Ahoy! Here be the results of the survey wherein I asked what romance subgenres you read:
You can also see the results at the Wufoo.com page.
So, were the results what you expected? I’m not surprised at all that historical reigns supreme. But there’s a lot of contemporary romance readers – I expected there to be more paranormal romance readers, but more people selected contemporary. However, I did not separate out “series/Harlequin” romances so those who read Harlequin Presents, for example, would select “contemporary.” I am sure some question my decision on that but I didn’t want to get into branded romances so much as I wanted to focus on setting/subgenre. Thanks to all of you who took the survey!
I’m going to say I’m not surprised, because that mirrors quite exactly my own reading tendencies and overall ratings. Most of my favourite romance novels are historicals, then contemporaries, then paranormals. 🙂 But then, that’s also because it’s what I find in shops and libraries… So it’s a vicious circle of sorts.
Emily, ‘bodice-ripper’ is actually a term that is fraught with confusion, because it is loosely used as a derogatory term by people who have usually not even read the books that they classify in this way. They have only looked at the covers: not a rational way, let alone a scholarly one, of understanding a text.
The Harlequin/Mills & Boon tradition (and remember M&B has been publishing romance novels since 1909) was never really an important part of it. Some of the American historical romances of the 1970s/80s did make use of historical settings as a justification for putting the heroines through a lot of male violence, often at the hands of the hero. Settings involving pirates and the American West obviously provided good opportunities for such stories. There is a logical rationale there: women did not have the same legal rights as men in earlier centuries, and could be ill-treated, even physically, with comparative impunity. I am not very familiar with the books that feature heroines put through all sorts of physical abuse. They were far more typical of American popular culture, and I was not reading American fiction much at the period of their floruit. I suspect that few were even published in the UK.
But (contemporary) American category romances of the 1980s regularly featured heroes of the kind mis-named ‘alpha’, who were emotionally rather than physically abusive, and this is part of the same approach. Some of the earlier Linda Howard categories illustrate this well, with ‘patient Griselda’ heroines who heroically put up with incredible levels of emotional abuse from the arrogant, smug, pathologically jealous, altogether repellent heroes. Try Howard’s Sarah’s Child or The Cutting Edge (both 1985) or Elizabeth Lowell’s outrageous Too Hot to Handle (1986) for the type: no bodices are ripped, but the underlying trope is the same.
Historicals set in the English Regency period normally slavishly followed the Heyer model, and were therefore would-be witty drawing-room comedies: no bodice-ripping, literal or metaphorical.
The classification issue really is a very difficult one, for the usual reason that the classes are changing and evolving all the time, and that at any given moment, it is difficult to establish which parameters are significant, and which merely passing fancies.
The percentage of m/m noted – nearly 20% is a substantial number of readers. I know we are talking about the online community of romance readers who may have different reading patterns to people who don’t seek that community connection but to me, 19.76% is mainstream reading. It also says something about the power of the small e-publishers in creating a market and reaching readers. Because e-publishers have opened up access to books there can be more choices of sub-genre and more readers.
I think there are some interesting, and possibly contentious, issues around the readerships of stories that feature male homosexual or lesbian romances. It would be fascinating to break down readerships of both m/m and f/f by both sex and sexuality of the readers.
Traditionally, in the 19thC, lesbian sex-scenes were popular in (illegal) pornography written for heterosexual males, for reasons that have to do with male power, status and voyeurism rather than with any intrinsic sympathy and understanding for same-sex bonds.
Some of us simply like reading about any romance — sexual and emotional relationships that work out well and happily — and therefore don’t mind whether the protagonists are one of each sex, or two males or two females. But I think there may be some rather interesting and variable things going on with some readers of gay romances. It’s not so long ago (about 40 years) that gay men and women could not easily access novels about gay relationships at all, or at least, not ones with happy endings. Generations of lesbians were made miserable by surreptiously obtaining and reading Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness… Mary Renault’s The Charioteer, published 1953, was probably the first easily available English-language book that dealt in a factual way with (male) gay relationships, and was essentially a romance, though how happy the ever after could have been at the time is questionable. One can understand why she turned to Ancient Greece after that. Of course none of these were erotica, because that was not yet legal in publishing. 🙂
I think the topic deserves a full blog post and discussion.
Wouldn’t “Regency” belong to “Historical”, too?
Or does it mean authors of the regency?
Yes, ‘Regency romance’ is a sub-class of ‘historical romance’.
If you write about your own times, you are writing a ‘contemporary’, even though it seems ‘historical’ to readers who read your work decades or centuries later. Thus, Jane Austen was writing contemporaries, because she was living in the late 18th/early 19thC, and writing about the late 18th/early 19thC. Writing an historical setting means that you are writing of a period earlier than your own lifetime.
🙂
@Gerd D.
There used to be Regency romances that were a distinct subgenre. They were published mainly by Signet (a Signet Regency) and were mostly “drawing room manners” stories with little or no sexual content. (They were also shorter books the size of Harlequin category Romance.) They were Historical Romances but so distinct as to be just about their own genre. To my mind, they were analogous to cozy mysteries which belong to the Mystery genre but in a very distinct way. Some readers will still remember those and refer to them as Regencies.
The Regency line ended some years ago and today’s Regency romances are just like any other Romance but are set in the Regency historical period. Mary Jo Putney, Edith Layton, Jo Beverley, Joan Wolf, and others started out writing Signet Regencys and went on to write Historical Romance.
@MaryK
I had no idea that the Regency line had ended. I’ve always avoided historicals labeled “Regency” because I find the traditional Regencies so boring. Really, if there’s no sex, what’s the point?
A bit off-topic but didn’t know where else to put this…
Would you survive the Victorian Period?
http://www.mccord-museum.qc.ca/scripts/games_jeux.php?Lang=1&id=17&full;
I got a perfect score for both genders, which I attribute to my love of historical romance. 😉 Would love to see this for other time periods.