, editors and contributors to the book, offer a fascinating, comprehensive, and surprisingly concise history of scholarship on popular romance fiction. The slow maturation of scholarly work on romance fiction is due, they argue, to the obstacles the genre must overcome: it is sentimental and emotional, written and read by women, and embraced by the mass-culture marketplace (3). Happily, this volume marks a move away from a defense of formulaic romance fiction to a more nuanced and self-assured apologetic.Seventeen remarkably erudite and instructive essays are organized into four parts. Part One, "Close Reading the Romance," provides a cultural context for romance fiction including a historical romance novel set in the Middle East, lessons on how to read the romance novel with the heart and mind, an interrogation of the rewriting of masculinity within the erotic paradigm of dominance and submission, and a compelling argument for the numerous hegemonies-beyond patriarchal structures and feminist criticism-that plague romance fiction. …

The peripheral dialects of Arabic tend to differ from the core dialects by having an important component derived from anther languages or language group. In the case of Maltese this non-Arabic component has been alost entirely of Romance origin until comparative recently, when English began to play a part. The Romance component is frequently more closely defined by stating that it is Italian, or Sicilian, or Siculo-Italian. It is the purpose of this paper to examine this component and try and understand the role that it has played in the formation of moderbn Maltese.

This article surveys recent scholarship on Middle English romances, observing that outside Malory, Chaucer, and the Gawain-poet, most romances remain little-known. To be sure, the corpus and development of Middle English romance are unwieldy and complicated, compared to that of Old French romance. New work on the romances, however, redefines the relationships between Middle English romance and its French sources, explores the aesthetic values of Middle English romances, and offers new approaches to teaching Middle English romances beyond the few most famous ones. Moreover, theoretical approaches to medieval romance encourage discussions across traditional period boundaries; medievalists also have special skills to contribute to scholarship. Current work on medieval English romance focuses on its aesthetic as well as cultural properties, bringing both into play in the classroom as well as in scholarship.

HE most extensive circles in present-day Germany are interested in Spain: her people, her land, her civilization. In a somewhat superficial fashion the saying has been coined, "Spanish is modern," but the interest in Spain is too deep, too warm, and too spiritually grounded to be nothing but a mere fashion. Moreover, the first quarter of the twentieth century is by no means the first period in which our attention was directed to the Iberian Peninsula. A full century ago the enthusiasm in Germany for Spain and the Spanish people and literature was proportionately as great as today. To be sure, the relations between Germany and Spain can be traced much farther, back into the Middle Ages: diplomatic relations, pilgrimages to Santiago, and the rovings of artists are so many ties between the two lands. The romantic period, however, may undoubtedly claim the merit of the first sympathetic appreciation of the Spanish soul, the enthusiastic familiarization of the German lands with that soul and its most individual utterances. The German Jacob Grimm was the first to present to his contemporaries a selection of Spanish romances with an intelligent introduction. Friedrich Diez, the founder of Romance studies in Germany, furnished translations of old Spanish romances in a manner that was philologically impeccable. Even before his time, Herder had occupied himself with the translation of Spanish romances into German. But other types of Spanish literature had occupied the minds of men at the turn of the century. It was in that day that Lessing pointed to the magnificent and at the same time indigenous dramatic literature of the Spaniards. Goethe was inspired by Calderon's steadfast prince, and Tieck's translation of "Don Quixote" caused the latter to become one of the "folk books"