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).

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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/

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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).

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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. 

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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  

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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

Call for Papers: Popular Romance and Sexuality/Erotica

From Jonathan Allan and Catherine Roach:

Call for Papers for a Special Issue of the journal Porn Studies focused on 

“Popular Romance and Sexuality/Erotica”

In “Mass Market Romance: Pornography for Women is Different,” American feminist scholar Ann Barr Snitow laid the groundwork for what has become something of a perpetual debate: is the romance genre pornography? For nearly fifty years, scholars, commentators, authors, publishers, and readers have debated this question, and truth be told, after fifty years, opinions are divided and there is no clear consensus. In particular, some feminist scholars favour the relationship while others dismiss it as pejorative. This Call for Papers is interested not in answering the “is it or isn’t it” question but in thinking creatively about affinities between “porn studies” and “popular romance studies.” What fruitful relationship exists between these two fields of inquiry?

To this end, the Call for Paper seeks new approaches to an old and often antagonistic question. What if instead of comparing romance novels to pornography, the relationship was about the similar ways both genres are scrutinized, dismissed, and controlled? For instance, it is very common for concerns to exist about the potential harms of pornography to the viewer and society. Strikingly, the 1970 Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography includes lengthy discussions of pulp fictions, such as love stories with sexual content alongside the visual medium. The history of American censorship debates can be written alongside the history of popular romance novels. In 1973, Miller v. California appears only months after the first blockbuster romance The Flame and the Flower (1972). During the 1960s, newsstands became sites of potential crime. In 2024, “obscenity” debates have returned in the context of book banning, library wars, and battles over school sex ed curricula. Age verification for pornography is becoming normalized in various jurisdictions. How might these moves affect popular fiction, especially erotic fiction and popular romance? It is not difficult to imagine age verification as a requirement for access to sexually explicit fiction or queer romance—or indeed to texts that challenge heteronormativity, patriarchy, or white Christian nationalism.

 More details can be found here. The closing date is 1 December 2024.

Beverly Jenkins in Conversation with Dr. Carole V. Bell

The Social Transformation Research Collaborative at DePaul University is holding a symposium on Writing, Race, and Memory on 22 October 2024. One of the keynotes is 

11:20am - Keynote | On Romance: A conversation with author Beverly Jenkins (Indigo, Forbidden) and Dr. Carole V. Bell

According to the Instagram post (from which I've taken the graphic), the conversation will be about Black romance. The full programme is here but if you'd just like to sign up for the zoom conversation between Beverly Jenkins and Carole Bell, you can do that here.

JPRS Editors Needed

Eric Selinger has announced that "This spring, after 15 years, I will be stepping down as Executive Editor of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies." In this role, and others, he's been central to establishing popular romance studies as a field, so I'd like to express my appreciation for that.

However, this means that JPRS is now "seeking an experienced replacement who is passionate about romance scholarship and can help lead the journal as we grow!"

The full job description for the Executive Editor role can be found here. Key points to note are:

• This is a volunteer position.
• This is a senior role that requires previous experience of editorial work at an academic journal (or equivalent).
• We estimate this role would require a commitment of 2-3 hours per week.
• The closing date is 30 November 2024.

They're "also looking to add two Associate Editors to the team to help with regular operations. This is a good position for someone who is interested in getting some experience in the behind-the-scenes operation of an academic journal."

The full job description for Associate Editors can be found here. Key points to note are:

• This is a volunteer position.
• This role would be well-suited to those without specific editorial experience but who would like to gain an insight into academic editorial roles.
• We estimate this role would require a commitment of 1-2 hours per week.
• The closing date is 30 November 2024.

New Publications: LGBTQ+ romance, dark romance, rape, publishing, folklore and coral

Items whose titles are hyperlinked are accessible freely.

Greening, Alo (2024). History, Huh: A Post-Modern Study of the Consumption of Queer Romance. Master of Arts in Women and Gender Studies, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Hernandez, Janeth (2024). Exploring Consent: An Analysis of Consent in Dark Romance and Contemporary Romance Books. Master of Arts in Writing: Book Publishing, Portland State University. 

 

Keran, Molly (2024). The Genre of Rape: Women’s Popular Literature and Contemporary Representations of Sexual Violence. PhD thesis, University of Michigan. 

Kousholt, Moa (2024). A Time, A Place, and A Person: A comparative literary analysis of Red, White & Royal Blue and One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston and how queer representation can be problematized in a classroom context. Teacher Education Programme for Upper Secondary School, Linnaeus University. 

 

Miclea, Adelina-Cerasela (2024). The Scientification of Love: A Cognitive Literary Approach to Romance Novels. PhD, Universitatea de Vest din Timișoara. [Only an index and summary is currently available online.] 

Poirel, Carole (2024). "The long tail business model in publishing: The case of Hachette's romance division in France " Business Model Innovation in Creative and Cultural Industries, Ed. Pierre Roy, Estelle Pellegrin-Boucher. Routledge. 69-88. [Abstract available from https://doi.org/10.4324/9781032714462-5 ]

Šmídová, Monika Markéta (2024). " 'Oh, my friend, those weren’t angels': Trauma, Recovery and Folklore in The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal and Spectred Isle by KJ Charles". Journal of Popular Romance Studies 13.

 

Valovirta, Elina (2024) "Love and Loss: Corals and Cultural Sustainability in Caribbean Popular Romance Novels." Arrivals and Departures: The Human Relationship with Changing Biodiversity. Ed. Otto Latva, Heta Lähdesmäki, Kirsi Sonck-Rautio and Harri Uusitalo. De Grutyer. 109-126. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111215273-006

 

CFPs: IASPR Conference 2025 and Conference of the Popular Culture Association 2025

From the IASPR website, two calls for papers:

Romantic Regions: Call for Papers, IASPR Conference 2025

We are now inviting submissions for the 2025 International Association for the Study of Popular Romance Conference. It will take place from June 24-26 2025 at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City, with a Zoom option for people unable to attend in person. We are accepting submissions for papers, panels, or workshops delivered in English or Spanish. 

Our theme for the 2025 IASPR conference is Romantic Regions, thinking through the evolving relationships between romance, place, and space. [...]

Submit abstracts of 250 words, along with a brief biography of 100 words, by November 30, 2024

[More details, including a note for those who "do not have a permanent academic job at a university (eg. PhD students, contingently employed staff, independent scholars), you may be eligible for the Kathleen Seidel Travel Grant" at https://www.iaspr.org/conferences/romantic-regions-call-for-papers-iaspr-conference-2025/ ]

CFP: Romance Area, Conference of the Popular Culture Association (2025)

Romance Area

Conference of the Popular Culture Association (PCA/ACA)

April 16-19, 2025 – New Orleans, Louisiana

Disrobing the Trope

It does not take an expert to see how important tropes currently are in the marketing of romantic media. Whether we’re talking about friends who find themselves in an only-one-bed situation (and thus become lovers), or enemies forced to fake date (and thus become lovers), or a grump who gets a second chance (to become lovers) with their sunshine-y childhood sweetheart, tropes have become ubiquitous to the way romance narratives are discussed.

In the Romance area of PCA, however, we are experts—and thus, for this year’s conference, we’d like to provoke people to think through and theorize the trope in popular romantic media. [...]

Submit 250-word abstracts to pcaaca.org by November 30, 2024

[More details at https://www.iaspr.org/frontpage/cfp-romance-area-conference-of-the-popular-culture-association-2025/ ]