Seminar 19 July – The Romance Boom – Jodi McAlister

Who: staff member Jodi McAlister with Lisa Fletcher
When: Thursday 19 July, 12pm to 1pm
Where: Burwood campus C2.05 | Geelong campus IC3.108

RSVP: [email protected]

 

One Book Sold Every 5 Seconds: Mills & Boon UK in the Twenty-First Century

“Romance is the most prolific and profitable popular genre globally, and almost all the positions in the genre’s production, distribution, and reception are occupied by women. The romance novels published globally by Harlequin Mills & Boon are emblematic of the textual, social, and industrial dimensions of this massive genre. In academic and public discourse alike, this brand of slim-bound fiction is routinely dismissed for the perceived shallowness and assumed conservatism of the stories it sells to its predominantly women readers.

In this paper, we chart a route beyond ‘form-and-ideology’ (Gelder, 2004) readings of romance through an analysis of Mills & Boon’s contemporary marketing strategies. Following Squires’ approach to book marketing, we examine the August 2017 new release titles for Mills & Boon UK in order to provide a detailed critical snapshot of romance as a globally integrated and nationally distinctive sector of the British publishing industry. According to the company’s website, Mills & Boon is ‘the UK’s undisputed market leader in romance fiction publishing’, publishing 120 new titles a month and selling a new book every five seconds. They have maintained this market dominance while shifting the bulk of their publishing and distribution activities to the digital marketplace. By looking closely at the publisher’s ‘new releases’ strategy for one month, we identify the key logics and practices that define the world’s most famous genre publisher.”

Associate Professor Lisa Fletcher is Deputy Head of Humanities at the University of Tasmania. Her books include Historical Romance Fiction: Heterosexuality and Performativity (2008), Popular Fiction and Spatiality: Reading Genre Settings (ed., 2016), and Island Genres, Genre Islands: Conceptualisation and Representation in Popular Fiction (co-authored with Ralph Crane, 2017). She is currently a chief investigator on the Australian Research Council Discovery Project, “Genre Worlds: Australian Popular Fiction in the Twenty-First Century” (2016-2018).

Dr Jodi McAlister is a Lecturer in Writing and Literature at Deakin University. She has previously been an Associate Lecturer in English at the University of Tasmania and an Associate Investigator for the ARC Centre for Excellence in the Study of the History of Emotions. Her research interests include representations of love and romance, and popular fiction and culture. She is also a novelist: her young adult novels Valentine (2017) and Ironheart (2018) are published via Penguin Teen Australia, with Misrule to be released in early 2019.