I'm going to start with the two new articles in the Journal of Popular Romance Studies for the entirely biased reason that one of them is by me.
- Pierini, Francesca (2022). "Critical Approaches to the Modern and Contemporary Anglophone Romance Novel (From A Room with a View to Fifty Shades of Grey)." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 11. [This is an article describing a seminar taught by Pierini.]
- Vivanco, Laura (2022). "Historical Accuracy, Racism, Courtney Milan, and The Duke Who Didn’t Conform to Genre Norms." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 11.
There have been a couple of podcasts that I thought would be of interest to readers of this blog:
In the first, Lucy Hargrave gives an overview of her PhD research:
Queer Romance: A History w/ @phdlifewithlucy is live! Lucy has dated queer romance w/ an HEA back to 1906, but it's been a rollercoaster with distinct eras since then. Learn more: listen or read!https://t.co/7wb0iRjSQNhttps://t.co/e2E1O0TdRO
— Shelf Love: Romantic Love Stories in Pop Culture (@ShelfLovePod) June 7, 2022
transcript: https://t.co/aOka5buKwr pic.twitter.com/WDcnlv3vlq
In other news, Angela Toscano has joined forces with Molly Keran (a PhD student) and Candy Tan (who I think is the same Candy who used to be half of Smart Bitches Trashy Books) and in this first episode they're discussing bodice rippers:
Holy alabaster orbs, Batman! We've released our first episode, and you can listen to it here: https://t.co/N9kPQZyF1t. Give it a listen to learn (perhaps more than you ever wanted to know) about what bodice rippers are, where they came from, and why they matter.
— Let the Bodice Hit the Floor (@bodicehitsfloor) June 14, 2022
The University of Reading has been cataloguing their Mills & Boon romance collection and as part of that process they've been digitising many of covers. You can find them here, mostly sorted by decade: https://vrr.reading.ac.uk/browse/Special_Collections_Library/Mills_and_Boon
New Frontiers in Popular Romance: Essays on the Genre in the 21st Century, edited by Susan Fanetti, appears to be available now as an ebook but is still forthcoming in the print version. It includes:
- "Healing Toxic Masculinity in Sweatpants Season by Danielle Allen" - Jonathan A. Allan
- "From Darcy to Dickheads: Why Do Women Love the Bad Boy?" - Ashleigh Taylor Sullivan
- "Tingles and Shivers: First Kisses and Intimate Civility in Eliza Redgold’s Historical Harlequin Romances Pre–and Post-#MeToo" - Debra Dudek, Elizabeth Reid Boyd, Madalena Grobbelaar, and Rose Williams
- "I Thought You’d Never Ask: Consent in Contemporary Romance" - Courtney Watson
- "“Say, could that lass be I?” Outlander, Transmedial Time-Travel, and Women’s Historical Fantasy" - Ashley Elizabeth Christensen
- "“Place the glass before you, and draw in chalk your own picture”: The Recasting of Jane Eyre" - Lucy Sheerman
- "“The Realness” in Jasmine Guillory’s Sista Lit Rom Com Novels" - Camille S. Alexander
- "Eating Disorders and Romance" - Ellen Carter
- "The “Grandly and Inhospitably Strange” World of Autistic Heroines in Romance Fiction" - Wendy Wagner
- "Women Policing Whiteness: Deviance and Surveillance in Contemporary Police Procedural Romance" - Nattie Golubov
- "“I’m a mehfil, I’m a gathering to which everyone is invited”: Reading “Outcast” Romances in Arundhati Roy’s Fiction" - Lucky Issar
- "The System That Loves Me: The State of Human Existence in Web-Based Romantic Fiction from Post-Socialist China" - Jin Feng
- "Original Slash, Romance, and C.S. Pacat’s Captive Prince" - Maria Albert
You can find an excerpt here and the publisher's page about the book is here.
Two other new items are:
- Fenske, Emma K. (2022). Romancing the New Evangelical Woman. Master of Arts, Baylor University.
- Frederick, Rhonda D. (2022). Evidence of Things Not Seen: Fantastical Blackness in Genre Fictions. Rutgers University Press. [One of the chapters reads Colin Channer's Waiting in Vain as a romance.]
As always, I've added the details about all these new items to the Romance Scholarship Database. I thought I should just mention that I do also sometimes find and add items which are new to me but which are older, and I don't usually post about those here at Teach Me Tonight.
