A very long list of new (and some not so new) publications about romance

The open access journal TEXT dedicated a special issue to romance/romantic fiction, under the subtitle "Trope Actually – Popular Romance" but it wasn't just about romances in the 'central romantic relationship +HEA' sense: there were pieces of short fiction as well as an article on bonkbusters and another on historical fiction. You can find the whole issue here. 

Here, though, is a list of the articles in it which focus on romance:

Matthews, Amy, Justina Ashman, Millie Heffernan, Payton Hogan, Abby Guy, Harrison Stewart, Kathleen Stanley, Alex Cothren, and Elizabeth Duffield. 2025. “Editorial: Degrees of Love and Trope Actually.” TEXT 29 (Special 75): 1–7.

O’Mahony, Lauren, and Yolandi Botha. 2025. “Reading the Romance in Australia: The Preferences and Practices of Romance Readers from ARRA Survey Data.” TEXT 29 (Special 75): 1–22.

Matthews, Amy, Alex Cothron, and Rachel Hennessy. 2025. “Happily Ever after in the Age of Climate Crisis: The Argument for ‘Cli-Ro.’” TEXT 29 (Special 75): 1–18.

Mulvey, Alexandra, and Hsu-Ming Teo. 2025. “‘You’re a Total Dick Sometimes, but It’s a Tolerable Kind of Dickishness’: Hegemonic Masculinity and Sports Romances.” TEXT 29 (Special 75): 1–20. 

Rouse, Lucy. 2025. “A Real Bad Boy: How Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us Exploits Romance Tropes.” TEXT 29 (Special 75): 1–17.

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Moving on to other new (or at least new to the database) publications: 

Abdul Majid, Amrah (2025). “Faith, Love and Spiritual Growth in Norhafsah Hamid’s Will You Stay? and Will You Love Me?.” Akademika 95.2: 319-332.

 

Aprieska, Rizkana and Bayu Kristianto (2025). "Penerjemahan Portmanteau dari Bahasa Inggris ke dalam Bahasa Indonesia dalam Novel Seri The Ravenels 1–4." Linguistik Indonesia 43.2:263-280.

 

Cho, Hyerim, Denice Adkins, Alicia K. Long, and Diogenes Da Silva Santos. "Webtoon Romance Reading and New Ways to Look at Genre Reading." Library Trends 74, no. 1 (2025): 148-169. 

 

Clement, Ella. 2025. “What Women Actually Want: Professions, Prestige, and Desire in Bestselling Fiction.” SocArXiv. [This is a pre-print and I'm not sure of its final destination. It's not all about romance, but there is a significant section which is.]

García-Aguilar, Alberto (2023). "De la novela rosa a la comedia romántica: Mi marido es usted (1938), de Mercedes Ballesteros, y el guion de Volver a soñar (1942), de Claudio de la Torre y José López Rubio." Ogigia. Revista Electrónica De Estudios Hispánicos 33: 97–118. [I know this one isn't very new, but it describes (in Spanish) a plot with a secret baby, in a novel from 1938, and I thought that was worth noting. I've come across an early Mary Burchell with a secret baby too (another one where the protagonists were married at the point the baby was conceived). Anyway, thought that might be of interest if anyone, at some point, decides to look into the history of various types of romance plot.]

Horáčková, Martina (2025). Exploring Romantasy Tropes: Analysis of Ali Hazelwood’s Bride. Bachelor’s thesis, Silesian University in Opava.

Horpestad, Amalie Fogtmann (2025). Beyond Romance: Generic Innovation in Lucinda Riley’s The Seven Sisters Series. Masters thesis, The University of Bergen.

 

Karamat, Yashfa and Rukhma Nawaz and Zainab Firdos. (2025). "Negotiating Reality and Fantasy through Magical Realism in Suleikha Snyder’s Big Bad Wolf." Advance Social Science Archive Journal 4.1: 2860–2876. 

 

Keran, Molly (2025). "Generic Guarantees." Mid Theory Collective. [This was looking at Hoover's It Ends with Us (and contrasting it with Jennifer Crusie's Crazy for You).] 

Knowles, Thomas and Christopher Smith (2025). “Female Labour at Bletchley Park: reality and (romantic) fiction.” Intelligence and National Security. Online First. Open access.

Larson, Christine (2025). The labor of love: romance authors and platform solidarity. Journal of Communication. [Abstract available here.]

 

Martín Coloma, Ricardo, 2025. “On Activist Mothers and Gentrifying Lovers: From the Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement to the Model-Minority Myth in the Caribbean Romance Novel.” Journal of American Studies. [Abstract here, though as I mention in my entry for this in the RSDB, I think maybe only one of the two novels looked at has a happy ending for a romantic relationship.]

 

McAlister, Jodi and Kate Cuthbert (2025). "Romantasy: An overview and a history." Synergy 23.2. [Abstract] 

Niebling, Laura (2025). "Consent capital: From Romantasy’s “Alpha male archetypes” toward a new cultural theory in post-digital storytelling." New Media & Society. Online First. 

Pataki Šumiga, Jelena (2025). "The Sweet Bonds of Society: Food Symbolism in Bridgerton." [sic] - A Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation 15.2. 

Pelegrina Gutiérrez, Alicia. (2024). "Los modelos femeninos en Idilio bajo el terror (1938) y María Victoria (1940), de Josefina de la Torre." Ogigia. Revista Electrónica De Estudios Hispánicos 35: 139–161.

Pelegrina, Alicia, 2024. “Franquismo y guerra civil en dos novelas rosas: Idilio bajo el terror (1938) y María Victoria (1940), de Josefina de la Torre”. Philologica Canariensia 30: 425-441.

Pradhan, Anil, 2025. "Return to Nature, Love: The Queer Potential of Rural Spaces and Travels in Contemporary Indian Gay Romance Fiction." Non-Western Approaches in Environmental Humanities. Ed. Gabriela Jarzębowska-Lipińska,  Aleksandra Ross and Krzysztof Skonieczny. Göttingen: V&R unipress. 183-199. [It is open access and should be available as a pdf from https://www.vr-elibrary.de/doi/pdf/10.14220/9783737018791 (the first page is blank, so keep scrolling!) and/or https://doi.org/10.14220/9783737018791.183 I haven't given it a separate entry in the database because it seems to be based on a chapter of the author's PhD thesis, and also many of the works discussed do not have happy endings, so are "romantic fiction" and not "romance". There are synopses in the thesis but not in this chapter.] 

Sare, Madelynn (2025). Assessing The Accessibility Of Queer Romance Book Covers As Digital Thumbnails: An Analysis Of Color Contrast, Colorblind Safety, And Typography Legibility. Master of Arts in Writing: Book Publishing, Portland State University.

 

van Peer, Willie and Anna Chesnokova (2025). "Love in Literature: Why Read About It?". International Handbook of Love: Transcultural and Transdisciplinary Perspectives (2nd edition).  Ed. Claude-Hélène Mayer and Elisabeth Vanderheiden. Springer, Cham.

Viklund, Julia (2025). Romantiska städer och spöken: Genreanvändning i samtida romance med magiska inslag. Bachelor’s thesis, Umeå University.