Posts
Journal of Popular Romance
Studies
Romancing the Long British
19th Century
The long British
nineteenth century (1789-1914) appears to have the long global twentieth
century (including the first decades of the twenty-first) in its thrall. Regency
and Victorian settings proliferate in popular romance fiction, ranging from
scenes of domestic life within the United Kingdom to British espionage in
Europe and British colonial settlements. Retellings and “sequels” of Jane
Austen’s novels line our (digital) bookshelves and fill fan-fiction websites, spilling
over most recently into the YouTube sensation The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. Such adaptations of Austen’s novels, along
with film and TV versions of the Brontë sisters’ Jane Eyre and Wuthering
Heights, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North
and South, suggest that modern audiences cannot get enough of stories about
Georgians, Victorians, and Edwardians in love.
The Journal of Popular Romance Studies seeks
papers on this enduring love affair with 19th-century Britain. Why does a period
that is historically associated with the establishment of the Industrial
Revolution, the consolidation of the Empire, and the coalescing of middle-class
mores now strike us as a particularly “romantic” era? How do popular and
middlebrow media from around the world construct, interpret, and recast the
world of 19th c. Britain, broadly construed? What do these interpretations say
about our current moment and our modern (or postmodern) thoughts and feelings
about romance?
We welcome submissions that
explore these and related questions from any disciplinary or theoretical angle.
We invite papers that cover different media, including (paper and digital)
literature, film, TV, online content, and marketing.
This Special Issue of The
Journal of Popular Romance Studies is guest edited by Jayashree Kamble and
Pamela Regis. Please submit scholarly papers of no more than 10,000 words,
including notes and bibliography, by March
1, 2014, to An Goris, Managing Editor, at managing.editor@jprstudies.org.
Submissions should be Microsoft Word documents, with citations in MLA format.
For more information on how to submit a paper, please visit http://jprstudies.org/submissions/
