Allan, Jonathan A. (2026). "Men’s Dress in Popular Romance Novels."
The Intellect Handbook of Men’s Fashion. Ed. Ben Barry, Andrew Reilly and José Blanco F. Intellect Books. [This is due to be published on 10 April, 2026. More details about the volume can be found here.]
Bhatta, H. (2026). "To what extent does age-gap romanticization in modern
BookTok romance fiction normalize predatory dynamics?. Sudurpaschim Spectrum, 3(1-2), 90–102. [I am not going to provide a direct link to this because I was upset to discover that some of the works cited do not exist/do not exist as cited. I did not check all the works, because I felt I had done enough work to engender doubts about the quality of the research. Details can be found in the entry at the RSDB.]
Clasen, Tricia (2026)
"Changing the Scripts: An Overview of Gender and Romance in Young Adult Literature
"
The Oxford Handbook of Young Adult Literature, Ed. Victor Malo-Juvera and Crag Hill. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 99-112. [Excerpt available here.]
Evans, Anne-Marie (2026). "Romancing the First Lady
"
The First Lady in Contemporary Popular Culture, ed. Anne-Marie Evans and Sarah Trott. New York: Bloomsbury. 113-128. [Links here.]
Kamblé, Jayashree (2026). "Recolouring the romcom: humor, respectability, and race in a 1986 American category romance novel." Comedy Studies. Online First. [Abstract here.]
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).
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.
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.]
11:20am - Keynote | On Romance: A conversation with author Beverly Jenkins (Indigo, Forbidden) and Dr. Carole V. Bell
According to the Instagram post (from which I've taken the graphic), the conversation will be about Black romance. The full programme is here but if you'd just like to sign up for the zoom conversation between Beverly Jenkins and Carole Bell, you can do that here.
and thanks to Cruz-Bibb, I've found references to some older dissertations I hadn't come across before:
Ganapathy, Subha
(2002).
Who Is Afraid of Romance Novels?: Women Readers, Patriarchy and Popular Culture.
PhD thesis,
Mother Teresa Women’s University. [Details here.]
The
last two reach very different conclusions from each other about lesbian
romance. Brown argues that lesbian romances differ significantly from f/m ones, whereas Secrease finds that they're really very similar. Both Brown and Secrease base their conclusions on small samples, and it could
be argued that they're comparing the lesbian novels to at least some
generalisations about heterosexual romances which have now been
superseded (and may have even been a bit out of date by the time the
dissertations were written) but it's interesting nonetheless that they
disagree. I linked to the entries in the Romance Scholarship Database
since I've included quotes there which are possibly not available in the
excepts at ProQuest.
---
Another item I found in Cruz-Bibb's bibliography is:
what I have experiencedas"feministchanges"to the romance genre began appearing in the mid-1980s [...] In my experience, in all but the subgenreofhistorical romance, gender stereotypes were beginning to change. Male characters were no longer portrayed strictlyasbrooding, dark, and macho; heroines were given more independence and depth. There were also thematic changes: for example, writers were beginning to pay attention to contemporary social issues, suchassingle parenting, substance abuse, and child abuse. (14)
On the topic of changes which took place in the 1980s, Steve Ammidown tweets that:
The
first mainstream contemporary romance to include condoms that I know of
is Elda Minger’s Untamed Heart. The first contemporary to discuss
abortion that I’ve seen was Sandra Brown’s A Treasure Worth Seeking. The
acquiring editor for both? Vivian Stephens. https://t.co/7pjFZyukPU
Minger's novel was published in 1983. Steve's
careful wording here reminds me that it's hard to keep track of
"firsts" in the genre: since there are so many romances, and many of the
earlier novels are somewhat difficult to access, their plots may not be
known to current scholars. There has been some work done on earlier
romances of course, and clearly some of them had plots we might find
surprising. For example, jay Dixon's The Romance Fiction of Mills & Boon 1909-1990s, describes
a romance by Elizabeth Carfrae, from 1929, in which the married heroine
conceives a child with the hero, to whom she is not married and "Her
husband thinks the baby is his and raises her accordingly until his
death, when the hero and heroine meet up again and marry" (139). One
early romance involving abortion is described by Joseph McAleer in his Passion's Fortune: The Story of Mills & Boon:
In November 1939 a Mills & Boon novel, How Strong is Your Love?
by Barbara Hedworth, made the Irish Government's list of prohibited
books, on the grounds that it 'advocate[d] the unnatural prevention of
conception', a provision of the 1929 Censorship of Publications Act.
[....] Mills & Boon published this novel [...] over a year earlier,
in August 1938. Splashy advertising for this title billed it as 'an
absorbing romance' and 'a love story that will delight everybody'.
Apparently not: [...] the heroine's father, a village doctor, is an
abortionist. He decides to help Rose, unmarried but pregnant, by
performing 'an illegal operation'. The abortion (never called such by
name) is a success, but a blood clot kills Rose. To spare his family the
shame and scandal, Dr Vickers shoots himself. (168)
I
suspect that Steve was thinking more of novels in which abortion is
"called such by name" and despite the censors' concerns, clearly this
novel does not present abortion very favourably given that Rose dies,
but it's interesting that the topic was at least present here: later on
Mills & Boon's policy was to avoid the topic completely so as not to
have their publications censored.
Still on the topic of changes in the genre, in a recent article, Ana Quiring argues that "a new subgenre of queer Regency-era romance"
align[s] the lovers with the most marginalized in society. In consequence,
these novels imagine queer love and sex as always political. Rather
than repeating the Cinderella dream of marrying up, they invent a new
one, no less fantastic: romantic love as a conduit to solidarity.
And by "new subgenre" Quiring doesn't mean that it's only just appearing in 2022: one of the romances described in the article dates from 2014.
Still on the topic of queer/LGBTQ+ romance, I'm a bit less sure about the historical perspective of a recent article in the Guardian, which
refers to "the rise of LGBTQ+ romance fiction" and notes that readers
of one of the works discussed "praised the novel for being refreshingly
joyful and funny –
including a happy ending, which is not that common for a book with an
LGBTQ+ plot." Obviously, given the dissertations by Brown and Secrease mentioned above,
LGBTQ+ romance (which, by definition, includes a happy ending) isn't actually something new but perhaps what's
happening is that it's relatively recently broken through into the
awareness of mainstream media?
Also apparently breaking through is Black romance. Naomi Elias states that Bolu Babalola's "romance books—by design, not default—have become outliers in the
publishing industry, since they center Black women as romantic leads" and the sub-heading of the article adds that Babalola's work "normalizes seeing Black women being loved loudly." Given that mainstream romance publishing has tended to publish too few Black authors, the word "outlier" seems fair enough but I think whoever wrote the sub-heading (and it may well not have been Elias) is overlooking the work of many other Black romance authors who've been publishing for decades.
July 1994 saw two landmark debuts in romance- the publication of Night Song by @authorMsBev, and the launch of Kensington’s Arabesque line with titles by Frances Ray and Sandra Kitt. 1/ pic.twitter.com/T8junhhdwj
Jayashree Kamble, Professor of English Literature at La Guardia Community College
Shana McDavis-Conway, Co-Director for the Center for Story-Based Strategy and Staff Reviewer for Smart Bitches, Trashy Book
I'll end, though, with something that's been present in the genre for a very long time: historically inaccurate clothing on covers. Bernadette Banner has redrawn some historical romance covers (and the
cover of one work of historical fiction) to make the costumes more
accurately reflect clothing in the periods and places in which they're
set. The novels are: Kelly Bowen's Duke of My Heart;
Beverly Jenkins's Something Like Love; Olivia Waite's The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics; Alyssa Cole's An Extraordinary Union; Gillian Bagwell's Venus in Winter;
Gayle Callen's Love with a Scottish Outlaw.
She
doesn't really explore the reasons why inaccurate outfits might be more
appealing to readers, and I'm not sure how much that's been discussed
by romance readers and scholars. Presumably the shirts that open in the
wrong way are more appealing due to the amount of bare chest they reveal
and I can see how some modern hairstyles might seem sexier than
accurate ones but is some of this due to which stock art was available? I
get the impression, though, that these were published by large
publishing companies who commission photo shoots specially for their
covers, so some of these choices don't make a lot of sense to me. Are
publishers making assumptions which aren't warranted about what will
appeal to readers? Or is the key thing just to give a general
"historical" feel so that the reader can easily identify which romance
subgenre the book's in?
