New Publications: Teaching, Bathsheba, Lesbian Pirates, Stay-At-Home French Canadians, Beverly Jenkins and some Socialism

Abrahamsson, Elin (2025) "Teaching Feminist Cultural Studies Using Popular Romance" Journal of Popular Romance Studies 14.

Deosun, Ceri (2025). "The Bible in Inspirational Fiction: The Case of Bathsheba." The Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction and Poetry. Ed. Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer. Oxon, Abingdon: Routledge. 348-363. [Excerpts available from Google Books and Routledge's page about the volume can be found here.]

Garber, Linda (2025). “The Present in Our Past: Reading Lesbian Historical Fiction.” Women’s Historical Fiction Across the Globe. Ed. Catherine Barbour and Karunika Kardak. Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. 59-75. [Abstract here.]

Luneau, Marie-Pier and Jean-Philippe Warren (2025). “Exoticism Without Cosmopolitanism: The Quebec Romance Novel of the 1940s and 1950s.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 29.1: 154-166. [Abstract]

 

Moore, Jeania Ree V. (2025). “The Religious Work of Beverly Jenkins’s Black Historical Romance.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 14.

 

Nielson, Annika (2025) "The Summer of YA Love: Young Adult Romance, Tiktok, and the Classroom," The Utah English Journal 53, Article 14.

 

Timlin, Carrie (2024). "“The Workers Must Strive if the Butterflies Must Live”: Ethel Mannin’s Love’s Winnowing , the Socialist Romance Novel, and British Working-Class Women." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 43.2:197-217.

Can you help a Romance Scholar with their Research?

Romance Genre Browsing and Engagement in the Digital Age

Birmingham University PhD student Katie Deane has produced a questionnaire as part of a study which "looks at how romance novels circulate amongst their readership in the digital age, from recommendation cultures online to digital shelving, search, and discovery". She's looking for romance readers to fill in this questionnaire. Can you help?

 https://app.onlinesurveys.jisc.ac.uk/s/bham/romance-reader-survey

She promises it's "pretty short". And if you could also share it with any other romance readers you know, particularly ones aged 18-24 who've not responded in large numbers yet, that would be really appreciated.

Call for Papers: Special Issue on Decolonising Affective Relationships in Contemporary Romantic Narratives

Special Issue Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses
Editors:
Irene Pérez-Fernandez (University of Oviedo)
and Cristina Cruz-Gutiérrez (University of the Balearic Islands)

Popular romance has traditionally been decried as low-quality and escapist genre by conservative canon gatekeepers and feminist scholars alike, scornfully repudiated on account of its allegedly endless recreation of old-fashioned romantic fantasies and harmful gender stereotypes, and generally understood as stubbornly impervious to politics and, as a result, unworthy of academic attention. Despite the complex evolution experienced by the genre in the last few decades and its indisputable popularity, romance fiction continues to be perceived by many as unsuitable for classroom discussion and postcolonial critical thinking. Our aim in this special issue is to reflect on how romance in its multiple print and media forms–, can be a suitable vehicle for postcolonial/decolonial critique.

The deadline is the 30th of March. More details here.

IASPR Conference 2025

Registration has opened for the 2025 IASPR Conference. The conference is being held in Mexico City from 24-25 June. There's both an in-person and hybrid option and you don't have to be a member of IASPR to attend.

Early Bird registration rates apply until February 28th, 2025. Regular registration will last from 1 March until 6 June, 2025.

More details from IASPR here.

Links and New Publications: Politics, Pakistan, Empire, Race, Tourism

From The Guardian (via Jodi McAlister):

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 also sold 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.

From Javaria Farooqui:

 

🎙️ Ever wondered about reader-fans in Pakistan? Here is a link for my chat with Dr Priyam Sinha about the fascinating world of Regency romance book clubs in South Asia! https://newbooksnetwork.com/romance-fandom-in-21st-century-pakistan

 

[Edited to add: Javaria later clarified "romance reading communities, not book clubs."] 

 

And on to the new publications:

Gopalakrishnan, Manasi (2024). "Nostalgia for the Empire: British nationalism in the spatial representation of colonial India in contemporary romantic novels." NEGOTIATIONS: An International Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies 6.1: 100-108.

 

Moussaoui, Abdelghani and Abdellah Benlamine (2024). "Gender, Identity, and the Politics of Difference in Popular Romance." Arab World English Journal for Translation & Literary Studies 8.3:78-89.

 

Moussaoui, Abdelghani and Abdellah Benlamine (2024). "Race as a 'Sign of Difference' in Romance Discourse." Journal of Applied Language and Culture Studies 7.2:114-128. 

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

Simón Brumos, Ana (2024). Jane Austen’s Influence on Contemporary Romance Novels Honours Dissertation, Universidad de Zaragoza.

Zaini, Ahmad Zuhdi (2024). Personality structure of the main character Reid Buchanan in Susan Mallery's Sizzling. Undergraduate, Universitas Islam Negeri Maulana Malik Ibrahim.

Ants as Consumers of Romance Novels

Just came across a bizarre use of romance novels:

In Termitaria (2001), contemporary environmental artist Perdita Phillips collaborated with termites. For this artwork, Phillips buried 850 romance novels in soil for a year. The insects, commonly known as white ants that consume decaying materials buried underground, ate the books. In so doing, the insects were also likely intermingling with nematodes, moulds and other microscopic organisms in the soil. While many of the books were completely consumed, Phillips was able to 'excavate' some remaining works and display them as 'sculptures'. These half-eaten copies look as though they might have been buried centuries ago, the edges of the pages undulate with holes and gaps, and only the spines of the books retain their structure.

However, while their forms are indeed sculptural due to the layers of pages, arrangements of the holes and aging patina, Termitaria is less a work for humans than a multiscalar engagement. The novels are now part of a 'romance' with the soil, a more-than-human sharing of cells. (2011)

from 

Paterson, Eddie and Lara Stevens (2025). Performing Climates. Routledge, London.

You can see an image of one of the 'sculptures" at the artist's website: https://www.perditaphillips.com/portfolio/termitaria-657/

New Publications: Censorship, Pulps, Royals, Readers, Pirates, Empire, Holidays

 

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). 

Lucynka's introduction to romance pulps can be found here: https://lucynka.wordpress.com/an-introduction-to-the-romance-pulps/

---

And here are more new publications:

Allan, Jonathan A. (2024) "Forever Amber, Censorship, and Popular Romance Studies." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 13.

 

Betts, Sarah (2024). "Royal Biography Between the Lines: Georgette Heyer’s Regency Romances and the Life of Princess Charlotte of Wales (1796-1817)." Royal Studies Journal 11.2:239-284.

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

 

Fortune, Teagan Bailey (2024). Rape Beyond Fantasy: Exploring the Influence of BookTok's Erotica and Dark Romance Literature on Young Adult Perceptions of Consent and Boundaries. Master’s thesis, University of Northern Colorado.

 

Franck, Kaja (2024). "Reader, I Included It: Reading Lists and Romance." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 13. 

 

Haglund, Tuva (2024). "Enkelsängar, äkta fiendskap och oplanerade graviditeter: Bruket av troper bland Booktoks romanceläsare." Passage - Tidsskrift for Litteratur Og Kritik 39(91): 99–116.

 

McNamara, E. K. (2024). Young Adult Contemporary Realistic Romance: Rhetorical and Intersectional Narratologies. PhD thesis, Ohio State University. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1723733528520264 [Embargoed until December 2029]

Upcoming Exhibition on Romance

From Patch:

McDaniel College hosts “Romancing the Novel,” a major exhibition exploring romance novels and their cultural impact.

Featuring original cover art, including paintings by James Griffin, Frank Kalan, and Gregg Gulbronson, manuscripts, publicity materials, genre history, and fan artwork, “Romancing the Novel” is curated by Robert Lemieux, associate professor of communication and cinema at McDaniel. The exhibition is in association with McDaniel’s Nora Roberts American Romance Collection, Bowling Green State University’s Browne Popular Culture Library, renowned romance publisher, Harlequin, and Yale University Art Gallery (Roy Lichtenstein’s “Crying Girl” is on loan courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery.)

Free and open to the public, “Romancing the Novel” runs Monday, Jan. 6-Friday, March 7, in McDaniel’s Esther Prangley Rice Gallery, Peterson Hall, at 2 College Hill, Westminster, Maryland. A public reception takes place Thursday, Feb. 6, 5:30-7:30 p.m., with a gallery talk at 6 p.m., and a “Romancing the Novel” speaker series is planned in collaboration with Carroll County Public Library to further highlight the romance genre during the month of February. As part of this series, historian Nicole Jackson, a professor at Bowling Green State University and co-host of the “Black Romance Has A History” podcast, presents "Love in Liberty: Black Historical Romances and the Joy of Freedom,” on Thursday, Feb. 27, at 6 p.m., in Coley Rice Lounge, McDaniel Hall, at McDaniel College (2 College Hill, Westminster, Maryland) with details about additional events forthcoming.

[Updated to add: these details can also be found on McDaniel's website at https://www.mcdaniel.edu/news/major-exhibition-opening-2025-explores-romance-novels-and-their-cultural-impact ]

CfP: Love Studies Conference

The International Institute of Love Studies will be holding their second conference:

Dates: March of 14 –16, 2025

Format: The online conference will present pre-recorded talks, followed by the Zoom livestreaming of thematic panel sessions.

Topics of love have become popular across many academic fields, such as anthropology, sociology, psychology, biology, linguistics, literary studies, history, philosophy, religious studies, and other disciplines. The increasing number of studies on love worldwide has gotten to the point where academics and practitioners who are interested in this topic want to have a dedicated platform for the exchange of ideas and research findings and a forum for dialogue and discussion. Therefore, the Conference is going to be truly multidisciplinary and international in its scope.

More details here. And here's the call for proposals:

The International Institute of Love Studies invites researchers and practitioners from various disciplines to submit their proposals for presentations at the Conference on a wide range of love-related topics. The call for proposals is open. The deadline for submitting proposals is January 14, 2025.

More details about how to format and submit a proposal can be found here.

New Publications: French Canadian Romance, Strangled Women and Dark Romance, Migration and Marriage, A Trans Romance author from 1909, Black Romance, Trauma

Love Stories Now and Then: A History of Les romans d'amour, by Marie-Pier Luneau and Jean-Philippe Warren was published in October. However, since they kindly sent me a copy so I could add more details about it to the Romance Scholarship Database, I put off mentioning it here until I'd been able to read it. It's a translation of their L’amour comme un roman. Le roman sentimental au Québec d’hier à aujourd’hui (2022). The book (in both versions)

is the first comprehensive survey of Quebec and French-Canadian romance novels. It tackles questions that everybody asks. What is “love at first sight”? How do class, national identity, religion, and race influence choice of partners? What are the rules to flirting? What are the limits to expressing one’s desires? What are people’s expectations in marriage? What is the place of sexuality and how does it differ in French and English culture in North America? (from the publisher's website)

I've added quotations from the book to the entry in the Database, and those give more information about the content of the chapters: "Repressed Love (1830-1860)"; "Sublimated Love (1860-1920)"; "Domesticated Love (1920-1940)"; "Celebrated Love (1940-1965)"; "Serial Love (1965-2000)"; "Love Despite Everything (since 2000).

---

Mary, E. (2024). "Strangled Women: Popular Culture, ‘Conservative Modernity’ and Erotic Violence in Britain, c.1890–1950." Cultural and Social History, 1–19. 

This open access paper "analyses popular novels and films in early-mid twentieth-century Britain. It argues that strangled women were increasingly depicted in violent narratives of adventure and domination by a male lover". That includes E. M. Hull's The Sheik, which is one of a number of novels (mostly non-romance) that are discussed here, which is why I thought it might be of interest to readers of this blog. 

---

Here's a piece in The Conversation by Magali Bigey on "dark romance" and why we shouldn't worry about its readers but we should be encouraging discussion about these novels: https://theconversation.com/reading-dark-romance-the-ambiguities-of-a-fascinating-genre-243982  

---

And onto the new arrivals in the romance scholarship database:

Burge, Amy (2024). "Marriage migration, intimacy and genre in Helen Hoang’s The Bride Test (2019) and Brigitte Bautista’s You, Me, U.S. (2019)." Literature, Critique, and Empire Today.

Imperitura, Lorenzo (2024). The Forgotten Queer Utopia. Master’s thesis, The Arctic University of Norway. [Since I think the genderqueer novel discussed here (Beatrice the Sixteenth, published in 1909 and written by Irene Clyde, an author described "variously as non-binary, genderfluid, transgender, or a trans woman") sounds like a romance, I feel it's worth sharing this thesis with readers of this blog, even though Imperitura is primarily assessing the work as utopian fiction.]

Johnson, Jacqueline Elizabeth (2024). Labors of Love: Black Women, Cultural Production, and the Romance Genre. PhD thesis, University of Southern California. [Analyses work by Rebekah Weatherspoon and Katrina Jackson.]

Kindleysides, Alicia (2024). Broken Hearts: Writing The Representation of Trauma and Trauma Recovery in a Post-Trauma Romance Novel. PhD, Central Queensland University.

Call for Notes on Preserving Primary Sources

Over on Bluesky, the Journal of Popular Romance Studies just posted:

Last year Jonathan Allan asked "what happens if those primary texts we study are inaccessible to a future researcher? How should the field of popular romance studies begin the process of archiving the primary materials that are studied and talked about?" 

It can be easy to forget how much information can be lost, removed, or withdrawn from distribution. We'd be interested in follow-up notes from people grappling with this issue, on an institutional level (like libraries) or individual level!

And if you're looking for ways to preserve material that might disappear, the information is out there, and some ideas are floating around Bluesky too (for example, this piece from @thetransfemininereview.com).

I thought I'd share the call more widely, as this is such an important issue (and one I'd love to read more about).

"Notes" in JPRS are "Short, with an upper word limit of 1,500 words" (and you can read more about how to submit them here).

Abortion, Witches and New Publications (Gaming, Asexuality, Teen Sexuality)

The Fated Mates podcast posted (on Bluesky) that "Elda Minger was the first romance novelist to put condom use on the page. When we spoke to her about the choice she made, she told us about the realities of the world before Roe, when abortion was neither safe nor legal." They've put a clip of Minger's hard-hitting comments on YouTube and it's less than 4 minutes long. The novel is Elda Minger's Untamed Heart, which as far as I can tell was published by Harlequin in 1983. [If I've got that wrong, or if you know of a romance published earlier which includes condom use, please leave a comment!]

I missed this article when it was first posted, in 2023, but it's worth a read. Taking a look at witch romances set in small towns, Jenny Hamilton argues that

After reading a certain number of these books, it becomes impossible to avoid aligning the witch fear of non-witches with white fear of non-whites, particularly given the close associations between whiteness and small-town and suburban America.

And some new publications:

 

Guajardo, Ashley ML (2024). "The BookTok to Player Pipeline: TikTok and the Baldur’s Gate 3 Fandom." Abstract Proceedings of DiGRA 2024 Conference Playgrounds

 

Heynderickx, Jasmine (2024). “It really got to me [...] The movies where the main characters freaked out about being virgins at the age of sixteen”: Narrative Subversion as a Queer Strategy in Loveless. Master of Arts, Ghent University.

Medrano-González, Claudia (2024). "On the Convergence Between Femme Theory and Popular Feminine Fiction: Adolescent Girls’ (Re)territorialisation Of Fem(me)ininity Through Young Adult Erotic Romance." Journal of Femininities (published online ahead of print 2024). https://doi.org/10.1163/29501229-bja10005