I don't mention all the new additions to the Romance Wiki bibliography but since I haven't posted for a while, I thought I'd share a couple of the most recent (which were added by Christina Martinez):
Whyte, Tamara Lynn. 2013. "Shakespeare in Love: Appropriation of Shakespeare in Popular Romance Novels." U of Alabama. (Dissertation Abstracts International) 75, no. 6 (December 2014).
Popular romance authors frequently allude to William Shakespeare's works within their novels. In my dissertation, I survey and analyze the various ways current authors of historical romance novels appropriate Shakespeare and how those appropriations reinterpret his works. I argue in part that the inclusion of Shakespearean allusions has become part of the codes of romance novels, with various types of allusions serving different purposes. Performances of Shakespeare's plays tend to serve as a backdrop for courtship or as a foil to the plot of the novel. When romance authors rewrite Shakespeare's plays to suit the romance novel audience, they often refocus on the heroine and give her more agency. Romance authors also rewrite Shakespeare's tragedies as romance in ways that draw on reader familiarity with the plays. These revisions tend to reduce the plays to key moments or themes and focus on female characters in Shakespeare's works. When romance novel heroes or heroines quote Shakespeare, his words serve as a signal to the reader of elements of their character, such as their intelligence or emotional availability. When authors allude to Shakespeare's works in titles, names, or opening quotations, they openly signal their appropriation of the Bard in ways that distinguish their novels from others. In these more minor appropriations, Shakespearean allusions can function as marketing tools.The whole dissertation is available for download from the University of Alabama.
Zeiger, Melissa F. " 'Less Than Perfect': Negotiating Breast Cancer in Popular Romance Novels." Tulsa Studies In Women's Literature. Fall 2013/Spring 2014, Vol. 32, No. 2/Vol. 33, No. 1: 107-128.
Over the last twenty years, breast cancer novels have quietly become a large subgenre within popular romance, reflecting both the increase in public breast cancer awareness and the commercialization of that awareness. The emergence of this subgenre both reflects and participates in a shift of what is acceptable to say about breast cancer and expands the range of romance novel topics, including, among other innovations, cancer narratives for lesbian and African American characters. While still liable to many of the criticisms leveled by feminists in the 1980s and beyond, romances can tell new stories as well as the old ones, expanding an inadequate set of cultural and emotional vocabularies. The space for feeling that this genre opens has produced a new reading community and is at least one of the major ways that romance has been and continues to be rewritten. Contradictory movements have accompanied greater freedoms in discussing breast cancer, and this essay argues that feminists can find in romance novels a powerful site, supplementary to feminist theory and activism, for elaborating a productive and critical public breast cancer discourse.This one isn't available for free online but here's a link to the abstract.
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