New Publications: Teaching, Bathsheba, Lesbian Pirates, Stay-At-Home French Canadians, Beverly Jenkins and some Socialism

Abrahamsson, Elin (2025) "Teaching Feminist Cultural Studies Using Popular Romance" Journal of Popular Romance Studies 14.

Deosun, Ceri (2025). "The Bible in Inspirational Fiction: The Case of Bathsheba." The Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction and Poetry. Ed. Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer. Oxon, Abingdon: Routledge. 348-363. [Excerpts available from Google Books and Routledge's page about the volume can be found here.]

Garber, Linda (2025). “The Present in Our Past: Reading Lesbian Historical Fiction.” Women’s Historical Fiction Across the Globe. Ed. Catherine Barbour and Karunika Kardak. Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. 59-75. [Abstract here.]

Luneau, Marie-Pier and Jean-Philippe Warren (2025). “Exoticism Without Cosmopolitanism: The Quebec Romance Novel of the 1940s and 1950s.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 29.1: 154-166. [Abstract]

 

Moore, Jeania Ree V. (2025). “The Religious Work of Beverly Jenkins’s Black Historical Romance.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 14.

 

Nielson, Annika (2025) "The Summer of YA Love: Young Adult Romance, Tiktok, and the Classroom," The Utah English Journal 53, Article 14.

 

Timlin, Carrie (2024). "“The Workers Must Strive if the Butterflies Must Live”: Ethel Mannin’s Love’s Winnowing , the Socialist Romance Novel, and British Working-Class Women." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 43.2:197-217.

Can you help a Romance Scholar with their Research?

Romance Genre Browsing and Engagement in the Digital Age

Birmingham University PhD student Katie Deane has produced a questionnaire as part of a study which "looks at how romance novels circulate amongst their readership in the digital age, from recommendation cultures online to digital shelving, search, and discovery". She's looking for romance readers to fill in this questionnaire. Can you help?

 https://app.onlinesurveys.jisc.ac.uk/s/bham/romance-reader-survey

She promises it's "pretty short". And if you could also share it with any other romance readers you know, particularly ones aged 18-24 who've not responded in large numbers yet, that would be really appreciated.

Call for Papers: Special Issue on Decolonising Affective Relationships in Contemporary Romantic Narratives

Special Issue Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses
Editors:
Irene Pérez-Fernandez (University of Oviedo)
and Cristina Cruz-Gutiérrez (University of the Balearic Islands)

Popular romance has traditionally been decried as low-quality and escapist genre by conservative canon gatekeepers and feminist scholars alike, scornfully repudiated on account of its allegedly endless recreation of old-fashioned romantic fantasies and harmful gender stereotypes, and generally understood as stubbornly impervious to politics and, as a result, unworthy of academic attention. Despite the complex evolution experienced by the genre in the last few decades and its indisputable popularity, romance fiction continues to be perceived by many as unsuitable for classroom discussion and postcolonial critical thinking. Our aim in this special issue is to reflect on how romance in its multiple print and media forms–, can be a suitable vehicle for postcolonial/decolonial critique.

The deadline is the 30th of March. More details here.

IASPR Conference 2025

Registration has opened for the 2025 IASPR Conference. The conference is being held in Mexico City from 24-25 June. There's both an in-person and hybrid option and you don't have to be a member of IASPR to attend.

Early Bird registration rates apply until February 28th, 2025. Regular registration will last from 1 March until 6 June, 2025.

More details from IASPR here.

Links and New Publications: Politics, Pakistan, Empire, Race, Tourism

From The Guardian (via Jodi McAlister):

Over the last four years, many in the romance community, sometimes known as romancelandia, have thrown themselves into activism. Fated Mates, the podcast that compelled Lee to run for office, operates a phone-banking campaign called Fated States, which has logged more than 900,000 calls in support of Democratic candidates and causes since 2020. Separately, a group of authors who write under the names Alyssa Cole, Kit Rocha and Courtney Milan started an organization called Romancing the Vote, which has since 2020 raised more than $1m for voting rights groups.[...]

many popular romance writers today – such as Casey McQuiston, Alexis Hall and Helen Hoang, to name just a few – take a more progressive view of gender roles, portraying marriage and babies as options rather than necessities. Between 2022 and 2023, booksellers also sold more than 1m LGBTQ+ romance novels – a 40% spike over the previous year, according to Circana.  [...]

Novels by Sarah J Maas, who writes bestselling “romantasy” novels, are among the most-banned books in the US. Schools have also banned books by McQuiston and Hall, as well as those by popular romance writers like Ali Hazelwood, Emily Henry and Colleen Hoover.

From Javaria Farooqui:

 

🎙️ Ever wondered about reader-fans in Pakistan? Here is a link for my chat with Dr Priyam Sinha about the fascinating world of Regency romance book clubs in South Asia! https://newbooksnetwork.com/romance-fandom-in-21st-century-pakistan

 

[Edited to add: Javaria later clarified "romance reading communities, not book clubs."] 

 

And on to the new publications:

Gopalakrishnan, Manasi (2024). "Nostalgia for the Empire: British nationalism in the spatial representation of colonial India in contemporary romantic novels." NEGOTIATIONS: An International Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies 6.1: 100-108.

 

Moussaoui, Abdelghani and Abdellah Benlamine (2024). "Gender, Identity, and the Politics of Difference in Popular Romance." Arab World English Journal for Translation & Literary Studies 8.3:78-89.

 

Moussaoui, Abdelghani and Abdellah Benlamine (2024). "Race as a 'Sign of Difference' in Romance Discourse." Journal of Applied Language and Culture Studies 7.2:114-128. 

Pérez-Gil, María del Mar (2025). "Tourists not welcome: perceptions of tourism in popular romance novels." Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change. https://doi.org/10.1080/14766825.2024.2448189

Simón Brumos, Ana (2024). Jane Austen’s Influence on Contemporary Romance Novels Honours Dissertation, Universidad de Zaragoza.

Zaini, Ahmad Zuhdi (2024). Personality structure of the main character Reid Buchanan in Susan Mallery's Sizzling. Undergraduate, Universitas Islam Negeri Maulana Malik Ibrahim.