This is a collection of soundbites from around the web prompted by The Reading Experience.

Via the Reading Experience:

Teach Me Tonight on how to define “romance novel” and why although “romance and romantic novels can be well-writen,” readers shouldn’t want “to jettison the genre definitions in order for them to gain acceptance.”

Via Teach me tonight:

I think the definition given by the Romance Writers of America (RWA), that ‘Two basic elements comprise every romance novel: a central love story and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending‘ is pretty much perfect as a short definition of the genre. For a definition of the structural components (e.g. ‘barrier’, ‘moment of ritual death’) of each romance, Pamela Regis’ A Natural History of the Romance Novel is excellent.

Via post-feminist literary critic Tania Modleski’s Loving with a Vengeance (1982):

Popular women’s fiction has come under attack for a number of different reasons. For one, popular culture specialists raise the issue of the passive consumption by women of mass-culture products which present women with negative role models. Most leisure-time activities are, in fact, passive, and few critics fault male readers with passivity when they read detective novels or westerns. –page 2

Via the guardian.co.uk

Publishers have been trying for years to find a winning formula for men’s fiction. From lad lit to dad lit to bad lit, men have been barraged with an array of reading matter since Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary stormed up the bestseller lists and into our lives in 1997. The New York Times reported last week on the failure of American publishers to find a satisfactory male equivalent for chick lit. Kyle Smith’s Love Monkey and Scott Mebus’s Booty Nomad, both published earlier this year, have failed to make any impact. As one blogger remarked, ‘Mebus’s antihero isn’t a character, he’s a demographic marketing fantasy.’

See also: genre theory