I'm always very happy to see scholars moving into the field of romance studies, so I'm glad to be able to mention that
Johanna Hoorenman "is currently working on a cultural history of Native American themed
popular romance novels, tracing the roots of the subgenre to early
American women's captivity narratives and James Fenimore Cooper's
The Last of the Mohicans" (
http://muse.jhu.edu/article/662582).
Ria Cheyne's
written a post for Public Books about "Disability and the Romance Novel."
Kecia Ali's
been at Smart Bitches Trashy Books to talk about her
Human in Death: Morality and Mortality in JD Robb’s Novels.
Mary Lynne Nielsen
writes at Dear Author that "the idea of some level of financial security is interwoven in romance."
Christian Peukert and Imke Reimers have found that "romance novels are more likely to be self-published than other genres [...]. The difference becomes particularly evident after 2010, as self-publishing became a successful “mainstream” distribution channel" and "After 2008 (the year after the introduction of the Kindle), there is a small increase in advances for romance novels, compared to a slight drop in advances for other genres. More pronounced, there is a sharp increase in deal sizes for romance novels after 2010 (the introduction of the iPad), whereas the deal sizes for all other categories remain almost constant." They write that:
The fact that more deals were made with future stars among the romance genre throughout the time period of our study suggests that publishers have been able to predict the future success of romance novels better than the success of non-romance books. After 2010 – concurrent with the large rise in self-publishing among romance bestsellers – the ability to predict bestsellers among romance novels increased further, with an increase in the share of future bestsellers among romance deals from about 2% to 5%.
New to the Romance Wiki academic bibliography are:
- Markert, John, 2017.
- “God is Love: The Christian Romance Market.” Publishing Research Quarterly. Online First.
- Christian publishers have long produced romance novels, but the
production of these slim books of love have not been a significant part
of their overall output. This started to change in the 1980s in response
to the increased sensuality found in secular romance novels. The
Christian romance has undergone even more of a resurgence at the outset
of the new millennium for the same reason: secular romances have notched
up the sensuality of their romances today and Christian houses have
responded to their constituents who tire of the sexual slant of these
secular novels. Indeed, the strength of the Christian market has not
gone unnoticed by mainstream houses and numerous secular houses, notably
Harlequin, are today producing Christian-themed romances. The secular
Christian message is somewhat attenuated, however, which helps explain
the continued popularity of those romances produced by Christian
publishers. (Abstract)
- Khuankaew, Sasinee, 2017.
- "Femininity and Masculinity in Twenty-First Century Thai Romantic Fictions." The Asian Conference on Literature 2017: Official Conference
Proceedings. [pdf available free in full online]
This paper is a thematically chronological supplement to the work in
- Khuankaew, Sasinee, 2015.
- "Femininity and masculinity in three selected twentieth-century Thai romance fictions." Ph.D thesis, Cardiff University. Abstract Pdf
- Veros, Vassiliki, 2017.
- "Keepers: Marking the Value of the Books on my Shelves." Proceedings from the Document Academy 4.1, Article 4. [pdf available free in full online]
