Suspense and the Happy Ending
If you’re an Erotic Romance reader, I would really like to talk to you. I’m interested in your experience of happy endings in erotic romance and how, even though you know that the story will end with the lovers getting together, you feel a level of suspense during your reading of the story. If you […]
Accidentally Kinky
Michel Perkins introduced his unique survey of modern erotic literature with George Bataille’s incisive quote: “Man goes contantly in fear of himself. His erotic urges terrify him.”(Perkins 1992). What serious novelist would deny themselves such a challenge as a topic? Yet most contemporary literary writers do, either by refusing to write about the sexual lives […]
My First (and perhaps last) ERWA Blog post
So, today was the first of my monthy ERWA Blog posts. It may very well be my last when my co-bloggers are confronted with 2000 words of density. We’ll see. Anyway, I’ve been blogging a lot lately about the lack of well-written or arousing sex scenes in literary fiction, and musing over the possible reasons […]
Show Me, Don’t Tell Me – Unless it’s Sex.
There were some really great comments on my last post about the literary world and its aversion to including erotic sex scenes in literary fiction or eliciting arousal in readers. Laughingly, and perhaps a little brutally, I said that it might have something to do with individual authors and their own feelings of sexual inadequacy. […]
Why Good Writers Write Bad Sex: An Exploration of Literary Prudery
Last year, Arifa Akbar wrote an interesting article in The Independent: Bad sex please, we’re British: Can fictive sex ever have artistic merit? I’ll be honest, I’ve been ruminating over this piece for about a year. First, let me give you some quotes from prize-winning writers and critics as to why they purposefully write unarousing […]
States of Grace: Reader Innocence, Happy Endings and the Writer as Responsible Sadist
“Your virtue!” said the lady, recovering after a silence of two minutes; “I shall never survive it. Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding Academia puts a high value on the ability to read critically; to deny the text our heart and view it with an analytical, objective mind. From the early of the 20th Century onwards, […]
“At the heart of pornography is sexuality haunted by its own disappearance”
How have representations of sex become so banal, so unthreatening, so uncritical? Because the body and sexuality are liberated as signs and only as signs. Through the sign-system, Baudrillard contends, ‘sexuality itself is diverted from its explosive finality’ and transformed into ‘promotional eroticism’ or ‘operational sexuality’. “Jean Baudrillard: Against Banality” by William Paulett I’m having […]
Erotic Romance Readers: What does a Happily Ever After Ending do for You?
I’ve had a marvelous time in conversation with 10 erotic romance writers. Each of them have given me wonderful insights into their craft, their challenges and their unique understanding of what constitutes erotic romance and their relationship with the genre and sub-genres. One thing that impressed me overwhelmingly was how close they feel to their […]
Why Conversations Matter: Hermeneutic Phenomenology
I’ve been having a wonderful time having conversations with writers about their writing and the uses and effects of the ‘Happily Ever After’ convention. However, in some cases, it has been difficult to persuade people to speak to me via voice with Skype, or explain why a text chat or an email exchange won’t work. […]
Erotic Romance Writers: Your thoughts, please
If you read my blog fairly regularly, you’ll already know I’m working on a research project investigating the function of the HEA/HFN ending in erotic romance, not simply as a form of narrative closure, but examining if and how it plays other roles in how you construct, imagine, character build, etc. If you write erotic […]