Northrop Frye states that a literary experience can be found in every work of literature, even when it comes from a popular core. This premise underpins this article, romance fiction being a literary experience, one which is a reflection of an idealized world. Public libraries are also idealized worlds, often considered democratic places providing social capital in order to facilitate equal access to information including fictional reading. However, the choice of shelving and floor locations, and the separation of fiction collections according to genre, can challenge this notion of equality. So as to understand how librarians establish and engage with their library collections, this article uses “dalliance” as a metaphor, alongside Pamela Regis’s “eight elements of romance fiction” as a conceptual framework. Both the metaphor and the framework act as Bourdieu’s "thinking tools”, allowing for a conceptualisation of the physical locations of romance fiction collections in the public library. These “thinking tools” reveal how romance fiction is “othered” in the library, evidenced by the varied practices of shelving and floor placements, their relationship to catalogue records, and further supported with interview data from public librarians. These practices impact the creation and visibility of cultural capital and the legitimisation of popular romance fiction. The practices show how decisions made about the placement of books in a library can create systems of exclusion, removing the equality among fiction books that is afforded through the use of alphabetical ordering.
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The interviews with the librarians reflect an acceptance of romance fiction as being escapist, ephemeral, light, for women, as nonthreatening, positioned as encouraging literacy, but it is not considered to be literary or meaningful.
Here's the abstract:
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A note at the end of the article states that: