Before getting to the new publications, I want to add a few links about the loss of Olivia Waite's romance reviews from The New York Times. Here's the news as broken by Smart Bitches Trashy Books, who felt "it’s shocking, appalling, and outrageous to see them dismiss a fiction columnist for sharing someone else’s post criticizing coverage of rape allegations against Trump." And here's an interview with Olivia, discussing the matter, with Zachary Fletcher at Literary Hub. Romance scholar and author Jodi McAlister made a statement about the importance of Waite's column:
When Olivia reviewed my book Not Here To Make Friends, it shifted the needle for me dramatically - suddenly my books *weren't* too Australian to be traditionally published in the US (something I'd heard repeatedly). Without that review, I might never have broken into overseas markets - it mattered, massively. I know I'm far from the only author to have a similar experience after being reviewed by Olivia, and it's so sad to think that that opportunity might now have vanished.
Prabir, Meghna (2026). “Post-Millennial Indian Romance Fiction in English.” The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First-Century Indian Fiction in English. Ed. E. Dawson Varughese. London: Routledge. pp. 329-338. [Abstract and some quotes.]
I probably should have posted this list before it got so long, but more and more notifications kept arriving in my inbox and I kept thinking I'd post once I'd added all the news items to the RSDB and that took me longer than anticipated. Anyway, I'll begin with a couple of not-strictly academic pieces which are, nonetheless, quite academic:
In the Arkansas Democrat Gazette (June 8) Guy Lancaster (mentioned recently on this blog and who has a publication below) gives his backstory as a non-romance reader before exploring the societal implications of the denigration of romance:
For so long, we have regarded the consumption of Harlequin paperbacks as
nigh pathological on the part of women, when in fact, it was the
rejection of romance that typified the pathological condition beginning
to emerge in American culture at large. After all, these stories center
the phenomenon we call love. And as no less a thinker than G.W.F. Hegel,
perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 19th century, wrote in
"Elements of the Philosophy of Right" (1820): "Love means in general the
consciousness of my unity with another, so that I am not isolated on my
own, but gain my self-consciousness only through the renunciation of my
independent existence and through knowing myself as the unity of myself
with another and of the other with me." (https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2025/jun/08/the-thrill-of-love/, archived here and also here)
And that's not entirely unrelated to Jessica Taylor's ponderings about the value of her research into romance now that she's outside academia, and how success is measured (in publishing and academia): "What is writing a romance for? What is this essay for? Is work all there is?" Jessica's PhD thesis, Write the Book of Your Heart: Career, Passion and Publishing in the Romance Writing Community (2013) can be downloaded here.
And the latest additions to the Romance Scholarship Database:
Ahmed, Iman and Michael-Zane Brose, Lara Dengs, Lucie Elfering, Elena
John, Mira Kalcker, Alice Kronenberg, Charmaine Küllenberg, Laura Le
Donne, Alican Nazik, Lena Neisen, Öznur Zeynep Özdal, Hanna
Schneemann, Antonia Steven, Julie Bøglund Strand (2025). A “Messy Complexity”? On Coming-Out, Identity Formation, and Community in Queer YA Romance Novels. Heinrich
Heine University Duesseldorf.
Burkes, Jordan (2025). The Love Hypothesis: Exploring the Consumption of Romance Novels.PhD,
Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College. [Embargoed until 2032 but the abstract can be found here.]
Hodson,
Jane (2024). "The Significance of Stance in Fictional
Representations of Non-Standard Language and Prescriptivism".
New
Horizons in Prescriptivism Research,
edited by Nuria Yáñez-Bouza, María E. Rodríguez-Gil and Javier
Pérez-Guerra. Bristol, Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters:
103-119. [https://doi.org/10.21832/9781800416154-007 I was late in finding this, probably because it doesn't mention romance in the title or the text of the essay. It does, though, focus on the use of "non-standard" language in Georgette Heyer's The Unknown Ajax. Currently, most/all of this is visible via Google Books.]
Kamblé, Jayashree (2025). "The
Women Who Changed the American Mass-Market Romance Genre: BIPOC
Editors, Authors, and Category Romance Novels from 1980 to 1988."Contemporary Women's Writing
19. [Abstract available here and excerpts here.]
Lancaster, Guy (2025).
" ‘It had turned them all into voyeurs’: Celebrity as the Antithesis of Community in Molly O’Keefe’s Wild Child."Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies
56.1:25–36. [Details here.]
Raffloer, Gavin and Melanie Green (2025).
"Of Love & Lasers: Perceptions of Narratives by AI Versus Human Authors."
Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans. [This is Online First, so does not yet have pagination. Also note that the paper discusses romance generated by AI versus romance written by humans, and I've written some comments on the methodology from the perspective of a romance scholar.]
Sutton, Denise H. (2025).
“Romance Publishing for a New Generation: The Case of Harlequin and
Mills & Boon In India.” Publishing History 89:7-27. [More details in the RSDB]
Valovirta, Elina (2025). "Romancing the Caribbean Sea: Size, Mobility and Sustainability in Cruise Ship Romance Fiction". Anglia 143.2: 382-397. https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2025-0026
Wilder, Mims (2025). (Wo)Men in Love: An Analysis of Sexual
Scripts, Escapism, and Queer Explorations Among Woman Readers and
Authors of Male/Male Romance Novels. Doctor of Philosophy in
Human Sexuality, California Institute of Integral Studies.
[More details here.]
Over the last four years, many in the romance community, sometimes known
as romancelandia, have thrown themselves into activism. Fated Mates,
the podcast that compelled Lee to run for office, operates a
phone-banking campaign called Fated States, which has logged more than
900,000 calls in support of Democratic candidates and causes since 2020.
Separately, a group of authors who write under the names Alyssa Cole,
Kit Rocha and Courtney Milan started an organization called Romancing
the Vote, which has since 2020 raised more than $1m for voting rights
groups.[...]
many popular romance writers today – such as Casey McQuiston, Alexis Hall and Helen Hoang, to name just a few – take
a more progressive view of gender roles, portraying marriage and babies
as options rather than necessities. Between 2022 and 2023, booksellers
alsosold more than 1m LGBTQ+ romance novels – a 40% spike over the previous year, according to Circana. [...]
Novels by Sarah J Maas, who writes bestselling “romantasy” novels, are
among the most-banned books in the US. Schools have also banned books by
McQuiston and Hall, as well as those by popular romance writers like
Ali Hazelwood, Emily Henry and Colleen Hoover.
Pérez-Gil, María del Mar (2025).
"Tourists not welcome: perceptions of tourism in popular romance novels."Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change. https://doi.org/10.1080/14766825.2024.2448189
A volume titled Travel and Colonialism in 21st Century Romantic Historical Fiction: Exotic Journeys, Reparative Histories? (kind of 2024/2025 publication date, given what's available online versus in print) is out from Routledge. The Introduction is open access and although most of the chapters are about romantic rather than romance fiction, the second chapter is definitely about romance. It's by Sarah F. Ficke: "Falling in Love Outside of the Law: Piracy, Race, and Freedom in Caribbean Historical Romance." That looks in particular at Captured (2009) by Beverly Jenkins and What the Parrot Saw (2019) by Darlene Marshall but Sarah Ficke's said that it "covers a bit about pirate romances by Julie Garwood and Johanna Lindsey as well."
Another chapter, by Hsu-Ming Teo and Astrid Schwegler-Castañer, examines Dinah Jefferies' bestselling novels, The Tea Planter's Wife (2015) and Before the Rains (2017) and I'm not really sure if everyone would classify them as romance, but they did seem more romance-inclined than the texts studied in the other chapters (with the exception of Ficke's).
---
The first romance pulp—or “love pulp,” as they are sometimes called—to hit the market was Love Story Magazine, which debuted in May of 1921 (or, at least, it is dated “May 1921”; when it actually hit the newsstands remains something of a debate).
Datta, Sreepurna (2025)
"'A
holiday that could be whatever anyone wanted it to be': The Indian
American Holiday Season in Sonya Lalli's A Holly Jolly Diwali".
Under the Mistletoe: Essays on Holiday Romance in Popular Culture. Ed. Liz W. Faber. McFarland. [Excerpt here.]
Farooqui, Javaria (2024). "Buildings, books, and memories: Analysing the culture of reading anglophone romance in Pakistan."
Journal of Postcolonial Writing. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2024.2433024
.@dramyburge and I are in the very early stages of some work on the history and development of British romance fiction, and as you can see, we have a lot of very interesting ground to cover... https://t.co/X7IPjCKNSZ
The International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR)
is seeking a Secretary to join our Executive Committee. This is a
volunteer position, with a two-year term.
They're also looking for a Film and Television Editor, Journal for Popular Romance Studies. Details about that can be found here (and the deadline's 30 July).
If you're not already signed up to IASPR's quarterly newletter, I'd encourage you to do that here (where you can also see the newsletter's archive). This quarter's newsletter includes a link to PCA Romance Area 2022 Abstract Booklet which I don't think was available online during the event and an interview with the new IASPR President (congratulations Jayashree and I look forward to seeing your ideas come to fruition!)
Balteskard, Susanna
(2022).
Feminism in Romance: How the romance genre has(n't) changed since the 1950s.
Bachelor thesis,
Norwegian University of Science and Technology. [Abstract only.]
Buttrick, Nicholas
Westgate, Erin C.
Oishi, Shigehiro
(2022).
"Reading Literary Fiction Is Associated With a More Complex Worldview." Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Online First. [A preprint version is available for free online - see the links in the romance scholarship database entry I've linked to]
Namysłowska, Karolina
(2022).
Romance novels in translation: Focus on defining features of selected texts translated from English into Polish.
Masters thesis,
Jagiellonian University. [Abstract]
Also, since I was sent a free copy of New Frontiers in Popular Romance: Essays on the Genre in the 21st Century, I've been able to update the entries in the Romance Scholarship Database about it to include quotes that give a flavour of each essay.
and thanks to Cruz-Bibb, I've found references to some older dissertations I hadn't come across before:
Ganapathy, Subha
(2002).
Who Is Afraid of Romance Novels?: Women Readers, Patriarchy and Popular Culture.
PhD thesis,
Mother Teresa Women’s University. [Details here.]
The
last two reach very different conclusions from each other about lesbian
romance. Brown argues that lesbian romances differ significantly from f/m ones, whereas Secrease finds that they're really very similar. Both Brown and Secrease base their conclusions on small samples, and it could
be argued that they're comparing the lesbian novels to at least some
generalisations about heterosexual romances which have now been
superseded (and may have even been a bit out of date by the time the
dissertations were written) but it's interesting nonetheless that they
disagree. I linked to the entries in the Romance Scholarship Database
since I've included quotes there which are possibly not available in the
excepts at ProQuest.
---
Another item I found in Cruz-Bibb's bibliography is:
what I have experiencedas"feministchanges"to the romance genre began appearing in the mid-1980s [...] In my experience, in all but the subgenreofhistorical romance, gender stereotypes were beginning to change. Male characters were no longer portrayed strictlyasbrooding, dark, and macho; heroines were given more independence and depth. There were also thematic changes: for example, writers were beginning to pay attention to contemporary social issues, suchassingle parenting, substance abuse, and child abuse. (14)
On the topic of changes which took place in the 1980s, Steve Ammidown tweets that:
The
first mainstream contemporary romance to include condoms that I know of
is Elda Minger’s Untamed Heart. The first contemporary to discuss
abortion that I’ve seen was Sandra Brown’s A Treasure Worth Seeking. The
acquiring editor for both? Vivian Stephens. https://t.co/7pjFZyukPU
Minger's novel was published in 1983. Steve's
careful wording here reminds me that it's hard to keep track of
"firsts" in the genre: since there are so many romances, and many of the
earlier novels are somewhat difficult to access, their plots may not be
known to current scholars. There has been some work done on earlier
romances of course, and clearly some of them had plots we might find
surprising. For example, jay Dixon's The Romance Fiction of Mills & Boon 1909-1990s, describes
a romance by Elizabeth Carfrae, from 1929, in which the married heroine
conceives a child with the hero, to whom she is not married and "Her
husband thinks the baby is his and raises her accordingly until his
death, when the hero and heroine meet up again and marry" (139). One
early romance involving abortion is described by Joseph McAleer in his Passion's Fortune: The Story of Mills & Boon:
In November 1939 a Mills & Boon novel, How Strong is Your Love?
by Barbara Hedworth, made the Irish Government's list of prohibited
books, on the grounds that it 'advocate[d] the unnatural prevention of
conception', a provision of the 1929 Censorship of Publications Act.
[....] Mills & Boon published this novel [...] over a year earlier,
in August 1938. Splashy advertising for this title billed it as 'an
absorbing romance' and 'a love story that will delight everybody'.
Apparently not: [...] the heroine's father, a village doctor, is an
abortionist. He decides to help Rose, unmarried but pregnant, by
performing 'an illegal operation'. The abortion (never called such by
name) is a success, but a blood clot kills Rose. To spare his family the
shame and scandal, Dr Vickers shoots himself. (168)
I
suspect that Steve was thinking more of novels in which abortion is
"called such by name" and despite the censors' concerns, clearly this
novel does not present abortion very favourably given that Rose dies,
but it's interesting that the topic was at least present here: later on
Mills & Boon's policy was to avoid the topic completely so as not to
have their publications censored.
Still on the topic of changes in the genre, in a recent article, Ana Quiring argues that "a new subgenre of queer Regency-era romance"
align[s] the lovers with the most marginalized in society. In consequence,
these novels imagine queer love and sex as always political. Rather
than repeating the Cinderella dream of marrying up, they invent a new
one, no less fantastic: romantic love as a conduit to solidarity.
And by "new subgenre" Quiring doesn't mean that it's only just appearing in 2022: one of the romances described in the article dates from 2014.
Still on the topic of queer/LGBTQ+ romance, I'm a bit less sure about the historical perspective of a recent article in the Guardian, which
refers to "the rise of LGBTQ+ romance fiction" and notes that readers
of one of the works discussed "praised the novel for being refreshingly
joyful and funny –
including a happy ending, which is not that common for a book with an
LGBTQ+ plot." Obviously, given the dissertations by Brown and Secrease mentioned above,
LGBTQ+ romance (which, by definition, includes a happy ending) isn't actually something new but perhaps what's
happening is that it's relatively recently broken through into the
awareness of mainstream media?
Also apparently breaking through is Black romance. Naomi Elias states that Bolu Babalola's "romance books—by design, not default—have become outliers in the
publishing industry, since they center Black women as romantic leads" and the sub-heading of the article adds that Babalola's work "normalizes seeing Black women being loved loudly." Given that mainstream romance publishing has tended to publish too few Black authors, the word "outlier" seems fair enough but I think whoever wrote the sub-heading (and it may well not have been Elias) is overlooking the work of many other Black romance authors who've been publishing for decades.
July 1994 saw two landmark debuts in romance- the publication of Night Song by @authorMsBev, and the launch of Kensington’s Arabesque line with titles by Frances Ray and Sandra Kitt. 1/ pic.twitter.com/T8junhhdwj
Jayashree Kamble, Professor of English Literature at La Guardia Community College
Shana McDavis-Conway, Co-Director for the Center for Story-Based Strategy and Staff Reviewer for Smart Bitches, Trashy Book
I'll end, though, with something that's been present in the genre for a very long time: historically inaccurate clothing on covers. Bernadette Banner has redrawn some historical romance covers (and the
cover of one work of historical fiction) to make the costumes more
accurately reflect clothing in the periods and places in which they're
set. The novels are: Kelly Bowen's Duke of My Heart;
Beverly Jenkins's Something Like Love; Olivia Waite's The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics; Alyssa Cole's An Extraordinary Union; Gillian Bagwell's Venus in Winter;
Gayle Callen's Love with a Scottish Outlaw.
She
doesn't really explore the reasons why inaccurate outfits might be more
appealing to readers, and I'm not sure how much that's been discussed
by romance readers and scholars. Presumably the shirts that open in the
wrong way are more appealing due to the amount of bare chest they reveal
and I can see how some modern hairstyles might seem sexier than
accurate ones but is some of this due to which stock art was available? I
get the impression, though, that these were published by large
publishing companies who commission photo shoots specially for their
covers, so some of these choices don't make a lot of sense to me. Are
publishers making assumptions which aren't warranted about what will
appeal to readers? Or is the key thing just to give a general
"historical" feel so that the reader can easily identify which romance
subgenre the book's in?
Brunet, Peyton and
Blair Davis (2022). Comic
Book Women: Characters, Creators, and Culture in the Golden Age.
Austin: University of Texas
Press. [Chapter 8 is about
romance comics: https://doi.org/10.7560/324110-010]
Farooqui, Javaria
(2022).
"Romance in an Old Bookshop."The Bridge Magazine 1:66-69. [This is available freely online. It discusses the distribution of second-hand romances in Pakistan and the connection with social class.]
Fresno-Calleja, Paloma (2022).
“Repurposing Fantasy Island: Lani Wendt Young’s Telesā Series
and the Politics of Postcolonial Romance.” Interventions:
International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.
https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2022.2054011
González-Cruz, María-Isabel. 2022.
Hispanicisms in Romance Fiction. An Annotated Glossary.
Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press. [Details from the publisher.]
Hendricks, Margo
(2022).
Race and Romance: Coloring the Past.
Arizona State University. [This is available to read for free online. This includes discussion of two novels by Beverly Jenkins and also Margo Hendricks's own romance novels (written as Elysabeth Grace).]
María Ramos-García
Transatlantic Definitions of Whiteness in Louise Bergstrom’s Gothic Romances in the Canary Islands (1971-72)
Heather Schell
Love in a White Climate: Category Romance and the Anglosphere
Angela Toscano
Big Girls Don’t Cry or Get the Guy: Representations of Fatness in Romance Andrea Anne I. Trinidad
“Kilig to the Bones!”: Kilig as the backbone of the Filipino Romance Experience
%20Amazon.co.uk%20Fresno-Calleja%20Paloma%20Teo%20Hsu-Ming%209781032801773%20Boo%5B...%5D.png)
