From Romance to Roberts and Back Again: genre, authorship and the construction of textual identity in contemporary popular romance novels

摘要

In this dissertation the relation between genre and authorship in the oeuvre of contemporary American popular romance writer Nora Roberts is analyzed. Roberts is the author of over 200 popular romance novels published in the course of the last three decades. Although Roberts is one of the most widely read authors on the planet – there are currently more than 400 million copies of her books in print – she is not a particularly famous figure. This remarkable contradiction between popularity and obscurity that surrounds Roberts and her vast oeuvre is studied in this dissertation via an analysis of the relation genre-authorship in this body of work. As genre fiction Roberts’ oeuvre is, on the one hand, part of a type of literature that today is overwhelmingly conceptualized in generic terms – popular romance novels are generally conceived of as generic instances instead of as unique books written by individual authors. On the other hand, however, this oeuvre is marked by a popularity that is unprecedented in the popular romance genre – Roberts is the genre’s single most successful and popular author – which indicates that Roberts does have a strong authorial identity. The multifaceted process in which this authorial identity developed and the ever shifting relation between genre and authorship that crucially underlies these developments are studied in this dissertation. These analyses are carried from what in very general terms can be considered a poststructuralist methodological perspective; authorship is conceptualized as the author function (Foucault, 1969) while genre is, following insights from contemporary genre theory (Frow, 2006), conceived of as an entity located on the crossroads between the text, its use and its user(s). This theoretic framing gives rise to a double level of analysis in which both the narrative and the paratextual (Genette, 1987) characteristics of the oeuvre are considered. Concretely, this dissertation focuses on three strategies or parameters which play a role in shaping the relation genre-authorship in Roberts’ oeuvre; these are first the presence of generic romance conventions, second the degree of generic hybridity and third the role of narrative serialization. The resulting triple analyses, which always consist of both a narrative and a paratextual level, trace, map and analyze in detail the development of Roberts’ author name and concomitant authorial identity in relation to the popular romance genre in which her work is situated. These establish that, on the one hand, Roberts’ authorial identity is strongly developed over the course of the last thirty years – Nora Roberts is not only a star in the so-called romance community, but her name has developed into a commercially powerful brand name in its own right – but that, on the other hand, in a mainstream context Roberts’ author name and identity remain tightly related to one author – in so far as Roberts’ is known in her native United States, she is predominantly known as a popular romance author. To that extent the generic and authorial identity merge.