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.

Edward II and Piers Gaveston

This chapter takes up the emotional dimension of Edward’s relationships with his favourites, considering the significance and decline of medieval claims that Edward ‘called Gaveston his brother’; engagements in early modern narratives of Edward’s reign with classical ideals of friendship; and the increasing romanticization of his relationship with Gaveston. I show that accounts of Edward’s love for his favourites, and his grief at their deaths, are often crafted to elicit sympathy and pathos, and thus represent a valuable source of positive depictions of relationships between men. Moreover, analysis of these depictions in texts of all genres provides insight into the literary influences and motivations of early modern chroniclers, including their incorporation of tropes of the romance genre, and the impact of Marlowe’s Edward II.

A story about the Daughter of Ka‘b from the Masnavi Ilahi-nameh by Farid ad-Din ‘Attar: the romance narrative within the mystical context

The article discusses the problem of author’s interpretation of conventional patterns of the romance “genre” in the Tale about daughter of Ka‘b from the Ilahinameh by Farid ad-Din ‘Attar. In particular, it deals with the so-called “standard situations” (e.g. falling in love without seeing the partner, exchange of love letters or poems, etc.) as well as key components of structure (dialogues, monologues, descriptive portraits of main heroes). The analysis is based on the comparison of canonic elements of romance narrative in the Tale about daughter of Ka‘b with their analogies in the texts of the same “genre” of the earlier periods, including the “standard” romances by Nizami. This research reveals the influence of the ‘Uzri lyrical and narrative tradition with regard to the structure of plot of the “romance” and the ways of building up and composition of the features of the chief personage. On this background were analyzed the literary functions of the “inferior” personages, e.g. the nurse (or wet-nurse). The article is based on the translation and commentary of the Story about daughter of Ka‘b by Layla G. Lahuty.

Frank Yerby and his Readers

This chapter discusses why and how Frank Yerby’s readers diminished greatly within a few years of his death. This essay also considers how Yerby may not have received support from African-American literary community leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes that may have kept his novels in print. Additionally, because Yerby worked in the historical romance genre, or what he referred to as costume dramas, where most of his protagonists are white, is explored as a possible correlation to his disappearing readership. Essentially, knowing Yerby’s history as an author and seeing how critics categorized his books as disposable fiction is necessary in understanding who his readers were and why he went from bestselling novelist to nearly being forgotten.

“A Boy Inside It”

This essay explores Ann Bannon’s lesbian pulp series “The Beebo Brinker Chronicles” through the lens of trans studies, placing her eponymous hero in conversation with the inversion rhetoric of sexological discourse and the transgender pulp novels that circulated alongside Bannon’s texts in the 1950s and 1960s. Despite the prominence of Beebo’s masculine identification, and the fact that Bannon draws heavily from Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness—now widely read as a transgender text—Beebo has yet to be read as a character that resonates within both the trans and the lesbian literary canons. Revisioning Beebo as a transmasculine character transforms our understanding of an unfolding trans-gender literary tradition, offering a bridge between Hall’s Stephen Gordon and later twentieth-century articulations of transmasculine identity and embodiment. Further, the essay suggests that Bannon’s series provides a vital intervention in the “case study” framing that dominated both transgender pulp novels and The Well by offering a vision of trans experience that, presented in the romance genre, exists outside medical authority. If we broaden the context for studying Beebo to include other contemporary trans literary genealogies, Bannon’s work becomes integral to understanding the pulp genre’s treatment of transgender themes and the reach of transgender plots and possibilities at midcentury.