Love Stories Now and Then: A History of Les romans d'amour, by Marie-Pier Luneau and Jean-Philippe Warren was published in October. However, since they kindly sent me a copy so I could add more details about it to the Romance Scholarship Database, I put off mentioning it here until I'd been able to read it. It's a translation of their L’amour comme un roman. Le roman sentimental au Québec d’hier à aujourd’hui (2022). The book (in both versions)
is the first comprehensive survey of Quebec and French-Canadian romance novels. It tackles questions that everybody asks. What is “love at first sight”? How do class, national identity, religion, and race influence choice of partners? What are the rules to flirting? What are the limits to expressing one’s desires? What are people’s expectations in marriage? What is the place of sexuality and how does it differ in French and English culture in North America? (from the publisher's website)
I've added quotations from the book to the entry in the Database, and those give more information about the content of the chapters: "Repressed Love (1830-1860)"; "Sublimated Love (1860-1920)"; "Domesticated Love (1920-1940)"; "Celebrated Love (1940-1965)"; "Serial Love (1965-2000)"; "Love Despite Everything (since 2000).
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Mary, E. (2024). "Strangled Women: Popular Culture, ‘Conservative Modernity’ and Erotic Violence in Britain, c.1890–1950." Cultural and Social History, 1–19.
This open access paper "analyses popular novels and films in early-mid twentieth-century Britain. It argues that strangled women were increasingly depicted in violent narratives of adventure and domination by a male lover". That includes E. M. Hull's The Sheik, which is one of a number of novels (mostly non-romance) that are discussed here, which is why I thought it might be of interest to readers of this blog.
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Here's a piece in The Conversation by Magali Bigey on "dark romance" and why we shouldn't worry about its readers but we should be encouraging discussion about these novels: https://theconversation.com/reading-dark-romance-the-ambiguities-of-a-fascinating-genre-243982
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And onto the new arrivals in the romance scholarship database:
Burge, Amy (2024). "Marriage migration, intimacy and genre in Helen Hoang’s The Bride Test (2019) and Brigitte Bautista’s You, Me, U.S. (2019)." Literature, Critique, and Empire Today.
Imperitura, Lorenzo (2024). The Forgotten Queer Utopia. Master’s thesis, The Arctic University of Norway. [Since I think the genderqueer novel discussed here (Beatrice the Sixteenth, published in 1909 and written by Irene Clyde, an author described "variously as non-binary, genderfluid, transgender, or a trans woman") sounds like a romance, I feel it's worth sharing this thesis with readers of this blog, even though Imperitura is primarily assessing the work as utopian fiction.]