Glen Thomas - Queensland University of Technology
Toni Johnson-Woods - University of Queensland
Jenny Brassel - Sydney Community College and NSW Writers' Centre

There is a long history of criticism and for a long time there has been a low opinion of romantic fiction. There seemed to be an attitude that women could be better people if they didn’t read. When you look at the values of male activities during the 20th century “home and hearth” and domensticities are treated poorly as they are not considered to be of the public sphere. There seems to be a need to justify basic human emotion.

Why do “literary” and educated” people devalue human relationships as not being important to read about. When you are looking at published books a “literary” writer is good but a “popular” writer is perceived as bad and romance is even worse. There seems to be an attitude that to be literary you should be starving for your art and to seem to be highly successful is a pay out. Fighting literary snobbery seems to still be a major obstacle. Even the academics in this area aren’t considered to have serious pursuits.

Devaluation of basic human emotion and relationships seems to start in a person’s teens when myth, love and fairy stories give way to realism - particularly in the school curriculum. Storytime is seen as a beautiful magical world with love and comfort and in most instances happily ever after (HEA) yet at some stage between 3rd grade to 6th grade this is turned around. In high school kids are taken away from dream, love and myth and going towards death, divorce and misery. This seems to be a contemporary western culture phenomenon. The view is that great literature is sad and if it is not sad its bad. Anything that is not sad is fodder for the masses. When was the last time a comedy/romance with HEA won the Booker, Pulitzer, Miles Franklin.

Values society places on collections and collectors impact perceptions of worthiness. The problem with many romance readers is that they didn't, until only recently, actually collect to the same level that crime fiction, science fiction and pulp fiction fans did. This made it even harder to qualify as important. The only sizeable collection of romance fiction in an academic library is Juliet Flescher's collection. http://www.lib.unimelb.edu.au/collections/special/collections/australiana/romance.html. This makes it very hard to conduct research for the serious romance scholar. It is also very hard getting the academic stamp of approval. Though this is slowly changing. Teach me tonight is a blog on Musings on Romance Fiction from an Academic Perspective. They currently have a call for staff to join the society which will be called The International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR) and the journal will be an online, open-source journal called The Journal of Popular Romance Studies (JPRS). There is a need for more critical attention for the romance genre. This is already happening for other genres such as crime fiction and science fiction. By studying romance Glenn was considered "a joke". Along with other romance academics they would sit at conferences and have "therapy" sessions saying that "no-one respects us". Many academics think that romances are not worthy of serious study. There are academic hangups as to what is worthwhile or not. Amongst the things that the panel said that they do is try to break down reading snobbery at NMIT and UQ. Literature students are expected to read a romance a semester amongst other books.

Cover art is also very important to the collector and to how the market has changes. Covers are branding and often authors have no control - marketing teams from the publishing house make the decsions. There is also a shyness that a book is a product that needs to be sold. This goes back to literary snobbiness. Genres have a certain set of markers and you would be very annoyed if you purchase a western but instead you recieve a romance. The other thing is that we need to get more romances reviewed in newspapers under the banner of romance. Once again this is happening for other genres. (at this point it was acknowledged that the newspaper industry is falling apart and that most of their independent reviewers have been let go).