Censored and Scorned Books, Nora Roberts, Furry Protagonists and New Publications

I'm not keen on the use of the word "spat" here, as I think it trivialises what's going on, but the news itself is of interest to Romancelandia:

Romance novelist Nora Roberts donated $50,000 Sunday to help keep the doors open at a Michigan library that was defunded in early August in a spat over LGBTQ-themed books. (Bridge Michigan)

Note that, given how prolific and popular Nora Roberts is, "Patmos Library, serving a township of 10,000 people, has 144 Nora Roberts books in its collection, compared to about 90 total books with LGBTQ themes."

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Turning from censored books to ones with low status, Vassiliki Veros has written a very personal reflection, drawing on her family history, about the importance of

the uncatalogued, the unwritten metadata of popular romance fiction [...] romance fiction collections that remain undocumented, unregistered, whose transtextual elements have been obfuscated or not fully realised—those works that remain separate, independent, successful without institutional engagement and recognition. (The Aleph Review)

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In the latest episode of the Shelf Love Podcast

Dr. Nicola Welsh-Burke, a scholar of fairy tales and romance, is here to discuss hot wolf boys, brooding Byronic figures, pseudomarriage and pseudovirginity, hot villain discourse, and why young women need beastly men to unlock their sexuality.

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And now on to the new publications:

Allan, Jonathan A. (2022). "One Sexy Daddy: Desirable Dad 'Bods' and the Popular Romance Novel." Fashionable Masculinities: Queers, Pimp Daddies, and Lumbersexuals, Ed. Vicki Karaminas, Adam Geczy and Pamela Church Gibson. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. 83-??. [Excerpt]

Aravind, G. S. Dwivedi, Laxmi Dhar (2021). "The Representation of Female Characters in the Romances of Hawthorne: A Comparison with the Popular Romance Fiction of America in the Twentieth Century." International Journal of Mechanical Engineering 6.3:1703-1706. [I'm not sure how this was published in a journal on this topic!]

Hallett, Hilary A. (2022). Inventing the It Girl: How Elinor Glyn Created the Modern Romance and Conquered Early Hollywood. Liveright Publishing Corporation. [Excerpt here. The prologue of the book makes a somewhat less sweeping claim about Glyn's relationship with the romance genre than the title does. Which, given that her most famous novel does not have an HEA, is probably for the best.]

Larson, Christine (2022). "Streaming books: confluencers, Kindle Unlimited and the platform imaginary." Communication, Culture and Critique. [Abstract]

Priyatna, Aquarini and Sri Rijati Wardiani (2022). "Naturalization and Romanticization of Violence in Indonesian Teen Lit Jingga Series by Esti Kinasih," Journal of International Women's Studies 24.5.