New Publications: The Meaning of Life and Work; Sexuality; Race; Language; the Environment and More

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.

AztecLady suggested that readers of Teach Me Tonight might be interested in reading this analysis by Gin Jenny of a sex scene in Cecilia Grant's A Gentleman Undone. 

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.

Barta, Orsolya and Ann Steiner (2025). "Between Desire and Responsibility: Unplanned Pregnancies in Contemporary Romance Novels." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 14.

Bausela Buccianti, Lucía (2025). “Demisexuality in Ali Hazelwood’s STEMinist Series: The Love Hypothesis (2021) and Love, Theoretically (2023).” REDEN. Revista Española De Estudios Norteamericanos, 6(2), 52–69. [I've included a direct link to this open access article, instead of the DOI, because the DOI wasn't working yet when I started working on this post.]

 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.]

Chan, McKenzie (2025). Silly Little Romance Books: Analyzing the Value and Function of the Popular Romance Genre. Honours Dissertation, Seattle Pacific University.

 Cobb, Karie L. (2025). Controlling the Narrative: How the United Daughters of the Confederacy Shaped Collective Memory Through Romance Novels. Master of Arts thesis, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

 Egidia, Clara & Ida Puspita. (2025). "Psycho-social Development of the Main Characters in the Novels Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers and Cantik itu Luka by Eka Kurniawan: A Comparative Study." INTERACTION: Jurnal Pendidikan Bahasa 12.1: 892–905. [But note that I was unable to locate some of the items in the list of works cited, as discussed here.]

Farooqui, Javaria (2025). "Broken Slippers and Glass Ceilings: Exploring the Romance of Reading Romance." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 14.

 

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.]

 

Kilian, G. Charles (2025). Gender, Genre, and Pleasure: Eroticism and Its Limits in French and Francophone Literature (1950–2010). PhD, University of Wisconsin - Madison. [As noted in the RSDB, this may be of interest to romance scholars because of its attempts to define the differences between erotic literature, pornography and romance.]

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.]

 

Nygren, Sandra (2025). Perfect imperfections: – en intersektionell fat studies-analys av tjocka flickprotagonister i young adult-romance. Masters, Linnéuniversitetet.  

 

Penttinen, Sara (2025). Mind-Reading the Romance Novel: Effects of Single Perspective and Dual Perspective in Christina Lauren’s The Unhoneymooners and Julie Olivia’s The Fiction Between Us. Master's in English Studies, University of Helsinki.

 

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]

 Suwanban, Rapeeporn Pauline (2025). Popular Romance & Orientalist Fantasy 1721-1930. PhD, Birkbeck, University of London.

 

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.]

Bad Romance Data, Monsters and New Publications

The data does NOT exist to support the statement that romance is a billion dollar industry. Quite frankly, the data does not exist to make any sweeping statements about the size of the popular romance genre market.

So says Andrea Martucci of the Shelf Love podcast, who's been taking a hard look at the "popular romance genre market data between 1972 and today" and presented her "research on 'Bad Romance Data' at the 2023 International Association for the Study of Popular Romance conference." You can read her analysis and conclusions here (and it's archived here).

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Also via Andrea (but this time not by her), comes a call for participants:

Whether you're solely into humans or a monster romance enthusiast, I'd love for you to take part in my survey. I'm a graduate student doing my thesis on whether or not monster attraction could be explained through evolutionary anthropology.

The survey will be available from January 9, 2024, to March 12, 20204, and it will take about 20 to 30 minutes to complete (although some people have finished it in as little as 12 minutes). It's completely anonymous and only requires that you be at least 18 years old to participate.

Andrea spotted it on Reddit but there's also a more formal announcement giving details of the research on the Research Study Consent Form to be found at the website of California State University, Fullerton.

The research is being "carried out by Phoebe Santillan, under the guidance of Dr. Elizabeth Pillsworth" and

The purpose of this research study is to gather information on people who are attracted to fictional monsters. You are being asked to participate in this study because any and all data is valuable at this stage within the research process. Attraction to fictional monsters is not required to participate in this study.

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And here's a short list of new publications:

Allen, Amanda K. (2024) "Ruling the Court: Reflections on Midcentury Junior Novel Romances." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 13.

Robinson, Rachel (2023). Reading and writing dogs in popular romance fiction, PhD, University of Tasmania. [Only the abstract is currently available.]

 

Warnaar, Karin (2023). "Dresses and Drapery: The Material Essie Summers." Scope: Contemporary Research Topics art & design 25:91-96. [Full pdf available for download at the link provided and, as a bonus, here's a link to a 2018 Otago Daily Times article about Essie Summers' life and work which Warnaar cites.]

Ya’u, Mohammed Sani, Sabariah Md Rashid, Afida Mohamad Ali and Hardev Kaur Jujar Singh (2023). "Semantic Extensions of Hausa Visual and Auditory Perception Verbs gani and ji in Romance Fiction." Pertanika Journal of Social Science and Humanities 31.4:1441-1464.

News and New Publications: Publishing Woe, a Forthcoming Book on the Romance Heroine's Journey, etc

I've now left Twitter but I can still be contacted via my website, via responses to posts here, and I'm also on Mastodon as @lauravivanco@romancelandia.club .

I would say "Happy New Year!" but SmartBitchesTrashy Books is reporting that

It’s a bleak time in the professional world of media and book publishing.

The Harper Collins Union remains on strike after more than a month, and HarperCollins is refusing to negotiate. Publishing shuts down at Christmas, so it’s likely they’ll be on strike into next year. [...]

There are layoffs happening at so many publications, too, including in books coverage. BuzzFeed has laid off a portion of their workforce, including their books editor, Farrah Penn.

And Gannett, parent to USA Today, laid off a portion of their workforce, including Mary Cadden, who compiled the USA Today bestseller list

To continue the bleak midwinter theme, Jezebel is reporting that 

In October 2020, a post on indie romance author Susan Meachen’s Facebook page, allegedly written by her daughter, announced that Meachen had tragically died by suicide a month earlier. This news was followed by more posts from Meachen’s “daughter” (on Meachen’s account) in the author’s private writers group, The Ward, suggesting her mother took her own life because her peers in the online indie book community bullied her.

In light of this horrible news, authors and online friends helped fund Meachen’s funeral, created an anti-bullying anthology in her memory, and offered to help her daughter edit her mother’s final book, free of charge. On Monday—over two years later—Meachen’s account posted something new in The Ward. This time, it was Susan saying she’s actually been alive this whole time.

On a happier note than redundancies and possible fraud, romance academic Dr. Amy Burge was quoted on the BBC website recommending romance-themed Christmas movies/books. She ended with a quick summary of what romance scholarship's about:  "While many read [...] romance for comfort and entertainment, readers can also think more critically about the genre, questioning the way these books represent the dreams, desires, and values of a particular society."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zbrmp9q

This is evident in Jayashree Kamblé's Creating Identity: The Popular Romance Heroine's Journey to Selfhood and Self-Presentation forthcoming (due in the summer) new book, which is now available for pre-order. You can read an excerpt here. I've collected some of the key quotes from that excerpt, describing the contents, here.

And now on to a list of recent publications:

Long, Veronica Lee (2022). “Individuation and the Romance Novel.” PhD thesis, Pacifica Graduate Institute.

Pupipat, A., Rungkaew, T., & Meeparp, L. (2022). "Judging a Book by its Back Cover: Spoken/Informal Register as Found in Happily-Ever-After Women’s Novel Blurbs." Journal of Studies in the English Language, 17(2), 1–31.

Sheehan, Sarah E. (2022) "The “Popular Romance Canon”: An Academic Librarian’s Response." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 11. [I would like to note that there are some academic libraries with significant romance collections, as listed at the Romance Wiki (unfortunately I've been unable to log in to it and update it with details about the acquisition made by Indiana University's Lilly Library) and I've also added some to the sidebar here at Teach Me Tonight.]

Scholarship and thoughts on race, publishing and language

Programme for the 2020 Bowling Green conference is now available.

Our Guest of Honor for the conference will be Alyssa Cole. She is an award-winning author of historical, contemporary, and sci-fi romance. Her Civil War-set espionage romance An Extraordinary Union was the RT Reviewers’ Choice Award’s Best Book of 2017 and the American Library Association’s RUSA Best Romance for 2018, and A Princess in Theory was one of the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2018.

One of the many people who'll be presenting papers is Christine Larson who recently had an article published about her research and the RWA crisis.

Some of her already-published work also discusses publishing and racism.

• The Color of Romance (from Voices: The Shifting Contours of Communication Research.) Eds. Patricia Moy and Donald Mathesen. Peter Lang, 2019. (You might be able to download it from her website)
• Open Networks, Open Books:  Gender, precarity and solidarity in digital romance publishing. Information, Communication & Society. June, 2019. 

More coming soon: "She is currently writing a book on the 40-year history of romance writers’ professional networks." 

K. J. Charles posted about the representation of non-English languages in English-language novels. Here's an excerpt:

Italicising serves as a nudge to the reader that they’re not expected to recognise or understand a word. That act very much assumes who the reader is. If you italicise all your Spanish in a book written about Mexicans, that rather suggests you don’t expect your book to be read by Mexicans. It is othering—and in many cases that can look like saying, “Those people are different from me and you, the writer and the reader.”

And finally, still on the topic of racism some more items which can't be added to the Romance Wiki bibliography because it's not around:

Adair, Joshua G., 2020. ‘“A Battlefield All Their Own”: Selling Women’s Fictions as Fact at Plantation Museums’. Museums, Sexuality, and Gender Activism. ed. Joshua G. Adair and Amy K. Levin. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. 239-251. [Excerpt]

Ali, Kecia, 2019. “Sacrifices, Sidekicks, and Scapegoats: Black Characters and White Stories in Nora Roberts’s Romances.” Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture 4.2: 149-168:

In several of the scores of romance novels she published between the 1980s and the early 2000s, bestselling American author Nora Roberts limns whiteness by deploying black characters as sacrifices or sidekicks. In her recent novels (2016–19), villainous white characters who express racist sentiments become scapegoats, obscuring racism’s broader structural and cultural dimensions. At a time when discrimination within romance publishing and award-giving has gained attention, it is vital to explore how the genre continues to center white readers and white identities, even while explicitly condemning racism.

New to the Romance Wiki: Emotions, Ethnocentrism, Evangelicals, Parody, Readers, Robin Hood, Translations

This is a long list: I should have posted an update earlier.

Capps, Stephanie Carol, 2017. 

"What You Read and What You Believe: Genre Exposure and Beliefs about Relationships". Master of Science thesis. University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, 2017. Pdf [This seems similar to the article below by Stern et al. I wonder if Capps changed surname between 2017 and 2018, as the first name and second initial are identical, as is the title of the paper.]

Jackson, Cia, 2017. 

"Harlequin Romance: The Power of Parody and Subversion." The Ascendance of Harley Quinn: Essays on DC's Enigmatic Villain. Ed. Shelley E. Barba and Joy M. Perrin. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2017. 16-??. Excerpt [This is about how the DC comics parody romance novel conventions via the figure of Harley Quinn.]

 

Johnson, Valerie B., 2018. 

"What a Canon Wants: Robin Hood, Romance Novels, and Carrie Lofty’s What a Scoundrel Wants", Robin Hood and the Outlaw/ed Literary Canon, ed. Lesley Coote and Alexander L. Kaufman. ???: Routledge, 2018. 184-??? Excerpt

Lee, Zi-Ying and Min-Hsiu Liao, 2018. 

'The “Second” Bride: The Retranslation of Romance Novels'. Babel. Published online first 27 August 2018. Abstract and full pre-publication version

 

McAlister, Jodi, 2018. 

‘ “Feelings Like the Women in Books”: Declarations of Love in Australian Romance Novels, 1859–1891’, Emotions: History, Culture, Society 2.1: 91-112. Abstract

 

Neal, Lynn S., 2013.

‘Evangelical Love Stories: The Triumphs and Temptations of Romantic Fiction,’ in Evangelical Christians and Popular Culture: Pop Goes the Gospel, ed. Robert H. Woods, Jr, vol. 2 (Santa Barbara: Praeger): 1–20. Excerpt.

Olivarez, Omar, Ryan Hardie, and Kate G. Blackburn, 2018.

“The Language of Romance: An Open Vocabulary Analysis of the Highest Rated Words Used in Romance Novels.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology. First Published August 18, 2018. Abstract

Pérez‐Gil, María del Mar, 2018. 

"Exoticism, Ethnocentrism, and Englishness in Popular Romance Fiction: Constructing the European Other". Journal of Popular Culture. Published online first 19 July 2018. [Focuses on the Spanish "Other" in the English imagination.] Excerpt

Popova, Milena, 2018.

"Rewriting the Romance: Emotion Work and Consent in Arranged Marriage Fanfiction". Journal of Popular Romance Studies 7.

Stern, Stephanie C., Brianne Robbins, Jessica E. Black and Jennifer L. Barnes, 2018. 

"What You Read and What You Believe: Genre Exposure and Beliefs About Relationships." Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. Advance online publication. Abstract and a short summary I posted at my personal blog, focused on the findings about romance readers.

In other sections I've added:

Hall, Cailey. 

"The Consolation of Genre: On Reading Romance Novels", Los Angeles Review of Books, 27 August 2018.

Liu, S.-h, 2012. 

"The Translation/Mutation of Romantic Love: An Exploration of the Translation History of Modern Romances in Taiwan after 1960". PhD Thesis, National Taiwan Normal University. Abstract

 

Sebastian, Cat.

"Romance, Compassion, and Inclusivity (Or: How Romance Will Save the World)", Los Angeles Review of Books, 29 August 2018. [This also appeared in the LARB Print Quarterly Journal: No. 19,  Romance]

Georgette Heyer Conference Tomorrow

The Nonesuch? Georgette Heyer and Her Historical Fiction Contemporaries

The Nonesuch? Georgette Heyer and Her Historical Fiction Contemporaries Tuesday 19 June 2018, 9.15am - 5.30pm 

The programme can be found here but in case that doesn't work and/or to preserve the details for posterity, here's a list of the papers and their authors:

Kim Sherwood (UWE Bristol) - "Pride and Prejudice: Metafiction and the Value of Historical Romance in Georgette Heyer"

Lisa Hopkins (Sheffield Hallam University) - "Shakespearean Echoes in Heyer’s Regency Novels"

Laura George (Eastern Michigan University) - "‘A little out of the way’: the dandy heroine in Regency Buck"

Kathleen Jennings (University of Queensland) - "Heyer... in Space! The Influence of Georgette Heyer on Science Fiction"

Vanda Wilcox (John Cabot University) - "Georgette Heyer, Wellington’s army and the First World War"

Geraldine Perriam (University of Glasgow) - "The Not-so-silly-ass: Freddy Standen, his Fictional contemporaries and Alternative Masculinity"

Tom Zille (Humboldt University) - "Georgette Heyer and the Language of the Historical Novel"

Deborah Longworth (University of Birmingham) - "From Almack’s to Astley’s: Regency World-building in the work of Georgette Heyer"

Sally Moore (University of Hertfordshire) - "Divorced, Beheaded, Died . . . The Problem with the Tudors in Romance Fiction"

Holly Hirst (Manchester Metropolitan University) - "Georgette Heyer and Redefining the Gothic Romance"

Stacy Gillis (Newcastle University) - "‘Ordinary People’: Austen and the Literary Genealogy of the Regency Romance"

jay Dixon (Independent Scholar) - "The Regency Novel under Heyer’s Influence"

Louise Allen (Independent Scholar) - "Writing in Heyer’s Shadow"

Roundtable discussion on Teaching Popular Historical Romance in the Literature Curriculum - Deborah Longworth, University of Birmingham

Lucie Dutton (Birkbeck, University of London) - "A Reluctant Movie"

Amy Street (Independent Scholar) - "Guilty Pleasures: Georgette Heyer"

Helen Davidge (Independent Scholar) - "Data Science, Georgette Heyer's Historical Novels and her Readers"

Roundtable discussion on Branding for the digital generation: Georgette Heyer’s book jackets as expressions of publishing contexts and fields - Mary Ann Kernan, City, University of London; Kim Wilkins, University of Queensland; Samantha Rayner, UCL

Plenary: Professor Kathryn Sutherland, Senior Research Fellow, St Anne's College Oxford, " 'Where history says little, fiction may say much': women writers and the historical novel"

CFP: International Seminar on Linguistic and Cultural Others in Romance

International Seminar on
LANGUAGES AND CULTURES IN CONTACT IN THE ROMANCE NOVEL

UNIVERSIDAD DE LAS PALMAS DE GRAN CANARIA
(Canary Islands, Spain)
June 21st-23rd 2017

Romance novels have often been dismissed by critics because of their nature as a popular genre and for being written and read largely by women. However, in the last decade a number of scholars have approached the study of the romance novel with critical rigor and avoiding the condescending treatment of previous analyses. Quite often in romance novels we encounter characters that have very different backgrounds: come from different countries and cultures, speak different languages, belong to very different social strata or are, in some other way, an “Other” to the rest of the characters and/or the intended readers. This International Seminar invites proposals in which the main characters or other important characters in the text can be considered as “Other”, with special consideration given to linguistic and cultural others. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

-       English-language novels that take place in the Canary Islands or other Atlantic /Caribbean islands
-       Paradise discourse
-       Cross-cultural clashes
-       Languages in contact: codeswitching and/or language mixing
-       Bilingualism, biculturalism and identity
-       Metalinguistic references and/or speech representation
-       The “Other” as a romance hero or heroine
-       Gender discourses

This International Seminar is organized by the “Discourse, Gender & Identity” Project Group (grant FFI2014-53962-P, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness) and the Research Team “Sociolinguistic & Sociocultural Studies” working at the ULPGC Department of Modern Languages. We invite proposals for paper presentations which must be sent as an email attachment by January 31st 2017 to isabel.gonzalezcruz@ulpgc.es

Abstracts will not exceed 350 words (excluding the references) and will outline the topic to be discussed in 20-minute sessions followed by ten minutes for discussion. The following details should also be provided in the abstract: 1) Title of paper 2) Name and affiliation of each author 3) email address of each author 4) between 3 and 5 keywords.

All proposals will be reviewed within four weeks of submission. The main language of the Seminar will be English but presentations in Spanish will also be considered.

Further information about registration, accommodation and details about publication of selected papers will be provided shortly in a second call for papers.