2025
Due in April - Still Reading Romance: Identity and Engagement with Popular Romance Fiction, edited by Josefine Smith and Kathleen W. Taylor Kollman:
This work centers around a data set collected with a revised version of Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance survey that will be shared with all the authors of this anthology. By having access to this pool, authors will have the opportunity to explore different elements of reader experience and cultural norms in romance fiction, and potentially reflect on changes since Janice Radway’s seminal work. The norms and negotiations readers experience while consuming romance is especially interesting as romancelandia becomes a more mainstream part of popular culture with the popularity of Bridgerton and romance series like Ice Planet Barbarians exploding on BookTok. No other book in romance or popular culture studies identifies a data set as the connecting element, and to do so creates an exciting opportunity to create a more inclusive study of popular romance, offer truly interdisciplinary research on the question of how readers read romance, and generate diverse areas of future scholarship.
2024
Due in November from Bloomsbury is Javaria Farooqui's which
offers the first major study of Anglophone romance fandom in South Asia, providing a new reader-centric model that engages with romance readers as genre experts.
Javaria Farooqui inspects the popular Anglophone romance reading community in Pakistan and develops a model for analysing genre romance novels through the lens of the readers’ perspective and preferences. Using focus-group interviews and close textual analysis, Romance Fandom in 21st-century Pakistan explores where and how readers access books of their choice, and explains why the detailed descriptions of dresses, food and spaces in historical romance novels of the Regency era exemplify good taste for this distinctive readership. Sitting at the intersection of literary studies, genre studies, and fan studies, this book considers the reception of Anglophone romance fiction by reading communities of colour.
Love Stories Now and Then: A History of Les romans d'amour, by the first comprehensive survey of Quebec and French-Canadian romance novels." The first chapter focuses on novels written between 1830-1860, and the book continues to work its way through various time periods until it reaches 1965-2000, which is the focus of the final chapter. The authors argue that romance novels
lend themselves to a historical analysis of how societies attribute a precise place to the impulses of love and codify its manifestations.This book is based on the premise that love is not as spontaneous and free as one would have us believe. While it is true that love exists in all human communities, not all communities love in the same way. The words used to speak of love, which simultaneously reveal and censor, inform and sublimate, channel and repress the stirrings of the heart, are chosen according to everchanging social and cultural norms.
Out in June, from Routledge was This book explores how postmillennial Anglophone women writers use romantic narrativisations of history to explore, revise, repurpose and challenge the past in their novels, exposing the extent to which past societies were damaging to women by instead imagining alternative histories. The novelists discussed employ the generic conventions of romance to narrate their understanding of historical and contemporary injustice and to reflect upon women’s achievements and the price they paid for autonomy and a life of public purpose. The volume seeks, firstly, to discuss the work of revision or reparation being performed by romantic historical fiction and, secondly, to analyse how the past is being repurposed for use in the present. It contends that the discourses and genre of romance work to provide a reparative reading of the past, but there are limitations and entrenched problems in such readings.
Also out in June 2024, from Princeton University Press, was Love in the Time of Self-Publishing: How Romance Writers Changed the Rules of Writing and Success by Christine M. Larson:
romance authors offer a powerful example—and a cautionary tale—about self-organization and mutual aid in the digital economy. In Love in the Time of Self-Publishing, Christine Larson traces the forty-year history of Romancelandia, a sprawling network of romance authors, readers, editors, and others, who formed a unique community based on openness and collective support. Empowered by solidarity, American romance writers—once disparaged literary outcasts—became digital publishing’s most innovative and successful authors. Meanwhile, a new surge of social media activism called attention to Romancelandia’s historic exclusion of romance authors of color and LGBTQ+ writers, forcing a long-overdue cultural reckoning.
Drawing on the largest-known survey of any literary genre as well as interviews and archival research, Larson shows how romance writers became the only authors in America to make money from the rise of ebooks—increasing their median income by 73 percent while other authors’ plunged by 40 percent
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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.
The largely forgotten romantic novelist Ethel M. Dell (1881-1939) published alongside Rudyard Kipling and other literary giants but was vilified by George Orwell and P.G. Wodehouse among many. Ethel was a recluse, and actively avoided marketing herself as a personality in any way, but her formula was successful. She reached a very large audience publishing 98 titles and earning, at the height of her career, about £4M annually in today’s values. Her plots included a popular and heady mix of heterosexual, implicit same-sex relationships, sexual deviances, gratuitous violence, death and exoticised notions of Empire and masculinity. The veneer of Ethel’s plots was used to communicate her philosophies, her views on life and on her family.
Although being publishing alongside literary giants she did not receive establishment acceptance because of her style and no doubt envy of her substantial earnings. With an escapist and non-literary appeal to a lower middle class reader universe Ethel used a very successful multi-media marketing strategy with magazine serialisation, hard copy books, film, theatre and radio to reach this audience in the UK, the United States, Europe and the British colonies.
A forerunner to Mills and Boon’s success Ethel was very influential in setting the scene for mass market romantic fiction. Barbara Cartland stated that Ethel was her greatest influence.
2023
The romance publishing landscape in the Philippines is vast and complex, characterised by entangled industrial players, diverse kinds of texts, and siloed audiences. This Element maps the large, multilayered, and highly productive sector of the Filipino publishing industry. It explores the distinct genre histories of romance fiction in this territory and the social, political and technological contexts that have shaped its development. It also examines the close connections between romance publishing and other media sectors alongside unique reception practices. It takes as a central case study the Filipino romance self-publishing collective #RomanceClass, analysing how they navigate this complex local landscape as well as the broader international marketplace. The majority of scholarship on romance fiction exclusively focuses on the Anglo-American industry. By focusing here on the Philippines, the authors hope to disrupt this phenomenon, and to contribute to a more decentred, rhizomatic approach to understanding this genre world.
More details can be found at the Cambridge University Press website.
2022
Susan Fanetti is the editor of New Frontiers in Popular Romance: Essays on the Genre in the 21st Century (McFarland)
This essay collection examines the position of the romance genre in the twenty-first century, and the ways in which romance responds to and influences the culture and community in which it exists. Essays are divided into six sections, which cover the genre’s relationship with masculinity, the importance of consent, historical romance, representation, social status and web-based romance fiction.
An excerpt can be found here.
Eirini Arvanitaki's Masculinities in Post-Millennial Popular Romance
(New York:
Routledge) was published in mid May:This book focuses on the projection of the hero’s masculinity in a selection of post-millennial popular romance narratives and attempts to discover if, and to what extent, this projection reinforces or challenges patriarchal ideas about gender. In the majority of these narratives the hero is often presented as a hegemonic alpha male. However, hegemonic masculinity is not a fixed concept. Rather, it is subject to continuous change which allows for the emergence of various dominant masculinities. Under a poststructuralist lens and through a close textual analysis approach and a gender reading of romance narratives, the book suggests that to a certain extent the romance hero could be described as a platform onto which different forms of dominant masculinity are displayed and highlights that these masculinities do not necessarily clash, depend on, or function as a prerequisite for each other.
González-Cruz, María-Isabel. 2022.
Hispanicisms in Romance Fiction. An Annotated Glossary.
Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press.
explores the literary and cultural genealogy of colorism, white passing, and white presenting in the romance genre. The scope of the study ranges from Heliodorus’ Aithiopika to the short novels of Aphra Behn, to the modern romance novel Forbidden by Beverly Jenkins. This analysis engages with the troublesome racecraft of “passing” and the instability of racial identity and its formation from the premodern to the present. The study also looks at the significance of white settler colonialism to early modern romance narratives. A bridge between studies of early modern romance and scholarship on twenty-first-century romance novels, this book is well-suited for those interested in the romance genre.
Out in February 2022, Black Love Matters: Real Talk on Romance, Being Seen, and Happy Ever Afters, thisintersectional essay anthology [...] celebrates and examines romance and romantic media through the lens of Black readers, writers, and cultural commentators, edited by Book Riot columnist and librarian Jessica Pryde.[...] In this collection, revered authors and sparkling newcomers, librarians and academicians, and avid readers and reviewers consider the mirrors and windows into Black love as it is depicted in the novels, television shows, and films that have shaped their own stories. Whether personal reflection or cultural commentary, these essays delve into Black love now and in the past, including topics from the history of Black romance to social justice and the Black community to the meaning of desire and desirability. [...]
Jessica Pryde is joined by Carole V. Bell, Sarah Hannah Gomez, Jasmine Guillory, Da'Shaun Harrison, Margo Hendricks, Adriana Herrera, Piper Huguley, Kosoko Jackson, Nicole M. Jackson, Beverly Jenkins, Christina C. Jones, Julie Moody-Freeman, and Allie Parker. (from description at Amazon)
Discursos
e Identidades en la Ficción Romántica: Visiones Anglófonas de Madeira y Canarias / Discourses and Identities in
Romance Fiction: Anglophone Visions from Madeira and the Canaries is a bilingual essay collection (the same essays appear first in Spanish and then in English) edited by María
Isabel González-Cruz. There is also a section related to teaching
romance fiction. A list of the contents, along with topic tags, can be
found in the Romance Scholarship Database. Excerpts are available from Vernon Press and Google Books.2021
Carolina Fernández Rodríguez, American Quaker Romances:
Building the Myth of the White Christian Nation, with the University of Valencia's Col. Biblioteca Javier Coy d'Estudis Nord-Americans. Here's part of the abstract:
Though relatively liberal in terms of gender, Quaker romances are considerably less progressive when it comes to race relations. Thus, they reflect America’s conflicted relationship with its history of race and gender abuse, and the country’s tendency to both resist and advocate social change. Ultimately, Quaker romances reinforce the myth of America as a White and Christian nation, here embodied by the Quaker heroine, the all-powerful savior who rescues Native Americans, African Americans and Jews while conquering the hero’s heart.
The Routledge Companion to Romantic Love was published on 30 November 2021 and "is an multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary reference work essential
for students and researchers interested in the field of love, romance
and popular romance fiction. This [is a] first-of-its-kind volume
illustrating the broad and interdisciplinary nature of Love Studies."
Of the 32 chapters, around half are about romance fiction. The table of
contents is available here.
Jodi McAlister's New Adult Fiction was published in the Cambridge Elements series in October 2021. She argues that this new genre "became a sub-genre of another major popular genre: romance."
Out from Peter Lang in April 2021, 
Romantic Escapes: Post-Millennial Trends in Contemporary Popular Romance Fiction, edited by Irene Pérez Fernández and Carmen Pérez Ríu:
Romance continues to stand as the most profitable literary genre and the second most read book category. The developments reshaping the conventions and marketing practices of popular fiction, both inside and beyond the books themselves, have affected the romance genre in specific ways that demand critical attention. This book brings together a collection of twelve chapters on postmillennial developments in contemporary popular romance fiction produced in different countries in order to prove how the genre, which has always been sensitive to customer demands and market trends, has continued to evolve accordingly. The chapters focus on how traditional formulae are being reshaped and adapted to meet readers’ expectations and market demands within this thriving transnational industry.
More details here.
Published on 25 February 2021 by UCL Press, Georgette Heyer, History, and Historical Fiction is edited by Samantha J. Rayner and Kim Wilkins. It's free to download:
Georgette Heyer, History, and Historical Fiction brings together an eclectic range of chapters from scholars all over the world to explore the contexts of Heyer’s career. Divided into four parts – gender; genre; sources; and circulation and reception – the volume draws on scholarship on Heyer and her contemporaries to show how her work sits in a chain of influence, and why it remains pertinent to current conversations on books and publishing in the twenty-first century. Heyer’s impact on science fiction is accounted for, as are the milieu she was writing in, the many subsequent works that owe Heyer’s writing a debt, and new methods for analysing these enduring books.
From the gothic to data science, there is something for everyone in this volume; a celebration of Heyer’s ‘nonesuch’ status amongst historical novelists, proving that she and her contemporary women writers deserve to be read (and studied) as more than just guilty pleasures.
2020
uma obra enciclopédica. Aborda muitos e variados aspectos do universo dos romances sentimentais no Brasil e se configura como uma leitura essencial para os interessados neste vasto campo. Trata-se de um livro essencial para os que estudam o amor e suas diversas configurações históricas.
Jodi McAlister's PhD thesis has now been published as a book by Palgrave. The Consummate Virgin: Female Virginity Loss and Love in Anglophone Popular Literatures
explores dominant cultural narratives around what makes a “good” female virginity loss experience by examining two key forms of popular literature: autobiographical virginity loss stories and popular romance fiction. In particular, this book focuses on how female sexual desire and romantic love have become entangled in the contemporary cultural imagination, leading to the emergence of a dominant paradigm which dictates that for women, sexual desire and love are and should be intrinsically linked together: something which has greatly affected cultural scripts for virginity loss. This book examines the ways in which this paradigm has been negotiated, upheld, subverted, and resisted in depictions of virginity loss in popular literatures, unpacking the romanticisation of the idea of “the right one” and “the right time”.
It has chapters on historical romance and category romance which will be of particular interest to scholars of popular romance fiction.
"Bringing together an international group of scholars, The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction
[edited by Jayashree Kamblé, Eric Murphy Selinger and Hsu-Ming Teo] offers a ground-breaking exploration of this global genre and its
remarkable readership. In recognition of the diversity of the form, the
Companion provides a history of the genre, an overview of disciplinary
approaches to studying romance fiction, and critical analyses of
important subgenres, themes, and topics. It also highlights new and
understudied avenues of inquiry for future research in this vibrant and
still-emerging field." Although the copyright date is in 2021, it was published in 2020.
Faith, Love, Hope and Popular Romance Fiction is a book by Laura Vivanco which she put online on her website during the pandemic (it can also be downloaded as a free pdf from there). It explores romance from a theological perspective, arguing that romance novels provide a form of pastoral care to readers. The first section of the book provides a new definition of romance, focused on faith, love, hope and pastoral care while the second half explores these concepts in more detail in relation to specific texts or concepts: Piper Huguley's A Precious Ruby; Rose Lerner's In for a Penny; Alyssa Cole's A Princess in Theory; Nora Roberts' Three Sisters trilogy; devils and the damned.
explores the varied representations of Otherness in romance novels and other fiction with strong romantic plots. [...] What all the essays have in common is the exploration of representations of the Other, be it in an inter-racial or inter-cultural relationship. Chapters are divided into two parts; the first examines place, travel, history, and language in 20th-century texts; while the second explores tensions and transformations in the depiction of Otherness, mainly in texts published in the early 21st century. This book reveals that even at the end of the 20th century, these texts display neocolonialist attitudes towards the Other. While more recent texts show noticeable changes in attitudes, these changes can often fall short, as stereotypes and prejudices are often still present, just below the surface, in popular novels.
2019
Jonathan A. Allan's Men, Masculinities, and Popular Romance seeks to open a lively and accessible discussion between critical studies of men and masculinities and popular romance studies, especially its continued interest in what Janice Radway has called 'the purity of his maleness.'"
Ria Cheyne's Disability, Literature, Genre: Representation and Affect.
2018
The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the birth of modern feminism, the sexual revolution, and strong growth in the mass-market publishing industry. Women made up a large part of the book market, and Gothic fiction became a higher popular staple. Victoria Holt, Mary Stewart and Phyllis Whitney emerged as prominent authors, while the standardized paperback Gothic sold in the millions. Pitched at middle-class women of all ages, Gothics paved the way for contemporary fiction categories such as urban fantasy, paranormal romance and vampire erotica. Though not as popular today as they once were, Gothic paperbacks retain a cult following—and the books themselves have become collectors’ items. They were also the first popular novels to present strong heroines as agents of liberation and transformation. This work offers the missing chapters of the Gothic story, from the imaginative creations of Ann Radcliffe and the Brontë sisters to the bestseller 50 Shades of Grey.
In Consuming Agency and Desire in Romance: Stories of Love, Laughter, and Empowerment (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington) Jenni M. Simon argues that:
An excerpt is available.The romance industry has profited on the fantasies of women for centuries. However, as a new generation of women raised under the guidance of second-wave feminists take up the reins of romance production, romance novels and films have increasingly challenged tired stereotypes labeling romantic stories as formulaic fodder. This book examines how the romance genre serves women in multiple ways, from escapism to sexual education, from fantasy to fun, and most importantly, as a site of production for feminist texts.
2017
Lisa Fletcher has co-written Island Genres, Genre Islands with Ralph Crane. It is the
first volume in Rowman & Littlefield's 'Rethinking the Island' series and focuses on four genres--crime fiction,
the spy thriller, popular romance, and fantasy--to show that genre is
fundamental to both the textual representation of real and imagined
islands and to actual knowledges and experiences of the 'geospace' of
islands. The book offers broad, comparative readings of the
significance of islandness in each of the four genres as well as
detailed case studies of major authors and texts. These include chapters
on Agatha Christie's islands, the role of the island in 'Bondspace,'
the romantic islophilia of Nora Roberts's Three Sisters Island trilogy,
and the archipelagic geography of Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea.
Además de analizar los elementos formales constitutivos del género, en este libro quiero demostrar que se trata de un género popular mucho más diverso y complejo de lo que suele suponerse. Aunque no soy fan de las novelas, he leído una buena cantidad de todos los subgéneros para redactar el libro y me ha sorprendido tanto su calidad como su variedad. En su mayoría son muy entretenidas porque la voz narrativa suele ser un tanto irónica, al igual que los personajes, y aunque también hay una gran cantidad de novelas que, francamente, son muy malas, me he guiado por las opiniones de las lectoras que sí son aficionadas y no me he equivocado: son las mejores críticas del género. Por último, quisiera que el libro sea una invitación a la apreciación justa del género que evite el tono de desprecio que acompaña a sus detractores. No se trata de un género ideológicamente conservador, también es innovador, porque si no lo fuera habría desaparecido.
Out on 1 February 2017 from Baylor was Kecia Ali's Human in Death: Morality and Mortality in J. D. Robb's Novels.Through close readings of more than fifty novels and novellas published over two decades, Ali analyzes the ethical world of Robb’s New York circa 2060. Ali explores Robb’s depictions of egalitarian relationships, satisfying work, friendships built on trust, and an array of models of femininity and family. At the same time, the series’ imagined future replicates some of the least admirable aspects of contemporary society. Sexual violence, police brutality, structural poverty and racism, and government surveillance persist in Robb’s fictional universe, raising urgent moral challenges. So do ordinary ethical quandaries around trust, intimacy, and interdependence in marriage, family, and friendship.
Ali celebrates the series’ ethical successes, while questioning its critical moral omissions. She probes the limits of Robb’s imagined world and tests its possibilities for fostering identity, meaning, and mattering of human relationships across social difference. Ali capitalizes on Robb’s futuristic fiction to reveal how careful and critical reading is an ethical act.
2016
proffers innovative case studies on representations of cross-religious and cross-cultural romantic relationships in a selection of late medieval and twenty-first century Orientalist popular romances. Comparing the tropes, characterization and settings of these literary phenomena, and focusing on gender, religion, and ethnicity, the study exposes the historical roots of current romance representations of the east, advancing research in Orientalism, (neo)medievalism and medieval cultural studies. Fundamentally, Representing Difference invites a closer look at medieval and modern popular attitudes towards the east, as represented in romance, and the kinds of solutions proposed for its apparent problems.
Catherine Roach's Happily Ever After: The Romance Story in Popular Culture is published by
Indiana University
Press (2016). She proposes "that romance novels have nine essential elements":
"It is hard to be alone"; "It is a man's world"; "Romance is a religion
of love"; "Romance involves risk"; "Romance involves hard work";
"Romance facilitates healing"; "Romance leads to great sex, especially
for women"; "Romance makes you happy"; "Romance levels the playing field
for women" (see her post for the RNA).“Find your one true love and live happily ever after.” The trials of love and desire provide perennial story material, from the Biblical Song of Songs to Disney’s princesses, but perhaps most provocatively in the romance novel, a genre known for tales of fantasy and desire, sex and pleasure. Hailed on the one hand for its women-centered stories that can be sexually liberating, and criticized on the other for its emphasis on male/female coupling and mythical happy endings, romance fiction is a multi-million dollar publishing phenomenon, creating national and international societies of enthusiasts, practitioners, and scholars. Catherine Roach, alongside her romance-writer alter-ego, Catherine LaRoche, guides the reader deep into Romancelandia where the smart and the witty combine with the sexy and seductive to explore why this genre has such a grip on readers and what we can learn from the romance novel about the nature of happiness, love, sex, and desire in American popular culture.
Romance Fiction and American Culture brings together scholars from the humanities, social sciences, and publishing to explore American romance fiction from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first century. Essays on interracial, inspirational, and LGBTQ romance attend to the diversity of the genre, while new areas of inquiry are suggested in contextual and interdisciplinary examinations of romance authorship, readership, and publishing history, of pleasure and respectability in African American romance fiction, and of the dynamic tension between the genre and second wave feminism. As it situates romance fiction among other instances of American love culture, from Civil War diaries to Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, Romance Fiction and American Culture confirms the complexity and enduring importance of this most contested of genres.
John Markert argues in Publishing Romance: The History of an Industry, 1940s to the Present thatRomance novels have attracted considerable attention since their mass market debut in 1939, yet seldom has the industry itself been analyzed. Founded in 1949, Harlequin quickly gained market domination with their contemporary romances. Other publishers countered with historical romances, leading to the rise of “bodice-ripper” romances in the 1970s. The liberation of the romance novel’s content during the 1980s brought a vitality to the market that was dubbed a revolution, but the real romance revolution began in the 1990s with developments in the mainstream publishing industry and continues today. This book traces the history and evolution of the romance industry, covering successful (and not so successful) trends and describing changes in romance publishing that paved the way for the many popular subgenres flooding the market in the 21st century.
Laura Vivanco's Pursuing Happiness: Reading American Romance as Political Fiction was published at the beginning of 2016. Itexplores some of the choices, beliefs and assumptions which shape the politics of American romance novels. In particular, it focuses on what romances reveal about American attitudes towards work, the West, race, gender, community cohesion, ancestral “roots” and a historical connection (or lack of it) to the land. The novels discussed include works by Suzanne Brockmann, Beverly Jenkins, Karin Kallmaker, Pamela Morsi, Nora Roberts, Sharon Shinn, Linnea Sinclair and LaVyrle Spencer.Romance author Isobel Carr has described it as "an insightful and entertaining look at the inherent, often invisible, politics that underlie America’s most popular genre of fiction".
Late 2015
The paperback edition of Women and Erotic Fiction: Critical Essays on Genres, Markets and Readers was published on 30 November 2015 (it became available for Kindle in August):Erotic texts written by and for women play a significant role in negotiating relations of gender, sexuality and kinship, and in shaping popular ideas about romance and the erotic. Examining the ""mainstreaming"" of women's erotica following the runaway success of Fifty Shades of Grey , this collection of new essays focuses on the publication and reception of women's popular erotic fiction across various genres and cultural contexts. The contributors draw connections between feminist and cultural studies scholarship on visual pornography and critical research on popular romance fiction. Essays explore a range of writing: popular erotic romance novels; ""feminist porn""; male/male and menage fiction; lesbian romance; sex blogs; new Chinese erotica; BDSM novels; and slash fiction. Topics discussed include the ideological and critical aspects of popular texts, audiences and fan communities, the disciplinary function of popular speech about women's erotic fiction, and the technological and social shifts which have facilitated women's access to new forms of erotic material.
Other Projects
current project is a book-length manuscript that examines the effects of the publishing, librarian and educational fields on the history of young adult literature and, more specifically, on teen girl romance novels published from 1942 to 1967 (known as the female junior novel genre). Allen uses a feminist cultural materialist approach, drawing on the theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Luce Irigaray, and using previously unpublished archival documents, to suggest a revised history of young adult fiction: one that explores the neglected female junior novel genre in relation to the rise and fall of a semi-autonomous network of female producers and distributors (editors, critics, librarians), and contrasted against the academics who ultimately defined "good" young adult fiction. By examining the female junior novel texts and network in relation to Cold War politics, federal initiatives in education and librarianship and the history of the children's publishing industry in America, she suggests a heretofore hidden battle regarding who has the right—and ability—to define our current concept of young adult fiction.
Johanna Hoorenman is "currently working a study of gendered conceptions of citizenship and cultural heritage in historical romance fiction, addressing the ways in which female readers read and imagine themselves into a history of Britishness and Christianity in which they have long held second-class citizenship. The first part of this research concerns settings of the Viking Age."
Jayashree Kamblé is "currently working on her second book (on romance fiction heroines) as
well as articles on the racial geographies of historical romance novels
(supported by the ARC Fellowship) and the history of American romance
fiction (supported by the William P. Kelly Research Fellowship)." Jayashree has also been named a 2021 Mellon Foundation/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellow for her project "BIPOC Writers, Editors, and Novels: The Missing Chapters in the Story of Mass-Market Romance."
Pamela Regis's
career-long project, which began with A Natural History of the Romance Novel, is to define, analyze, and write the history of the genre based on as synoptic a knowledge of the entire history of the novel as I can muster.Eric Murphy Selinger has outlined his plans for How to Read a Romance Novel (and Fall in Love with Popular Romance) here at Teach Me Tonight. He envisages writing a book which will
The romance is a world-wide phenomenon, but I would argue that American romance holds a place near the center of the genre’s concerns, and its history deserves a separate treatment. I wish to write that history.
The proposed project will involve first identifying the novels of American authors that contain the eight elements of the romance novel laid out in my earlier book. From this will emerge the first identification of America’s national canon of romance. Analysis of these novels with an eye to identifying the essential components of an American romance, which is to say, those characteristics that the author’s nationality and its attendant culture imbue it with, will define our romance tradition. (RWA)
introduce its readers to a bunch of late-20th and early 21st century British and American romance novels that I quite like, from a range of subgenres, from Christian inspirational novels to paranormal, erotic, and LGBTQ romance, with the focus of each chapter being one to three novels that I read in depth, attending both to internal complexity and to a novel’s dialogue with literary or cultural contexts.
Still Reading Romance is tentatively due in May 2024. Following a call for papers https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2022/09/19/still-reading-romance
this collection’s co-editor Josefine Smith designed an updated version of Radway’s survey, targeting romance novel readers. After two distributions, the result was over 300 responses and a raw data set which [was shared with] interested contributors to this volume. This survey includes questions on the following topics: Romance Reading Habits, the Romance Genre, the New Adult Fiction Subgenre, and Demographics.
Conflict, Colonialism and Exoticism in 21st Century Women's Historical
Fiction, edited by Hsu-Ming Teo and Paloma Fresno-Calleja will explore
the representation of difficult or traumatic histories in 21st century women's historical fiction. Issues of historical accuracy and realism arise in chapters exploring topics such as: women's suffrage, the Great Irish Famine, the Spanish Civil War, the Greek Civil War, the Holocaust, American Indian history, colonialism in South Africa and South East Asia. (description from Teo's university)
I don't know how many of the chapters will discuss romance novels but Teo has often written about romance and (as mentioned in this thread) it will include a chapter by Jayashree Kamblé on "the economic & racial geographies of London in historical romance set in the 19th century, w/ a focus on K. J. Charles's An Unseen Attraction."
Definitely! It's a book that also challenges the class and racial politics of canonization as well as analyzes newspaper fiction in the reading field of the original newspaper page...so less analysis of fiction and more on reception, authorship, and reading as a practice...
— Kim Gallon (@BlackDigitalHum) April 27, 2021
If you know of another forthcoming publication in the area of romance which should be added to this list, please contact Laura Vivanco.
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