Men, Masculinities, and Popular Romance by Jonathan A. Allan

Author:Jonathan A. Allan [Allan, Jonathan A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Gender Studies
ISBN: 9781351240000
Google: bC27DwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 46265740
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-10-31T01:32:15+00:00

I am still inclined to agree with the position that it is not the role of the literary scholar to determine which works represent the ‘strongest romance novels.’ Simply, I am not even sure how one would go about determining ‘greatness’ or ‘strength’ with regards to the genre. What qualities would be required? The novels, thus, that I set out to study are limited only in terms of their content insofar as I do not engage with ones that include fantastic elements, for example, nor do I consider historical novels. My inclusion criterion is that the novels must be contemporary romance novels and accessible to a general reading public, which is to say that they be published material. My goal, then, is not to limit myself to the ‘best’ or the ‘strongest’ romance novels, and if these novels happen to be among the ‘best’ or the ‘strongest,’ that is merely happenstance. What is important for this study is that these novels address men and masculinities. Indeed, more and more, I find myself agreeing with Frye, who noted in an interview that ‘the real, genuine advance in criticism came when every work of literature, regardless of its merit, was seen to be a document of potential interest, or value, or insight into the culture of the age’ (1996–2012: vol. 24, p. 754). These works are interesting because they represent the values, interests, insights, and even pleasures and desires of a particular moment.

One of the most significant challenges of studying the male/male popular romance novel centres upon the question of authority. Perhaps I am too Barthesian in my approach, in that I am less interested in the author and more interested in the text itself, recalling here Barthes’ famous conclusion that ‘the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author’ (1977: p. 148). Nonetheless, I have previously observed that one of the most persistent criticisms of the male/male romance novel is that ‘gay men, by and large, are not writing these novels about themselves. In other words, their voices and experiences have been appropriated by those who have little or no experience as gay men’ (2016: p. 68). I acknowledge this criticism, but, as noted, I am not inclined towards it. While this may well be an important critique, it is not one with which I wish to grapple; instead, I am more interested in why readers might desire and consume these novels. Often enough, that scholarship gets bogged down by the weight of criticism, of finding problems close to what Sedgwick (2003) might called ‘paranoid reading,’ and in so doing it often misses out on more mundane questions of readerly pleasure and desire. Even with all of the problems that scholars can find – and we can find plenty – readers still buy, desire, and consume the novels (even after we’ve pointed out all the problems!). This challenge seems to me more interesting and more productive. As such, I set out here to think

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