Nothing But Good Times Ahead: the Novels of Jennifer Crusie
Since the foundational work of Janice Radway and Tania Modleski in the 1980s, scholars and critics of popular romance fiction have treated the novels primarily in groups, often from an ethnographic or sociological perspective. There has yet to be a book focused on the work of just one modern romance writer, treating her novels at length and in detail. This gap in the scholarship reinforces the notion that romance novels are essentially all of a piece—formulaic, artless, unable to sustain critical attention—and hampers those who wish to study or teach romance fiction in courses on popular literature, women writers, or cultural studies. The collection of essays that we propose, Nothing But Good Times Ahead: the Novels of Jennifer Crusie, will mark a turning point in the critical study of romance fiction, even as it demonstrates the richness of Crusie’s work as both an innovator in, and theorist of, her chosen genre.
We have chosen to focus on Jennifer Crusie for three reasons. First, Crusie's work is widely loved in the world of romance fiction. Her category romances and single-title novels have won numerous awards, including two RITAs from the Romance Writers of America, and Crusie regularly ranks among the most popular romance authors in online fan surveys. (In a 2002 poll on the popular All About Romance website, for example, Crusie received the highest rating possible from nearly 60% of those who have read her. The Yahoo group of Jennifer Crusie fans currently boasts 1641 members, who regularly post from two to three hundred messages a week.) In a genre where most books go out of print quite soon after publication, Crusie’s have been repeatedly reissued; indeed, her first published novel, the 1993 Harlequin Temptation Manhunting, was among Amazon.com’s top 25 romance bestsellers when it was reissued in 2000, and returned to print yet again as a hardcover novel in 2007, just as her 1996 Harlequin Love & Laughter volume Anyone But You did early in 2006. In February 2006 Crusie was the closing speaker in Pamela Regis’s series of “Conversations About Romance” at the Smithsonian Institution.
Crusie has used her popularity—and her own scholarly background—to contest both literary and academic disparagement of romance fiction. She came to the genre in 1991, the year that the University of North Carolina Press reissued Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance, and her essays make it clear that she, like Radway seven years before, initially approached romance fiction with a little distrust, even distaste. Forcing herself to read it as research for her Ph.D. dissertation on narrative structures in men’s and women’s fiction, she became, unlike her predecessor, a convert to the genre, and, soon after, a romance author in her own right. Crusie’s essays in defense of the genre form a coherent, theoretically sophisticated, ardently feminist argument on its behalf, often directed as much against skeptical critics like Radway as against the stereotypes about romance found in popular culture. Her novels, too, engage in cultural critique, subtly challenging readers’ expectations about what romance heroines, heroes, plot structures, and love scenes can be, while affirming the deeply-rooted optimism of the romance novel as a form. Like the essays by romance authors in Jayne Ann Krentz’s collection Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance (U of Pennsylvania P, 1992), Crusie’s novels and essays mark a generational shift in romance fiction and its relationship to feminist literary criticism, American gender politics, and the institutional culture of romance fiction. The final chapter of Reading the Romance, for example, speaks of the “recent” founding of the Romance Writers of America. Crusie has grown up, professionally, with the organization, and she helped draft the RWA’s much-publicized definition of the genre, intended not only to guide aspiring authors but also to shape future journalistic and critical reception of romance texts.
Finally, we have chosen Crusie because of the demonstrable literary merits of her texts, which open to, and will reward, the most intensive critical investigation. Meticulously crafted, her novels are richly intertextual in their engagement with popular culture, fairy tales, and the Bible. A writer at the peak of her profession, Crusie represents the best that the romance genre has to offer. A collection of essays on her work will lead, we are confident, to a new wave of scholarly inquiry into the genre: an inquiry that will be newly attentive, not just to the ideology of romance fiction, but also to the artistry of its individual authors and texts.
As the editors of this volume, we bring an unusual range of expertise to bear on our topic. One of us, Eric Murphy Selinger, is by training a scholar of love poetry and contemporary American poetics, with two books from scholarly presses and over a dozen essays and book reviews published in peer-reviewed journals, literary magazines, and major newspapers. Some years ago, Selinger received a grant from DePaul University to research A. S. Byatt’s novel Possession: a Romance; his work on the “romance” part of that title led him to create the university’s first course on popular romance fiction, which he has taught at both undergraduate and graduate levels. In March 2006 Selinger won the Romance Writers of America’s $5000 research grant competition to undertake work on a series of critical essays about Crusie, Julia Quinn, and Emma Holly. The 2006-7 co-chair in Romance Novel Studies for the Popular Culture Association, Selinger is the founder and moderator of RomanceScholar, a listserv with over 130 subscribers from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and he created and regularly contributes to “Teach Me Tonight”, a collaboratively-written academic blog about romance novels. DePaul University hosts his webpage—currently under construction—of “Resources for Teaching Popular Romance Fiction”.
The other editor of this volume, Laura Vivanco, also brings a fresh perspective to the study of popular romance. Vivanco began her academic career in the field of Hispanomedievalism, and is the author of Death in Fifteenth-Century Castile: Ideologies of the Elites (Tamesis, an imprint of Boydell & Brewer) as well as articles on Castilian sentimental romances and Fernando de Rojas' Celestina, a work which explores love, lust, honor, social status and religion. As a British scholar, Vivanco approaches contemporary American romance fiction much as she reads medieval Spanish work: with an outsider’s eye for in the ways in which literary texts engage with the ideologies of the society in which they are written. A collaborator with Selinger on the “Teach Me Tonight” academic blog, Vivanco has been a primary contributor to the extensive, on-line bibliography “Romance Scholarship,” the first such resource in the field.
Nothing But Good Times Ahead will appeal to several audiences. Scholars and critics interested in popular culture, romance fiction, and women’s studies will welcome a volume of academic essays on Crusie’s work. So will professors who teach courses that address popular romance fiction, whether at the community college, undergraduate, or graduate level. (At the moment, students in such courses are most often assigned some or all of Radway’s Reading the Romance, an important text but one whose claims about the content, form, and literary sophistication of the genre are decades out of date.) Finally, our collection will find an audience among the intelligent, well-educated, and enthusiastically literate community of romance readers. Of the 64.6 million Americans who read a romance novel in 2004, according to market research by the RWA, 42% were college graduates, and 15%--more than 9.6 million women and men—either had, or had worked toward, graduate or professional degrees. Romance readers visit book review pages, read blogs about the genre, and communicate through fan and author websites. Written and edited with this cross-over market in mind, Nothing But Good Times Ahead has the potential to draw many readers from both inside and outside the academy.