First panel after lunch! First up, Eric Selinger, speaking about love and place in novels by Sherry Thomas. #IASPR18
Selinger: place (including fictive place) plays an important role in Thomas' backstory as well as her books. #IASPR18
Selinger: the setting of Thomas' first two novels were British and familiar, although it played with time via flashback. In her third book, she maintained the temporal experimentation, and set it in what is now Pakistan. #IASPR18
Selinger: after the initial market failure of Not Quite A Husband, Thomas did not return to "unusual settings" for another four years, with My Beautiful Enemy. #IASPR18
Selinger: in Not Quite A Husband, a side must always be chosen, but in My Beautiful Enemy, there is much more resistance to this binarism (to the extent that it's coded as a kind of violence). #IASPR18
Selinger provokes us to think about how we choose the books that we study in popular romance studies, and the role of the "critical darling". #IASPR18
Next up: @FeistyHeroine, speaking about race, belonging and nation in 21st century historical romance fiction. #IASPR18
Jagodzinski is interested in how her historical romance authors deal with questions of citizenship, and the combination of social and emotional justice. #IASPR18
Jagodzinski: the ending of historical romance often ends with unfriendly institutions (eg. patriarchy) being remade in a more friendly way. #IASPR18
Jagodzinski: in "confrontation" scenes, white heroines are asked to consider the hero's non-whiteness and their own whiteness, engaging in notions of citizenship. #IASPR18
Jagodzinski: in these books, to talk about inclusive citizenship, villains serve a purpose, whiteness must be explicitly confronted, and it might matter where the couple ends up. #IASPR18
Finally got this panel: Johanna Hoorenman on hypermodernity and the chronotope of the "native reservation" in books by Jenna Kernan. #IASPR18
Hoorenman: all representation is subject to a semiotic gap between representation and actuality. Much depends on strategies of representation and commodification. #IASPR18
Hoorenman: the chronotope of the Native American-themed novels are fairly anachronistic - the tribe is untouched by settler culture, smallpox isn't really a problem, language acquisition is easy, etc. #IASPR18
Hoorenman: the white heroine aligns herself with the tribe, assuaging the potential guilt of the non-native reader. #IASPR18
Hoorenman: through the formal elements of her genre (romantic, suspense, contemporary, series), Kernan rewrites some of the more problematic elements of the historical genre in her Apache Protectors series. #IASPR18
