The shake up with RWA and the ethics debacle, or in Elizabeth’s word the implosion, has injected the romance-writing community with some extra energy right now. At least as far as discussions related to the genre. Romance Scholar Digest is having an interesting discussion regarding the definitions of the romance novel. Eric Selinger shared in an email that there’s an ongoing discussion on Twitter about the need for some linkable definition of the romance genre that doesn’t rely on the RWA, which has led to an interest in a compendium (with citations) of definitions that have been offered of the genre by various hands, scholarly and authorial and industrial, etc. I’m not on Twitter so I’m getting my information from a Romance Scholar Digest email thread. Eric is considering putting them up at the IASPR site or in the Journal of Popular Romance Studies (JPRS), which I would look forward to. The Teach Me Tonight blog has a list of definitions compiled by Laura Vivanco, some of which I’ve included here. Continue reading →