Expeditions into ‘Central Man’: Imperial Romance, Tropical Medicine, and Heroic Masculinity

In this chapter, Taylor-Pirie considers how parasitology became rhetorically and materially entangled in the imperial imagination with travelogues, anthropological treatise, imperial romance fiction, and missionary biography. These modes jointly constructed the colonial encounter as a feat of manly endurance, using the linguistic enjoinment of medicine and exploration to frame parasitologists as modern heroes. Examining the influence of Thomas Carlyle’s conceptualisation of the heroic in history and imperial cartography as a strategy of representation, she demonstrates how tropical illness became a subject associated with pioneers, poets, and prophets, mapped onto the larger field of empire by the adventure mode. Through close readings of Henry Seton Merriman’s With Edged Tools (1894), John Masefield’s Multitude and Solitude (1909), and Joseph Hocking’s The Dust of Life (1915), she demonstrates the utility of forms like the ‘soldier hero’ and ‘imperial hunter’ in elaborating masculine citizenship in the context of tropical illness and ‘muscular Christianity’.

Female Readers as Literary Critics: Reading Experiences of Kano Market Romance Fiction

This paper aims to explore the female readers reading experiences, views and feelings of Hausa romance novels found in most of the northern part of Nigeria. This article also examines some criticism and accusations against the readership and content of the Hausa romance genre. The study applied the Transactional Reader-Response Theory of Rosenblatt’s (1978) as guide by selecting 7 female readers within the age ranges between 22-26 years from 2 book clubs to participate in the study. The findings revealed that all the readers individually were able to reveal their varied responses, beliefs, and experiences on the value of the romance novels which challenged the assertion made by the literary critics and traditional society that the books have no relevance in their life activities which supported their arguments and personal interpretive reading stance towards the Hausa romance genre. The finding yielded four themes were emerging: (a) promoting literacy development; (b) resistance to the traditional marriage system in society; (d) enlightening females on social inequality. These findings provided empirical support for the application of the Transactional Reader-Response Theory of Rosenblatt (1978) outside classroom contexts to understand the role of African romance novels towards female social transformation.

Looking through the lens of Bourdieu: A corpus-based Study of English Romance Fiction Translation

Habitus is one of the key concepts of the Bourdieusian sociology which Translation Studies has benefited. Based on the Bourdieusian sociological model, this study investigated the translatorial habitus of the Iranian translators of English romance novels as far as the translation strategies of culture-specific items (CSIs) are concerned before and after the Cultural Revolution of 1980 in Iran. The research data include 4282 sentences containing CSIs extracted from Rebecca, Sense and Sensibility, and The Great Gatsby, and their two Persian translations. The extracted data were analyzed, adopting a consolidated typology of translation procedures for CSIs. The strategies employed for translating CSIs are presented with frequencies and percentages using descriptive statistics. Moreover, the results were corroborated with a qualitative analysis of some archived interviews printed in Motarjem [the translator] journal. The investigation revealed three essential findings: a marked source-oriented tendency among Iranian translators of the English romance novels when translating CSIs in the Pre-Cultural Revolution era, maintaining the same tendency in the Post-Cultural Revolution era, and finally a growing tendency in moving from Pre- to Post-Cultural Revolution era. The results of the Chi-square test highlighted a significant difference between various strategies used in two eras.

Cum iubim? Coduri de gen în romanul de dragoste românesc

My paper aims to present how the Romanian romance novel written between late 19th century and the Second World War fictionalized some of the gender codes active in that particular timeframe in social and familial contexts. A very popular subgenre amid the unprofessional readers, romance fiction rises a new kind of responsibility for literary critics and historians, that traditionally gave little to no attention to the matter of toxic gender codes found in these novels. This article attempts to analyse, by means of both close and distant reading tools, a few narrative aspects that encoded gender inequality.

Romance in Woman’s Weekly and Woman’s Weekly as Romance, 1918–39

This article examines romance and social aspiration in British domestic magazine Woman’s Weekly during the interwar period. Between 1918 and 1939, Cinderella romance was the dominant fictional genre in Woman’s Weekly, which featured at least one complete story and one serial instalment in each weekly issue. These romances work through the social ambitions of the magazine’s target readers: lower-middle-class housewives on low incomes, who aspire towards class promotion. Assuming a social framework within which a woman’s status is determined by the status of her husband, and assuming a reading experience in which the heroine functions as the reader’s avatar, the social aspirations of Woman’s Weekly’s target readers emerge in the socio-economic status of the magazine’s fictional romance heroes. Surveyed using the ‘distant reading’ process pioneered by Franco Moretti, a sample of Woman’s Weekly Cinderella romances issued during 1918–19, 1928, and 1938–39 reveals shifts and complexities in these aspirations across the interwar period. Notably, these shifts and complexities reflect changes within Britain’s class system, and the assumed position of Woman’s Weekly’s target readers within it. Whilst Woman’s Weekly’s Cinderella romance fiction fulfils its target readers’ social aspirations in fantasy, the magazine’s lifestyle content promises to realize them in actuality, by supplying the products and behaviours associated with aspirational lifestyles. Showing how the anticipation and fulfilment of narrative resolution that underpins Cinderella romance narratives might shape one imaginary reader’s experience of reading Woman’s Weekly, I argue that it is the romantic promise of social elevation that attracts readers to the magazine, and ensures their long-term loyalty. The extent to which the magazine can fulfil this promise for real is, however, questionable.