AustLit

'The Sentimental Bloke was a hugely popular multi-media phenomenon in Australia during the First World War and early interwar years. I explore the work as a heterosexual “masculine romance”: a love story expressing heterosexual romantic feeling from a masculine point of view and in a self-consciously masculine way. The Bloke phenomenon demonstrates that “ordinary” Australian men were more interested in certain forms of romantic popular culture than previously allowed. It also points to the fact that avowedly masculine constructions of romantic feeling were emerging in this period in response to criticism of elaborate Victorian-era expressions of romance on the one hand, and of commodified approaches to romantic love on the other. This point has implications for romance studies, which has paid little attention to the concept or even the possibility of masculine romance. In Australia, there was an insistent emphasis on plainness and straightforwardness as the hallmarks of a sturdily masculine approach to romance in the 1910s and 1920s. My hope is that this discussion will prompt other romance scholars to consider the particular inflexions given to masculine constructions of romance in other localities in the same period.'

Source: Abstract.

'This article explores Australian romance fiction from the 1880s to 1930s to contemplate how Australian women writers conceptualized romantic love, gender relations, marriage, and the role of the romantic couple within the nation and British Empire. It argues that short stories about love and romance novels prior to Australian Federation (1901) tended to be more pessimistic about the outcome of romantic love in the colonies; both male and female writers of love stories were too aware of the hardships that befell women in the colonies, especially along the frontier. After Federation, however, many of the obstacles to love that had developed in the colonial romance persisted, but in the post-Federation romance novel women writers began to imagine that Australian culture, environment, and character – particularly the two heroic national types, the “Australian Girl” and the “Coming Man” – were ultimately sufficient to overcome such obstacles. Thus post-Federation romance novels are more likely to have happy endings. In these romances, a successful marriage between an Australian and a Briton also served the higher purpose of either nation- or empire-building.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Through a close analysis of Thank God He Met Lizzie, a rare example of an Australian romantic comedy/drama, this article demonstrates the central place of loss that still maintains an important role at the centre of contemporary marriage. Expanding on notions of male melancholia that were central to gender representation and desire in 1990s cinema, this article argues that the audience experience of grief in watching the film is dominated by a strong perception of an inevitable compulsion towards an unbreakable stasis in marital relationships increasingly devoid of love and intimacy. Formally and thematically expressed, what is seen as lost in this film is not only the truth and intimacy of romantic love, but the capacity for change and movement that it requires.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This article identifies a critique of popular romance plots through unstable identities and disingenuous narrative perspectives in three Australasian Bluebeard tales. In these works by female writers in Australia and New Zealand, Bluebeard’s key tropes of fragmentation, repetition and revelation are used to dismember popular understandings of romantic love. Confronting both the limits of knowledge and the power of story to shape romantic relations, Margaret Mahy, Sarah Quigley and Marion Campbell each in different ways refashion the Bluebeard tale’s central images to complicate romantic love as a site of self-realisation. The resulting works ask us to consider how narratives and expectations of romantic love might be better “re-membered” to encourage relations of embodied compassion in contemporary Western culture.'

Source: Abstract.

'Rachael Treasure is Australia’s most popular author in the mainstream rural romance genre. Her novels combine bush or agricultural landscapes with gutsy heroines who are keen to transcend the context’s sexist pecking order. This article focuses on the representation of working dogs, romance and the ethics plot in Treasure’s first novel, Jillaroo (2002). Dogs, particularly the heroine’s well trained kelpies, progress and hinder the novel’s romance; they play a central role in some of the romantic elements yet are conspicuously absent in others. Relationships between humans and dogs unlock the novel’s ethics plot. This plot emphasises certain behaviours and attitudes between humans and non-humans and aligns readers’ sympathies with particular characters while encouraging disidentification with others. Jillaroo’s heroine Rebecca Saunders and her dogs undertake typical farm jobs efficiently and economically thereby securing her entry into spaces usually reserved for men. Rebecca shows herself to be equal, if not superior, in action and knowledge to the men who populate such contexts. Dogs therefore assist in constructing Rebecca as an example of Sherri Inness’s ‘tough woman’, heroines who use their “body, attitude, action, and authority” (Inness 24) to challenge the dominance of male heroes in popular culture and disrupt gender roles and stereotypes. Dogs also complicate Rebecca’s gender construction by undercutting and disturbing her feminine gender performances. For the novel’s male characters, interactions with dogs indicate their mental health and their “interspecies competence” (Fudge 11). A close reading of the relationships between Jillaroo’s main characters and dogs reveals that the narrative endorses and rejects particular human-human, human-animal and human-environment behaviours, ultimately positioning readers to value the ethical treatment of others (human and non-human) and the environment. Overall, Jillaroo’s romance narrative and representation of working dogs emphasises contemporary gender, environmental and animal rights issues in rural Australia, imparting a vital lesson to readers about the ethical treatment of others.'

Source: Abstract.

'Anne Gracie and Lisa Fletcher met at the 2013 Romance Writers of Australia Conference at the Esplanade Hotel, Fremantle, Australia. The interview took place in a quiet alcove of the hotel on the afternoon of 17 August, 2013.'

Source: Abstract.