Charlotte of Close Reading Romance has written a series of posts thinking through how
any HEA is, fundamentally, an act of inferring the future from information about the past. In queer romance, though, doing so means imagining optimism from not-always-hospitable spaces. It has also sometimes meant thinking around certain concluding structures integral to the genre – cohabitation, marriage, procreation – that haven’t always been accessible to queer protagonists. So as I often do, I started wondering about the particular prose demands of writing re-imagined pasts and imagined futures. What kind of work is done by the last sentences of queer love stories, the words that place a completed narrative into the past while opening up towards imagined futures?
Here's the Introduction to the series and links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.
Jayashree 's been promoting Creating Identity: The Popular Romance Heroine’s Journey to Selfhood and Self-Presentation so there's now a video in which she discusses the book at the Asian American/Asian Research Institute: https://aaari.info/23-09-22kamble/ and there's an episode of the podcast ShelfLove in which she discusses the book: https://shelflovepodcast.com/episodes/season-2/episode-145/heroines-creating-identity-in-romance
Over at JPRS, Jonathan A. Allan has been worrying about how to preserve romance texts for future scholars and I do think it's a big issue, especially for works which are ebook only. Eric Selinger says that if you have any answers to the questions/issues raised in Jonathan's note, please contact the journal to add a note of your own on this topic!
And here's a list of some new publications:
Ali, Kecia (2023). "The End of the World as We Know It: Climate Catastrophe in Nalini Singh's Paranormal Romance Fiction." The Journal of the Core Curriculum: An Annual Literary and Academic Anthology in the College of Arts and Sciences at Boston University 32:81-86. [The link is to a pdf of the whole volume, which means you'll have to scroll down/do a search to find the article. It's free, though!]
Bharathi, L. Divya and K. Muthuraman, K. (2023). "Nicholas Charles Sparks’s The Notebook: A Novel Of Love Or Romance?" Journal of Namibian Studies 35, special issue 1: 3749-3755.
Horgheim, Celina
(2023).
From Rape to Romance: Sexual Consent Negotiation in Romantic Retellings of the Myth of Persephone.
MA Degree Secondary Teacher Programme,
University of Oslo.
Petrović, Janja (2023). Breaking the stereotype – romance novel today. Masters thesis, University of Zagreb.