Special Issue: Sarah J. Maas
Millions of adolescent and adult readers alike have been drawn to Sarah J. Maas’s YA fantasy-romance series for their representations of empowered, embattled young women, their immersive fantasy worlds, and especially their romance narratives. From the Throne of Glass (2012-18) and A Court of Thorns and Roses (2015-21) books to Crescent City (2020-24), her current series-in-progress, Maas has become wildly popular for the complex romantic and sexual relationships she portrays. The Journal of Popular Romance Studies (JPRS) seeks articles for a special issue focused on Maas’s fiction. These articles may focus on any of Maas’s works and may take a variety of disciplinary approaches.
Topics may include but are not limited to:
- Intersections of romance and politics, including connections between sexual agency and political agency in Maas’s fiction
- How Maas’s work engages with feminism and/or postfeminism
- Portrayals of or discourses on assault, trauma, and/or PTSD in Maas’s fiction and romance as trauma narrative
- Maas’s adaptation of fairy tales in her romance narratives
- Representations of sex and sexuality in Maas’s work
- Portrayals of gender in Maas’s work
- Maas’s engagement with traditional romance-genre tropes
- Renderings of adolescence and adult-youth power dynamics in romantic pairings and other relationships in Maas’s fiction
- Maas’s portrayal of LGBTQ+ or queer romantic relationships
- Class structures/dynamics and how they shape romance in Maas’s work
More details about this can be found here.
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Eirini Arvanitaki's Emotionality: Heterosexual Love and Emotional Development in Popular Romance was published by Routledge in May 2024. It
focuses on the projections of romantic love and its progression in a selection of popular romance novels and identifies an innovation within the genre’s formula and structure. Taking into account Giddens’s notion of ‘confluent’ love, this book argues that two forms of love exist within these texts: romantic and confluent love. The analysis of these love variants suggests that a continuum emerges which signifies the complexity but also the formation and progressive nature of the protagonists’ love relationships. This continuum is divided into three stages: the pre-personal, semi-personal and personal. The first phase connotes the introduction of the protagonists and describes the sexual attraction they experience for each other. The second phase refers to the initiation of the sexual interaction of the heroine and hero without any emotional involvement. The third and final phase begins when emotions such as jealousy, shame/guilt, anger, and self-sacrifice are awakened and acknowledged.
Cho, H., Adkins, D., da Silva Santos, D., Long, A.K. (2024). "Platform,
Visuals, and Sound: Webtoon’s Immersive Romance Reading Engagement."
In: Sserwanga, I., et al. Wisdom,
Well-Being, Win-Win. iConference 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer
Science, vol 14597. Springer, Cham. [More details here.]
Deane, Katie (2024). Romance Self-Publishing and UK Legal Deposit. British Library Research Repository.
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And finally, although this is not a publication about romance, Sonia Gollance, advertising her new book It Could Lead to Dancing: Mixed-Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity, has written a post about some of what you could expect to find if there were more historical romances written about Jewish protagonists. https://jwa.org/blog/scandalous-dance-scenes-romance-plots-and-jewish-literary-modernity
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