Conference Cancellations, a new RWA Board in a time of crisis, and Some Secondary Reading

The RWA has a new board (details archived here).

All the upcoming romance conferences have now been postponed (links to details on the conference page).

Below is a list of items I would have added to the Romance Wiki's bibliography of romance scholarship except it's no longer online. If you can read Greek, Portuguese and/or Turkish, you'll be able to understand much more of some of these than I could:


Al Thobaiti, Fatmah, 2019. "Afterlife of the Romance Hero: Readers’ Reproduction of Romance." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 8.

Chen, Eva, 2019. ‘“The Hate that Changed”: Cycling Romance and the Aestheticization of Women Cyclists’, Victorian Periodicals Review 52.3, pp. 489-517.

Choyke, Kelly, 2019. "The Power of Popular Romance Culture: Community, Fandom, and Sexual Politics ." PhD Thesis. Ohio University, 2019. [Not available in full until January 2021 but the abstract's here.]

Day, Sara K., 2020. "Reimagining Forever...: The Marriage Plot in Recent Young Adult Literature." Beyond the Blockbusters: Themes and Trends in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction. Ed. Rebekah Fitzsimmons and Casey Alane Wilson. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 156-170.

Erekli, Arzu, 2006. Medeni ya da müslüman: popüler aşk romanlarında Feyza olmak, Yayınlanmamış Yüksek Lisans Tezi, Bilkent University, Ankara.

Fletcher, Lisa, Jodi McAlister, Kurt Temple and Kathleen Williams, 2019. “#loveyourshelfie: Mills & Boon books and how to find them.” Mémoires du livre / Studies in Book Culture 11.1. https://doi.org/10.7202/1066945ar

Fresno-Calleja, Paloma, 2020. "Chick-Lit Pasifika-Style or How to B(l)end the Formula: Lani Young’s Scarlet Series." Contemporary Women's Writing. https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpaa003

Jones, Amanda. “Madness, Monks and Mutiny: Neo-Victorianism in the Works of Victoria Holt”, Neo-Victorian Studies 12.1 (2019): 1-27.

Kendal, Evie, 2019. “The Use of Free Indirect Discourse in J. R. Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood Series.” Colloquy: Text, Theory, Critique 38: 20–43. https://doi.org/10.26180/5df1974e1cb20

Kapell, Matthew, and Suzanne Becker, 2005. "Patriarchy, the Christian Romance Novel, and the 'Ecosystem of Sex'." Popular Culture Review 16.1: 147-155. [I may have mentioned this before, but it's now available online]

Lawrence, E. E., 2020. "On the problem of oppressive tastes in the public library", Journal of Documentation, Online First. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-01-2020-0002 

Neves, Mariana Brasileiro, 2014. ROMANCES DE BOLSO: A novela romântica da Harlequin Books no mercado editorial brasileiro, Bacharelado, Universidade Católica de Pernambuco.

Nikbakht, H., 2019. Female Agency in the Harlequin Romance Formula: developments within the timeframe of second wave feminism. Bachelor's thesis. Utrecht University.

Taylor, Jessica, 2018. “Flexible Nations: Canadian Romance Writers, American Romance, and the Romance of Canada.” Reading between the Borderlines: Cultural Production and Consumption across the 49th Parallel, edited by Gillian Roberts. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press: 199–222.

Villar-Argáiz, Pilar 2018: “Ireland and the Popular Genre of Historical Romance: The Novels of Karen Robards”, ABEI: Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies 20.2: 97-109.

And for anyone who can read Greek, a masters thesis by Ρωξάνη Γραφανάκη called Γυναίκες και ροζ λογοτεχνία: η περίπτωση των εκδόσεων Άρλεκιν and available from here.

State of Diversity Report 2019 out now!

The Ripped Bodice's report on "the state of racial diversity in romance publishing" for 2019 has now been published.

Harlequin as a whole isn't doing particularly well, with low proportions and falls in all imprints except for Carina, which came second overall in the table with 20.7% of publications by authors who were "people of color". Kensington came top with 27.5%.

Bethany House has consistently had 0% now for four years in a row, and Tule Publishing only rose above 0% in 2018.

See the report for full details, including breakdowns by publisher.

Renee Dahlia adds some context:

this is a USA based study, and the results should be compared to the USA general population. According to census data, the USA population is 60.4% White, 18.3% Hispanic or Latino, 13.4% Black, 5.9% Asian, 2.7% Biracial, 1.3% Native American, and 0.2% Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander.
If romance publishing in America was equal, we’d see figures similar to this in the Ripped Bodice study. However, we don’t.

Indeed we don't. The figure for all romance authors of color in 2019 is only 8.3%.