New Publications: Barbara Cartland, Olivia Waite, Talia Hibbert, E. Marlitt, Romance Readers, and much, much more

An item I missed last year, and which is in a book that is freely available for download is:

Hall, Cailey (2025). “Redefining the Archive in Queer Historical Romance Novels.” Unsettling Sexuality: Queer Horizons in the Long Eighteenth Century. Ed. Jeremy Chow and Shelby Johnson. Newark: University of Delaware Press. 95-108.

It focuses on Olivia Waite's The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics (2019).

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Recently published is a biography of Barbara Cartland, by Matthew Sweet. The entry in the RSDB includes links, including to earlier biographies and autobiographies. Sweet's The Great Dictator: A Life of Barbara Cartland has been reviewed by the BBC (and the article includes a quote from our own Dr Amy Burge). 

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And now on to the other new works: 

Brown, Cheyenne (2026). I Read It for the Plot: Romance and Identity on BookTok. Master of Arts thesis, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte. [Excerpt]

Creel, Stacy and Walker, Crystal (2026). "SLIS Notes: Psst...Do You Have this Dirty Book?," Mississippi Libraries: Vol. 88: No. 1, Article 3.

Faraon, Capucine (2026). Les mécanismes de recommandation littéraire sur TikTok et Instagram : exposition des contenus de Dark Romance et visibilité des trigger warnings auprès des jeunes adultes de 20 à 25 ans. Masters Thesis, UCLouvain.

 

Florimond-Clerc, Adeline and Louis Gabrysiak (2026). "Lire la New Romance : pratiques, réceptions et illégitimation." Revue française des sciences de l’information et de la communication 31.

 

Florimond-Clerc, Adeline and Louis Gabrysiak, "New romance." Publictionnaire. Dictionnaire encyclopédique et critique des publics. Mis en ligne le 24 mars 2026.

 

Hunter, Kathryn M. (2026). “Desert Dreams: Valentino, Lawrence, and Sheik Fantasy in 1920s Australia.” Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 112: 56-76. [Link, abstract and some quotes.] 

 

Ingram, Toni (2026). "Romantasy, Virginity and Other Fictions." Sexuality & Culture. Online First. 

 

Jones, Bethan (2026). Sight Loss and the Tethered Self in 21st Century Novels. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. [The chapter on romance is titled "Blind Love and the Will to Run in Romance Fiction by Eric Lindstrom and Lucy May Lennox". More details here.]

 

Kamblé, Jayashree (2026). "Race, religion, and the politics of desire in Talia Hibbert’s A Girl Like Her and Take a Hint, Dani Brown." Literature, Critique, and Empire Today. Online First. [Abstract] 

 

Mantere, Neea (2026). Heartthrobs and Inside Jokes: Narrative Empathy in Emily Henry’s Funny Story and People We Meet on Vacation. Master’s thesis, University of Helsinki.

 

Mundembe, Enet and Fiona F. Moolla (2026). "Marriage and Procreation: Continuities and Transformations in the Ankara Novellas A Tailor-Made Romance and Love Me Unconditionally Against the Backdrop of Flora Nwapa’s Efuru." Journal of Popular Romance Studies.

O’Connell, Mark Joseph (2026). “No More Martyrs: Heated Rivalry, Queer Romance and the End of Tragic Legitimacy.” Journal of Popular Television 14.2: 161–79. [This is mostly about the TV version of Heated Rivalry, but it does mention the novel and romance conventions. Abstract]. 

Ottaviani, Lauren (2026). "(Re)Defining Irish Womanhood: Serials and Short Stories in The Lady of the House (1890-1914)." The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Literature and Periodical Culture. Ed. Elke D'hoker and Phyllis Boumans. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 143-158. [Excerpt] 

Partzsch, Henriette, Päivi Lappalainen, Katja Mihurko, Viola Parente-Čapková, Marie Nedregotten Sørbø, and Suzan van Dijk (2026). "One Woman Writer Everywhere: The Ubiquitous E. Marlitt". Redrawing Europe’s Literary Map. Ed. Henriette Partzsch and Viola Parente-Čapková. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.

Partzsch, Henriette (2026). "Moving Texts, Moving Communities: Emotions, E. Marlitt’s Fiction and the Circulation of Controversial Texts in Periodicals across Linguistic and Cultural Borders in Late Nineteenth-Century Europe." Modern Languages Open.

 

Pataki Šumiga, Jelena (2026). "“If not for her, nobody here would be reading this book”: Exploring Literary vs. Popular Fiction and Translation in Book of Love (2022)." [sic] - A Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation 16.2. 

Pierini, Francesca (2026). Romancing Literature: When Literary Fiction Meets Genre. Abingdon: Routledge. [Link and excerpts here.]