Out Now: JPRS 1.2

Issue 1.2 of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies (JPRS) is now available. JPRS is a peer-reviewed academic journal which is freely accessible online. Eric Selinger, the editor of the journal, writes that

The Journal of Popular Romance Studies is dedicated to publishing scholarship on romantic love in global popular media, now and in the past, along with interviews, pedagogical discussions, and other material of use to both scholars and teachers. With this second issue, we make good on that mission in several new and exciting ways. We expand internationally, and into cyberspace, with essays on web-based Chinese romantic fiction, on single women in British middlebrow novels of the interwar years, and on debates at the popular Smart Bitches, Trashy Books website about “plus-size” heroines in popular romance fiction.

Alongside these, we have our second author interview, this time with groundbreaking science fiction author Joanna Russ, reflecting on her decades-old engagement with slash fiction and fandom. And this issue inaugurates what we hope will be an on-going series of “Pedagogy Reports,” this one focused on the challenges and rewards of “embedding” Georgette Heyer’s romance novel Sylvester in a University of Tasmania course on historical fiction, teaching it alongside canonical literary texts.

Here's a table of contents for issue 1.2:

• Editor's Note: Issue 1.2
• "Does This Book Make Me Look Fat?" by Sonya C. Brown
• “Men Conquer the World and Women Save Mankind: Rewriting Patriarchal Traditions through Web-based Matriarchal Romances" by Jin Feng
• “These are Just Romances: Love and the Single Woman in the Fiction of Rosamond Lehmann" by Emma Sterry
• Pedagogy Report: Embedding Popular Romance Studies in Undergraduate English Units: Teaching Georgette Heyer’s Sylvester by Lisa Fletcher, Rosemary Gaby, and Jennifer Kloester
• Interview: Joanna Russ, by Conseula Francis and Alison Piepmeier

JPRS welcomes "comments on all of these contributions."