Romance in foreign accents: Harlequin-Mills & Boon in Australia

Abstract

This article is broadly interested in the adaptation and circulation of the mass-market romance genre as one example of the publishing industry's production and distribution of cultural artefacts within and across national borders. To consider this, the article focuses on the most successful mass-market romance publisher in the world, Harlequin-Mills & Boon, to ask the following questions: how has Harlequin-Mills & Boon, but particularly its international expansion into and operation in ‘foreign’ markets, been key to the contemporary success of the genre? What are some of the key strategies of the publisher's adaptation of the genre to new national markets, particularly in terms of issues of generic repetition and difference? What can Harlequin-Mills & Boon's negotiation of one national market, namely the Australian market, reveal about these questions in more detail? And how has the Australian office's recent shift from importing international content to commissioning local content signalled a critical shift in its adaptation of the genre to the national market? Ultimately, this paper proposes that these changes signal the publisher's entrée into the creative economy and the Australian office's shift away from being a branch office and towards being a creative branch.

Acknowledgement

This research was supported under the Australian Research Council's Linkage Projects funding scheme (project number LP0777066).

Notes

1. At that stage, Australia and the United Kingdom still marketed the books under the anachronistic British branding of ‘Mills & Boon’; this practice changed in the 1990s, when the branding was changed to the company's proper title of ‘Harlequin-Mills & Boon’.