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Tadeusz Jasiński (1928-1992), a writer and journalist, was connected with Zielona Góra for the first twenty years of his creative career, and from 1974 until his death, with Lublin. He worked in artistic prose, literary reportage, and journalism, occasionally writing dramas and poems. A prominent romantic theme, set within a socio-political context, appears in most of his novels. From today's perspective, these works can easily be classified as historical romances - though it is important to note that, except for the stories set in the history of the Lubusz Land, Jasiński never ventured further back in time than the early 20th century in his literary texts. Typically, his writing aimed to understand and evaluate the transformations that took place in Poland after World War II. These evaluations may now be controversial, but it is difficult to deny Jasiński's fidelity to the ideals of his youth, and his works reflect the reality of those times in an interesting way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Set in Jamaica and London in the 1820s, Sara Collins' debut novel The confessions of Frannie Langton (2019) is a neo-slave historical novel par excellence. In it, Collins shapes and reshapes several subgenres of historical fiction, such as gothic fiction, historical romance, and historical mystery. Facing a trial based on the accusation of killing her master and mistress, Frannie Langton narrates her life story in the form of confessions to her lawyer as she endeavors to remember what happened on the night of the murder. This paper attempts to answer the following questions: Is Frannie trying to remember or to forget what happened? Why does Collins add strong gothic shades to her historical novel? How does she manipulate the historical whodunits of the crime in relation to Frannie's memory? Why does Collins choose a lesbian relationship to feature the historical romance in the novel? The paper examines how a post-2000 historical novel manipulates its conventional subgenres by adhering to some and changing others, starting with the gothic, then the murder story and, lastly, the lesbian romance in telling a neo-slave story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines three major works by nineteenth-century Black Appalachian poet Albery Allson Whitman, focusing on georgic scenes of agricultural labor to highlight the most radical of his agrarian visions. I show how Whitman imagines ecological thriving, decolonial cohabitation, and racial justice in terrains charted outside the political, economic, and geographic bounds of the expanding United States. On one hand, Whitman's poetic reflections on the interface of land and labor in Black historical experience yield transformative visions that offer abolitionist alternatives to the violently extractive paradigms of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, industrial agriculture, and United States imperialism. On the other, Whitman's rhetoric of racial uplift tends to uphold some of those extractive paradigms, precisely to the extent that it buys into the ideology of American exceptionalism. While acknowledging Whitman's occasional lapses into the belief that labor contributing to national growth is the key to both individual and collective thriving, I reveal how Whitman's works ultimately privilege local, subsistence, and regenerative forms of Afro-Indigenous agriculture as world-making enterprises that contest the racial and colonial order of the plantation form, as well as the United States settler state that upholds it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the concepts of female agency and consent in historical romance fiction using corpus methods of analysis. To this purpose, we provide an overview of the concept of agency in historical romance novels which focus on female characters and their journey toward empowerment and independence in addition to romantic fulfilment. Previous research has shown that romance novels can shape perceptions of consent, as well as attitudes towards sexual intimacy. To observe if this idea is validated by the data retrievable from our corpus, we explore the linguistic expressions of consent and discuss the encoding of agency through performative verbs and indexical expressions, as well as the frequency and contextual usage of gender-marked language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the paradigm of neomedievalism in historical popular romance novels as the process of recreating the medieval past through a combination of character types and medievalist tropes accepted by the readership as iconic. Considering that the typical readers of popular romance novels set in the Middle Ages are less preoccupied with historical accuracy, and neomedievalism does not prescribe specific gender tropes (Ford 2015), we shall explore the ways in which knights are developed as male characters, and whether the cultural assumption about the medieval past as "a time of unrelieved misogyny" (Ford 2015: 31) is subverted in heteronormative popular romance contexts. While popular romance novels are usually heroine-centric, the selected novels by author Alice Coldbreath feature the knight archetype repeatedly and prominently, with slight variations related to background, thus suggesting that the readers are particularly interested in a certain type of rugged, military manliness associated with a warrior physique, prowess in battle and honour. Unlike other novels typical of the popular romance genre, Coldbreath's novels do not take interest in war but in tournaments attended by the knights, predominantly war veterans with romantic interests, frequently as part of the audience, and sometimes as knowledgeable and invested supporters. Throughout this paper, our focus will be on the representation of the knight and its two ideals -- chivalry and prowess --on display during tournaments, as well as on the dichotomy knight/lady (and implicitly, man/woman), and their manifestations in the medieval popular romance genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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A case study of Sherry Thomas’s Qing-era My Beautiful Enemy (and its prequel, The Hidden Blade) allows for a fruitful discussion of changing representations of diversity in romance fiction and its appeal to readers. MBE’s heroine is Anglo-Chinese, and the novel’s plot draws on wuxia, a literary and cinematic genre that has a long history in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. It is also associated with immigration and exile, perhaps resonating with Thomas’s own move from China to the U.S. Readers might find its infusion in romance appealing for two reasons: one, it features a warrior heroine (a type popular in paranormal and urban fantasy romance, which questions gender roles), and second, it taps into the worldwide appreciation for wuxia, inspired by hits like Crouching Tiger. MBE enacts the genre’s features closely: the heroine is a righteous knight errant and a racial and gendered Other, intervening in nineteenth-century English and Chinese politics through uncanny martial means. Her struggle to determine her ethnic and political identities alongside filial piety and romantic love makes for a more transcultural romance novel.

Although romance novels are overwhelmingly white where romantic protagonists and their communities are concerned (even if these societies are culturally diverse in reality), romance writers and readers of different ethnicities have challenged this white norm. Black American romance is a flourishing subgenre, albeit with its own problems of market limitations, and Hispanic romance publishing is a growing phenomenon. However, romance novels with East Asian protagonists are few and far between. This essay outlines briefly the rise of romance novels featuring East Asian protagonists (that is, protagonists mainly of Chinese, Japanese, or Korean background), and then explores how these novels constitute “Asianness.” Drawing on Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism and Stanley Fish’s configuration of strong and weak multiculturalism, I will consider how references to history, culture, and, above all, a certain notion of the oppressive Asian family are used to create a sense of authentic Asianness in historical romances set in China, as well as in contemporary romances that also employ tropes about identity formation and identity crisis often found in Asian-American Young Adult novels.

The paper discusses the historical romantic novel The Island (2005) by contemporary British writer Victoria Hislop (b. 1959) in the context of literary tourism. Hislop set her novel on Crete, depicting the tragic and a long-time silenced part of Greek history connected with the leper colony on the island of Spinalonga in the years 1903 to 1957. Hislop's novel became an international bestseller and turned the island, together with the Elounda Gulf and town Agios Nikolaos, into one of the most popular tourist areas in Crete. Focusing on the effect of the novel on the place, the paper predominantly discusses the presentation of the setting from a perspective of literary tourism studies, addressing the psychological impact of a literary travel on the tourist-protagonist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A case study of Sherry Thomas's Qing-era My Beautiful Enemy (and its prequel, The Hidden Blade) allows for a fruitful discussion of changing representations of diversity in romance fiction and its appeal to readers. MBE's heroine is Anglo-Chinese, and the novel's plot draws on wuxia, a literary and cinematic genre that has a long history in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. It is also associated with immigration and exile, perhaps resonating with Thomas's own move from China to the U.S. Readers might find its infusion in romance appealing for two reasons: one, it features a warrior heroine (a type popular in paranormal and urban fantasy romance, which questions gender roles), and second, it taps into the worldwide appreciation for wuxia, inspired by hits like Crouching Tiger. MBE enacts the genre's features closely: the heroine is a righteous knight errant and a racial and gendered Other, intervening in nineteenth-century English and Chinese politics through uncanny martial means. Her struggle to determine her ethnic and political identities alongside filial piety and romantic love makes for a more transcultural romance novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revue Francaise d'Etudes Americaines is the property of Editions Belin and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Anna Cowan’s Untamed was one of the most discussed and reviewed historical romance releases of 2013. It was a polarising, unusual text, particularly due to its hero: a bisexual cross-dressing duke who passes as a woman for more than half the book. While it adheres to the structure and many of the tropes of what we might think of as a typical heterosexual historical romance, it is also recognisably queer. Untamed is a text preoccupied with the rigid becoming fluid. In this article, I will explore its queerness by reading it alongside Georgette Heyer’s The Masqueraders, which also features a cross-dressing hero. I will draw on David Halperin’s explication of the word “queer” to explore three key aspects of Untamed: the ways in which it approaches gender, social roles, and history, and how these contribute to the book’s project of fluidity. I will also examine online reviews of the book to examine how readers reacted to Untamed’s attempt to queer the straight romance: is this something for which there is an appetite? If so, what does this mean for historical romance in the future?