Call for Papers: Sports Romance

From JPRS:

The Journal of Popular Romance Studies is calling for papers for its special issue on Sport Romance.

Narratives intertwining sport culture with popular romance have steadily grown in popularity throughout the last fifty years, spiking most recently with the release of streaming drama Heated Rivalry, adapted from the novels of Rachel Reid. Increasingly, popular romance set against the backdrop of elite athleticism and featuring one, if not two or more, professional athletes, have become a substantial facet of the romance literary and media landscape. Despite the significant success of this subgenre of popular romance, scholarly investigations have thus far been limited. This special issue therefore is devoted to igniting wide-ranging, exploratory and original discussion on the topic of sport romance.

Adopting an expansive definition of sport and leisure, these articles may consider sports, games and pastimes ranging from international leagues to community clubs to sports that push the limit of the term such as autoracing, gaming and gambling, as represented in romance fiction, film and TV, fanfic and other forms of transformative culture and media. We invite submissions from a broad range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts, including but not limited to: cultural studies, literary studies, gender studies, publishing studies, history, celebrity studies, sports studies and fan studies.

Topics of interest may include but are not limited to:

• Sports in romance narratives in a variety of media, including but not limited to: genre fiction, memoir, screen media, music, or in the teaching of these media.
• The significance of self-publishing in contemporary sport romance
• The relationship between sport fan communities, romance fan communities and sport romance fiction
• ‘BookTok’ and the impact of sport romance fan behaviour on athletes
• Precursors to contemporary sport romance such as Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire Chronicles and Susan Elizabeth Phillips’ Chicago Stars
• Portrayals of gender difference and subversion in sport romance
• Class, wealth and celebrity in sport romance
• Queer themes and homophobia within sport culture as explored in sport romance
• Young Adult sport romance and the pedagogical interventions endeavoured by sport romance in young people’s physical activity

Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words and bios of no more than 100 words to Atlanta Tsiaoukkas (at839@cam.ac.uk) by 31st May 2026. Full articles of between 5,000 and 10,000 words, including notes and bibliography, will be due by 1 December 2026. Please note that all research articles submitted to this special issue of JPRS will undergo peer review via a double blind, pre-publication peer review policy.

JPRS Editors Needed

Eric Selinger has announced that "This spring, after 15 years, I will be stepping down as Executive Editor of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies." In this role, and others, he's been central to establishing popular romance studies as a field, so I'd like to express my appreciation for that.

However, this means that JPRS is now "seeking an experienced replacement who is passionate about romance scholarship and can help lead the journal as we grow!"

The full job description for the Executive Editor role can be found here. Key points to note are:

• This is a volunteer position.
• This is a senior role that requires previous experience of editorial work at an academic journal (or equivalent).
• We estimate this role would require a commitment of 2-3 hours per week.
• The closing date is 30 November 2024.

They're "also looking to add two Associate Editors to the team to help with regular operations. This is a good position for someone who is interested in getting some experience in the behind-the-scenes operation of an academic journal."

The full job description for Associate Editors can be found here. Key points to note are:

• This is a volunteer position.
• This role would be well-suited to those without specific editorial experience but who would like to gain an insight into academic editorial roles.
• We estimate this role would require a commitment of 1-2 hours per week.
• The closing date is 30 November 2024.

CFP (on Sarah J. Maas), and lots of new publications (emotions, vasectomies, comics, deposit libraries, aro-ace romance, dance history)

The Journal of Popular Romance Studies has put out a call for papers for a

Special Issue: Sarah J. Maas

Millions of adolescent and adult readers alike have been drawn to Sarah J. Maas’s YA fantasy-romance series for their representations of empowered, embattled young women, their immersive fantasy worlds, and especially their romance narratives. From the Throne of Glass  (2012-18) and A Court of Thorns and Roses (2015-21) books to Crescent City (2020-24), her current series-in-progress, Maas has become wildly popular for the complex romantic and sexual relationships she portrays. The Journal of Popular Romance Studies (JPRS) seeks articles for a special issue focused on Maas’s fiction. These articles may focus on any of Maas’s works and may take a variety of disciplinary approaches.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

• Intersections of romance and politics, including connections between sexual agency and political agency in Maas’s fiction
• How Maas’s work engages with feminism and/or postfeminism
• Portrayals of or discourses on assault, trauma, and/or PTSD in Maas’s fiction and romance as trauma narrative
• Maas’s adaptation of fairy tales in her romance narratives
• Representations of sex and sexuality in Maas’s work
• Portrayals of gender in Maas’s work
• Maas’s engagement with traditional romance-genre tropes
• Renderings of adolescence and adult-youth power dynamics in romantic pairings and other relationships in Maas’s fiction
• Maas’s portrayal of LGBTQ+ or queer romantic relationships
• Class structures/dynamics and how they shape romance in Maas’s work

More details about this can be found here.

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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.

Allan, Jonathan A. (2024) '“Condoms Break. Birth Control Fails.” Heroes in the Procreative Realm and Jessica Scott’s “Anything for You”'. Journal of Popular Romance Studies 13.

Cho, H., Adkins, D., da Silva Santos, D., Long, A.K. (2024). "Platform, Visuals, and Sound: Webtoon’s Immersive Romance Reading Engagement." In: Sserwanga, I., et al. Wisdom, Well-Being, Win-Win. iConference 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14597. Springer, Cham. [More details here.]

Deane, Katie (2024). Romance Self-Publishing and UK Legal Deposit. British Library Research Repository.

Lienhard, Alissa (2024). "“I’ll Call it Platonic Magic”: Queer Joy, Metafiction, and Aro-Ace Autofictional Selves in Alice Oseman’s Loveless." In Progress: A Graduate Journal of North American Studies 2.1:59-72.

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And finally, although this is not a publication about romance, Sonia Gollance, advertising her new book  It Could Lead to Dancing: Mixed-Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity, has written a post about some of what you could expect to find if there were more historical romances written about Jewish protagonists. https://jwa.org/blog/scandalous-dance-scenes-romance-plots-and-jewish-literary-modernity

 

Volunteering, Cover Art, Fan Fiction and Canada

The Journal of Popular Romance Studies is looking for a volunteer to become the next editor of the "Notes and Queries" section of the journal. More details here: https://www.jprstudies.org/journal-of-popular-romance-studies-notes-and-queries-editor/

Alice Liang takes a look at trends in cover design over the past few decades: https://pudding.cool/2023/10/romance-covers/

Audrey Lavallée is starting to publish a series of blog posts about the history of Canadian romance publishing. There's an introduction to the series here and the first post is about Julia Catherine Beckwith's St. Ursula’s Convent, or the Nun of Canada (1824). The Internet Archive has a copy available which dates from 1824 although the following statement from Jennifer Blair in her “Reading for Information in St. Ursula’s Convent, or The Nun of Canada” in The Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 46, 2016, pp. 201–18 may put you off reading it (or encourage you to see if it really is as bad as Blair claims):

Julia Catherine Beckwith Hart’s St. Ursula’s Convent, or the Nun of Canada. Containing Scenes from Real Life (1824) secured its place in the canon of English Canadian novels retroactively, not because, as with most texts, its aesthetic or social importance could be appreciated only long after publication, but for the unique reason that it is the progenitor of that canon. While Frances Brooke’s The History of Emily Montague (1769) is often cited as an earlier Canadian novel, and while John Richardson has been called the ‘first real Canadian novelist’ for his later Wacousta (1832), St. Ursula’s Convent is the first English novel to be written by an author born in the region that would become Canada. Despite its claim to fame, the book has since gained notoriety for its discomfiting lack of quality. Suffice it to say that while St. Ursula’s might be forever celebrated as the ‘first Canadian novel’, Hart’s admittedly ‘“little work”’ now tends to be counted among Canada’s very worst novels of all time. (201)

And, still on a Canadian theme, here's a new thesis which is freely available:

Vermeer, Lina (2023). The Affective Power of Intimacy: A Case Study of a Men’s Hockey Real Person Fan Fiction’s Literary and Social Contexts. Master of Arts, Trent University.

Call for Papers: JPRS special issue on Romancing Africa

Here's the Call for Papers:

Romancing Africa: Manifestations of Popular Romance in Africa

Editors: Lynda Gichanda Spencer and Martina Vitackova

In February 2016, the New York Times published “A Valentine’s Day Reading List” that did not include any character, love story or book from Africa. In response, Grace A. Musila took to social media where she started #LoveinLiteraryAfrica, ‘a protest against this oh-so-familiar tradition’. Musila’s tweet received a remarkable response from the “African literati” who immediately began to share their favourite love stories from Africa. Five years later, in February 2021, Kiru Taye, one of the founding editors of Romance Writers of West Africa, was named as one of USA Today’s Bestselling Authors: a clear demonstration that there are African authors writing within the romance genre, and a sign that it is time—indeed, past time—for scholarship on popular romance fiction to address the thriving worlds of popular romance in Africa.

Romance imprints abound on the continent, including Sapphire Books, Nollybooks, the imprints of NB Publishers and Romanza from South Africa, Drumbeats from Kenya, Adoras from Cote d’Ivoire, Littattafan Soyayya, Ankara Press, Ebonystory and Love Africa Press from Nigeria. Scholarship on African romance remains marginal, in relation to studies of western romance, but this scholarship does exist, including a foundational essay by Lydie Moudileno on “The troubling popularity of West African romance novels” in Research in African Literatures (2008), a special issue of the South African feminist journal Agenda on “Gender and Popular Imaginaries in Africa” (October 2018), a special issue of Feminist Theory on ‘Chick-Lit in a Time of African Cosmopolitanism’ (April 2019), and a forthcoming special issue on popular romance written in Afrikaans for the digital journal Stilet. This special issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies therefore aims both to bring together scholars doing research on popular romance in Africa and to introduce existing research on the genre at the African continent to popular romance academia.

If, as Moudileno argues, the local creativity involved in “Africanizing the romance” allows romance readers and writers to manipulate structures and produce new meanings that are linked to the experience of the postcolony, thus opening up ‘the potentialities of an overtly marginal literary genre’ (2008:128), our hope for this issue is to Africanize popular romance scholarship. We are therefore interested in essays about all aspects of popular romance writing in Africa: its writers, readers, publishing houses, and scholars. We want to map the dynamics of popular romance genre in Africa and investigate these in their specificity and/or comparability with popular romance from other geopolitical areas. We seek to explore how popular romance shapes Africa, and how Africa shapes popular romance. What does the production and consumption of popular romance reveal about contemporary Africa?

We are open to submissions from a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts, including but not limited to: cultural studies, literary studies, gender studies, publishing studies, history, sociology, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, political science, law, and music. Since this is an electronic publication, we also welcome multimedia and artwork contributions documenting the world of popular romance in, on, and about the African continent. We welcome articles discussing works by authors on the African continent as well as African authors in the diaspora. We seek submissions on (but not limited to) the following topics:

• Popular romance publishing industries on the African continent
• Self-publishing and other alternative forms of text circulation in Africa or by African authors
• Interrogating femininity, masculinity, sexuality, race, gender, ethnicity and religion
• The pleasures of erotic desire
• Subversion, alternatives and alterations to the (Western) romance formula
• Social engagement and social critique in African popular romance
• Interviews with romance authors from Africa
• Analysing the culture of reading clubs and reading groups in Africa

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The editors have set a deadline for expressions of interest of 30 September 2021. More details can be found at the IASPR/JPRS website.

The items tagged "Africa" in the Romance Scholarship Database can be viewed here.

Hoping 2021 is better than 2020

Romance is, after all, a genre of hope and

To cope with all the feelings of uncertainty that 2020 has brought, many have been turning to one place guaranteed to bring a happy ending and sense of optimism: romance novels.

Sarah Wendell, an author, podcaster, and co-creator of the romance community blog Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, has seen a 75% surge in traffic on her website since the pandemic began in March. Her site was so overwhelmed, in fact, that she had to upgrade to a new server. (Copeland)

Carolyn Copeland's article at Prism also offers a roundup of some of the romance activism that took place in 2020, most notably "Romancing the Runoff" which I haven't mentioned on the blog so far, I think, but which ought to be recorded here for posterity. It got a lot of coverage (including in the New York Times, but I couldn't read that because it was behind a paywall), and I've collected some of the items written about it below:

Bustle, Lily Herman, 24 November 2020

Entertainment Weekly, Maureen Lee Lenker, 25 November 2020

Jezebel, Kelly Faircloth, 25 November 2020

Newsweek, Katherine Fung, 25 November 2020

The Guardian, Lois Beckett, 25 November 2020

Kirkus Reviews, Michael Schaub, 27 November 2020

Slate, Rachelle Hampton, 7 December 2020

Vogue, Elena Sheppard, 8 December 2020

Just for the record, the last reference I saw to the total amount raised was (as of 17 December) $475k

I can't believe donations are still trickling in, BUT THEY ARE! We have hit $475k, which is the most amazing number. We are overwhelmed, overjoyed, and cheering on our Georgia friends as they get out to vote!

You can still contribute at https://t.co/1JdTr4U31F! pic.twitter.com/ZMbfbaoIfx

— Romancing the Runoff (@RomancingRunoff) December 17, 2020

Another thing I forgot to mention earlier in the year (but which maybe someone would like to contribute to as part of a New Year's Resolution) is that the Journal of Popular Romance Studies now has a new section.

This section will be a Notes and Queries section. It is meant to create a more immediate dialogue on issues and trends in the field. Moreover, it offers the opportunity for our community of scholars to share insights on aspects of popular romance that would not fit the scope and requirements of a more traditionally published academic article, but nevertheless, cultivates our shared knowledge and furthers our research.

You can find out more about it here. So if you have insights to share with romance scholars, please consider submitting to JPRS. I'm looking forward to seeing what comes up in the new section in 2021.

Congratulations and Recent Publications

First of all, I'd like to congratulate the 2020 winners of the RWA Academic Research Grant. The

RWA Academic Grant Committee has recommended and the RWA Board of Directors has approved Dr. Julie E. Moody-Freeman, an Associate Professor in African and Black Diaspora Studies at DePaul University, and Hannah E. Scupham, a doctoral student in Literature at the University of Kansas, as recipients of the 2021 RWA Academic Research Grant. 

and here are more details about the research for which they've received the grants:

‘Lift as We Climb’: Black Romance Writers, Social Justice, and Institution Building, Dr. Julie E. Moody-Freeman

Grant funds will be used to aid in her research that will examine black writers’ representations of racial uplift in which their romantic plots and produce one season of the Black Romance Podcast, which documents the history of the production and publication of Black Romance through Dr. Moody-Freeman’s conversations with writers, editors, journalists, and scholars.

 

Sensual Politics: Modern Romance Novel Reading and Reimagination of the Victorian Past, Hannah E. Scupham

Grant funds will be used to fund dissertation research. Scupham’s work focuses on how contemporary popular romance novels set in the nineteenth-century century seek to challenge and change modern readers’ imaginations of the nineteenth-century, specifically on issues of gender, sexuality, and race.

Here are some recent publications, one of which, by Caroline Duvezin-Caubet, touches on the same area of research as Scupham's, and it's free to read online.

Duvezin-Caubet, Caroline, 2020. "Gaily Ever After: Neo-Victorian M/M Genre Romance for the Twenty-First Century." Neo-Victorian Studies 13.1: 242-269.

Intan, Tania, 2020. "Formula Romance Dalam Perfect Romance Karya Indah Hanaco: Kajian Sastra Feminis." Alayasastra 16.2: 301-316. [More details here.]

Murias, Rosana, 2021. "In Grey and Pink: The Image of the Bride through the Spanish Postwar Novela Rosa." The Bride in the Cultural Imagination: Screen, Stage, and Literary Productions. Ed. Jo Parnell. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books. 17-34. [More details here.]

IASPR Statement on Racism in the RWA

The International Association for the Study of Popular Romance has issued a statement, available on their website, which I copy below in full:

IASPR Statement on the Romance Writers of America

For over a decade, the Romance Writers of America has been a generous sponsor of IASPR. Every conference we have held has received RWA support, including our upcoming 2020 conference on “Diversity, Inclusion, Innovation” in popular romance culture, and the field of popular romance studies has been seeded and sustained by the RWA Academic Research Grant program.

However, in light of recent events we as a scholarly organization must add our voice to the chorus of readers, reviewers, editors, agents, and authors who have called for sweeping and lasting change at the RWA, beginning with the eight steps listed in the “Readers to RWA” letter from Romance Sparks Joy:

• A clear, unequivocal statement that RWA is anti-racist and that all of its policies, procedures, and activities will ensure that the organization meets this standard.
• A public apology to Ms. Milan, the Board members who have been compelled by their consciences to resign this week, and members who have been harmed by the RWA as stated above.
• The resignations of President/President-Elect Damon Suede and Executive Director Carol Ritter.
• An emergency election of new Directors to replace those who have resigned in protest.
• A full, transparent, and independent investigation into the complaint, investigation, and censure processes around RWA’s Code of Ethics, with attention to events related to the complaints against Ms. Milan and reports that ethics complaints by marginalized members were not forwarded to the Ethics Committee by RWA staff.
• An accounting of the actions that led to the creation of a secret ethics committee and the Board’s initial vote against Ms. Milan.
• The removal of staff if investigations demonstrate those staff members discriminated against marginalized authors based on their identities, whether intentionally or through negligence.
• An Action Plan developed with public input to address the systematic exclusion, harassment, and lack of support for marginalized members and prospective members at every level of RWA, including chapters, conferences and events, staff prerogatives, and Board action.

In keeping with that letter’s call for a “boycott of any events sponsored by or affiliated with the national chapter of RWA,” and in order to forestall any use of our conference to whitewash problems with diversity and inclusion at RWA itself, we will budget for, plan, and, if necessary, hold our 2020 conference this summer without using the financial support that RWA has provided for it. We will reallocate resources and seek out other funding in order to minimize the impact of this decision on travel support for graduate students, untenured faculty, and independent scholars.

We do not flatter ourselves that IASPR, our conferences, and our affiliate publication, the Journal of Popular Romance Studies are somehow free from racism, exclusion, and inequity, or that we will always succeed in addressing them. We do, however, hope to respond to our failures by keeping in mind the advice that Prof. Jay Thalang gives his graduate students—and, ultimately, takes to heart—in Courtney Milan’s Hold Me:

“If you can’t get over your ego and just talk about what you did and what happened, this will take four times as long. You failed. Get used to it. Some of the biggest scientific breakthroughs came about because someone failed and figured out why. Don’t worry about failing. Worry about failing wrongly.”

So far in this matter RWA has not just failed, but failed wrongly. We ask for better from them, and will try to do better ourselves. We hope all organizations, including RWA, are able to embrace policy and practice that sees and represents all of their talent.

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Teach Me Tonight's coverage so far:

25 August 2019: "Racism and the Corporate Romance Buyer: a "little fiasco" involving Sue Grimshaw"

24 December 2019: "Racism, Literary Criticism and a "Safe and Respectful Environment"

26 December 2019: "RWA turmoil continues"

28 December 2019: "RWA and Broader Concerns"

And since the announcement mentions the RWA Academic Research Grant program, here's a link to the winners, from 2005-2019.

CFP: Special JPRS issue on The Sheik

Special Issue Call for Papers  

100 Years of The Sheik

Since its publication in 1919, E. M. Hull’s The Sheik has been a sensation. Beloved by its contemporary readers, the novel’s cultural impact in Britain and North America has been significant and enduring. Considered “the ur-romance novel of the twentieth century” (Regis, 2003, p. 115), The Sheik has been extensively studied by academics and students alike, who have written on the novel’s treatment of gender, sexuality, and race as well as its position in literary modernism.

This special issue and connected symposium will mark the centenary of the original publication of The Sheik. We are seeking submissions for original research articles and short reflective pieces on a number of topics relating to The Sheik and its legacy. The symposium will take place in Birmingham, UK in September 2019 with the publication of the special issue also happening that month. A CFP for the symposium will be circulated separately.

For the special issue, we welcome proposals for original research articles (5000-10,000 words) on any aspect of The Sheik including, but not limited to:

• The Sheik and masculinity (post-war crisis of masculinity, masculinity and race, hegemonic masculinities)
• Adaptations of The Sheik (including the 1921 film)
• Audience and reception studies (of the book and its adaptations)
• The legacy of The Sheik (including its sequel)
• The Sheik and gender and sexuality
• The Sheik and literary modernism

We also invite proposals for short pieces (1000-2000 words) on teaching and learning The Sheik from teachers and students.

The deadline for 250-word abstracts is 1 December 2018 with full drafts due by 1 March 2019. Please send abstracts and direct any enquiries to Dr Amy Burge at a.burge@bham.ac.uk.

News Round-up and Calls for Papers

On 29 August the Journal of Popular Romance Studies was added to the European Reference Index for the Humanities and Social Sciences (ERIH PLUS). This is an indicator of the quality of the journal and increases its visibility:

The main aim of ERIH has been from its very beginnings to enhance global visibility of high quality research in the humanities published in academic journals in various European languages all over Europe. The index enables researchers to better understand and promote the national and international importance of their research. (About)

Entertainment Weekly report that

Bea and Leah Koch, the sister duo who founded and own Los Angeles’ romance bookstore The Ripped Bodice, have signed an overall deal with Sony Pictures Television [...]. The Koch sisters will partner with Sony to develop romance-focused projects for television based on their unique connection to romance readers and authors.

A symposium is being held at the University of Warwick on 28th September, on the topic of "Imagining ‘We’ in the Age of ‘I’: Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture". Speakers include:

• Abhija Ghosh (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi) on ‘Orchestrating Romance: Nineties Romance Genre, Film Song and Bollywood’
• Diana Holmes (University of Leeds), on ‘Plaisirs d’amour: love and popular fiction in contemporary France’ 
• Lucy Sheerman (independent researcher) on ‘Reader I Mirrored Him: the recasting of romance tropes in Jane Eyre fanfiction'

If that makes you want to write a paper about love, then the call for papers for "Love, etc", A conference sponsored by the “Uses of Literature” Research Project at the University of Southern Denmark, October 3-4, 2019 might be of interest. The closing date for submissions is November 15 2018.

Alternatively, there are still a few days left before the closing date for submissions to the ACLA Book Lovers seminar: "Book Lovers welcomes abstracts that touch on any aspect of love". Abstracts must be received by Thursday, September 20, 2018 at 9 a.m. EST. The American Comparative Literature Association's 2019 Annual Meeting will take place at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, March 7th-10th, 2019.

There's also been a call for papers for a panel on Muslim Popular Culture in Asia: Aesthetics and Politics at the German Association for Asian Studies’ (DGA)'s biannual Conference on Contemporary Asia, which will be held in April 3–5, 2019 in Würzburg, Germany. The deadline for all paper proposal submissions is October 7, 2018, 6:00pm (CET).


Kate Cuthbert's keynote address to the 2018 Romance Writers of Australia conference, on "the romance novel and representations of sexuality after #MeToo" is now available online. It discusses hope, and how romance has a history of growing and changing.

In August a team from the Surgery and Emotion project introduced visitors to the Science Museum to Mills & Boon romances:

One participant said it was ‘such a fun station’ and that they’d ‘learnt a lot about Mills & Boon books’. Another commented it was ‘so fun’, ‘a good idea for an activity’, and that it encouraged her to think about ‘the cultural impact of medical fiction’. One attendee described it as an ‘awesome stall’, explaining that they ‘didn’t know anything about Mills & Boon before, it’s really made me think’. Finally, one visitor remarked that it was a ‘super enjoyable’ activity, and that they’d ‘learnt a lot about how the novels were ahead of their time, regarding females’ roles in a medical setting’.

More details here.

Sourcebooks is releasing new editions "of 11 of Heyer’s Regency romances as part of the Georgette Heyer Signature Collection" (Keira Soleore). The books in the "Georgette Heyer Signature Collection" include

praise from scores of bestselling authors, sharing their love of Heyer and why she’s such a gem. Each book includes a fun glossary of Regency slang, plus an Afterword by Heyer’s official biographer Jennifer Kloester, with fascinating insights about what Heyer thought about her own books and what was going on in her life at the time she was writing them. A Reading Group Guide helps readers delve into discussion of Heyer’s time and ours, and why the more things change, the more they stay the same (human nature for sure!).

Keira Soleore has interviewed Jennifer Kloester.

Literary Criticism Following its Heart, Teaching Twitter, Challenging Racism through Fiction, Archives and Reviews

Some of the papers from the Bowling Green State University's recent conference on romance are now available from them.

Eric Selinger's "Use Heart in Your (Re)Search: The Invitations of Popular Romance" suggests that the protagonists' four-step quest in Sherry Thomas’s neo-Victorian historical romance My Beautiful Enemy

offer[s] us a guide to the heartfelt thinking and learning to which many romance novels — not all, perhaps, but many -- invite us as scholars, as students, and as teachers of the genre, at least in a literary studies context 

The first step by the way, is to "Believe the Legend": "In the context of popular romance studies, believing the legend entails believing that romance novels offer something worth learning, treasures worth finding".

As discussed in "Romancelandia on Twitter: Designing a Digital Humanities Research Assignment for First-Year Writing Students" Heather M. Schell and Ann K. G. Brown have been collaborating

to develop an assignment sequence around original research on romance authors’ public social networks. The project uses Social Feed Manager and textual analysis tools to give students the opportunity to shape their own research questions and study the Twitter feed of the romance author of their choice. In-class activities will help students track down supplemental research and think through the ethical questions raised by studying individuals’ social media accounts. (from the abstract)

Elizabeth Kingston writes as an author of historical romance novels about how "History's Been Hijacked: How To Combat White Supremacy Through Popular Literature".

it is undeniable that the version of history taught by romance novels has made it far easier for white supremacist arguments to be accepted by otherwise intelligent, well - read people. To put it simply, the well is poisoned, and if you read historical romance, you are drinking from that well.

She's also posted (a very slightly shorter version of) the paper on her own website along with a follow-up piece, "Practical Advice: Expanded edition" which is exactly what its title states it is.

The Journal of Popular Romance Studies (JPRS) is going to publish on a rolling basis. The first few articles of issue 7 are now available:

"Romance Fiction in the Archives" by Kecia Ali.

Kecia describes a visit to the Ray and Pat Browne Popular Culture Library (PCL) at Bowling Green State University. They have a large and ever-expanding romance collection, so Kecia couldn't see more than a tiny proportion of her holdings. In fact, she was only looking at a small proportion of the Romance Writers of America (RWA) archives and:

I skimmed over or skipped past many tantalizing leads and materials. [...] Many projects might benefit from consulting the collection. In other cases, entire projects might be built around the archival material. This list is partial, idiosyncratic, and woefully incomplete, meant only to offer a starting point for thinking about drawing on the archives.

"Review: Heartthrobs: A History of Women and Desire, by Carol Dyhouse" by Jonathan A. Allan

"Review: Romance Fiction and American Culture: Love as the Practice of Freedom?, edited by William A. Gleason and Eric Murphy Selinger" by Victoria Kennedy

New Issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies

Eric Selinger writes:

Now that we've switched to a rolling publication format in JPRS, new pieces will appear both individually and in thematic or "special issue" groups. Today, we begin rolling out Volume 6 of the journal with a new Special Issue on Critical Love Studies, edited by Amy Burge and Michael Gratzke. The table of contents is below, and you can find the whole issue here: http://jprstudies.org/issues/volume-6. 

Enjoy! And spread the word!

E

• Special Issue: Critical Love Studies (Editors’ Introduction)
  by Amy Burge and Michael Gratzke
• Love is what people say it is: Performativity and Narrativity in Critical Love Studies
  by Michael Gratzke
• Loving over Skype: Tactile Viewing, Emotional Atmospheres and Video Calling
  by Yvonne Clarke-Salt
• Feminist Researcher Wishes to Meet Romantic Subject: The “Case” of Mrs. F.
  by Susan Ostrov Weisser
• Love and its Contradictions: Feminist Women’s Resistance Strategies in their Love Narratives
  by Nagore García Fernández
• Love, Limb-Loosener: Encounters in Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah
  by Jennifer Leetsch
• The boys’ love phenomenon: A literature review
  by Ágnes Zsila and Zsolt Demetrovics
• PLOTS: an art installation
  by Angelika Böck
• Review: Representing Difference in the Medieval and Modern Orientalist Romance, by Amy Burge
• Review: Women and Erotic Fiction. Critical Essays on Genres, Markets and Readers, edited by Kristen Phillips

Are you interested in: a JPRS issue on Beverly Jenkins, a research workshop at BGSU, a pop culture conference?

Eric Selinger is currently teaching Beverly Jenkins’s Forbidden at DePaul University and he's noticed that Jenkins has:

been on a lot of romance syllabi over the last few years, especially here in the United States. It would be great to have a special issue / forum of JPRS about Jenkins, including some pieces about teaching Jenkins (who does a lot of teaching in her work, of course, as well); something about how she reads from outside the US would also be quite interesting, as would pieces about her legacy and influence on other romance authors.

If anyone wants to guest edit that special issue, please be in touch! And if you wouldn’t want to edit it, but could contribute – even something relatively small about what you’ve taught and what you did with it—get in touch with me about that as well. 

Jenkins is one of the authors featured in a small online exhibit about "Pioneering African American Romance Authors" created by Steve Ammidown, Manuscripts & Outreach Archivist at Browne Popular Culture Library. He also sends notification of an

upcoming PCA/ACA Summer Research Institute here at Bowling Green. More information can be found here: http://pcaaca.org/educatio/pcaaca-research-workshop/

I particularly want to highlight our romance collections, since they got short shrift in the announcement. They include:

-Romance author manuscripts

-Papers of the Romance Writers of America

-An extensive collection of series romances dating back to the 1960s

-Stand-alone gothic and contemporary romances from the 1960s and 1970s

-A collection of Woman’s Weekly Library (UK) periodicals from the 1950s-1970s

-Promotional postcards for romance novels, mostly 1990s-today

-And probably some more stuff I’m forgetting!

I would be happy to answer any questions about the collections and their potential for research. I’d really love to see these collections get use during the Institute, so please consider applying. The deadline for applying is March 24^th, so time is of the essence!

The British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies has announced:

Theorising the Popular Conference 2017
Liverpool Hope University, June 21st-22nd 2017

The Popular Culture Research Group at Liverpool Hope University is delighted to announce its seventh annual international conference, ‘Theorising the Popular’. Building on the success of previous years, the 2017 conference aims to highlight the intellectual originality, depth and breadth of ‘popular’ disciplines, as well as their academic relationship with and within ‘traditional’ subjects. One of its chief goals will be to generate debate that challenges academic hierarchies and cuts across disciplinary barriers.

The conference invites submissions from a broad range of disciplines, and is particularly interested in new ways of researching ‘popular’ forms of communication and culture. In addition to papers from established and early career academics, we encourage proposals from postgraduate taught and research students.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Film and Television
• Media and Communication
• Politics and Populism
• Literature (Fiction and Non-Fiction)
• Music
• Drama and Performance
• Fan Cultures and Audience Research
• Sport
• Celebrity
• Social Media
• Gender: Feminism/Femininities/Masculinities/Queering/Sexualities/Representations of the Body
• Language/Linguistics

The conference will be held at Liverpool Hope’s main campus, Hope Park. Situated in a pleasant suburb of Liverpool, just four miles from the city centre, Hope Park offers superb facilities in beautiful surroundings.

Papers should be 20 minutes in length. Please send abstracts of 300 words to Dr Jacqui Miller and Dr Joshua Gulam (ttpconference@hope.ac.uk) by March 17th 2017. The abstract should include your name, email address, affiliation, as well as the title of your paper.

Successful abstracts will be notified by April 3rd 2017.
Conference fees: £100 for both days, including lunch and all refreshments (£80 for students).
Theorising the Popular 2017
ttpconference@hope.ac.uk

CFP: The Romance of Science Fiction/Fantasy

Laura Vivanco

CALL FOR PAPERS:  The Romance of Science Fiction / Fantasy

Deadline: September 30, 2016

Whether we consider romance novels incorporating elements of the fantastic, the future, or the alien, or works of Science Fiction/Fantasy exploring love, desire, and other aspects of romantic culture, the relationship between these genres has been enduring and productive. Following up on a series of joint panels at the 2016 national conference of the Popular Culture Association, the Journal of Popular Romance Studies calls for papers for a special issue on the intersections between romance and science fiction/fantasy in fiction (including fan fic), film, TV, and other media, now and in the past, from anywhere in the world.  This special issue will be guest edited by Gillian I. Leitch, PCA co-chair for SF/Fantasy, and Erin Young.

Contributions might consider questions like the following, either in terms of particular texts (novels, films, TV shows, etc.) or in terms of genre, audience, and media history:

·         How has the intersection of these two popular genres opened up new possibilities in conceptualizing gender, desire, sexuality, love, courtship, or relationship structure, not just recently, but since the earliest years of SF/Fantasy? 

·         How has their intersection allowed us to see existing concepts of gender, desire, sexuality, love, courtship, and relationship structure in fresh or critical ways? 

·         How have authors, filmmakers, producers, and fans played these genres against one another, for example by using romance to critique traditions in SF/F, or SF/F to critique the tropes of romance?  How has this counterpoint been explored by authors, filmmakers, producers, and fans of color, or by LBGTQIA creators and audiences?

·         How might reading classics of SF/F as romance change our perception of them: works like Dune and the Witch World novels, The Left Hand of Darkness, or even E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series, which are threaded on a tale of eugenic love? 

·         What happens to works of paranormal, futuristic, or time-travel romance when we read them through the lenses provided by SF/Fantasy Studies?

·         What happens when teaching works of SF/Fantasy and popular romance? How do these genres co-exist or compete in pedagogical experience or classroom practice?

·         How do works of SF/Fantasy and popular romance coexist and interact in library ecosystems? What issues arise in terms of collection development, readers advisory, or community engagement?

Papers of between 5,000 and 10,000 words, including notes and bibliography, should be sent to Erin Young (managing.editor@jprstudies.org). To facilitate blind peer review, please remove your name and other identifying information from the manuscript.  Submissions should be Microsoft Word documents, with citations in MLA format.

The Journal of Popular Romance Studies is a double-blind peer reviewed interdisciplinary journal exploring popular romance fiction and the logics, institutions, and social practices of romantic love in global popular culture. JPRS is available without subscription at http://jprstudies.org.

New Issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies

Laura Vivanco

"The Journal of Popular Romance Studies started publishing almost exactly five years ago: August 4, 2010" (Selinger) and Issue 5.1 is now available, for free, online.

Special Issue: Romancing the Library (Editor’s Introduction)
by Crystal Goldman
 
A Matter of Meta: Category Romance Fiction and the Interplay of Paratext and Library Metadata - by Vassiliki Veros
 
Love in the Digital Library: A Search for Racial Heterogeneity in E-Books - by Renee Bennett-Kapusniak and Adriana McCleer
 
Creating a Popular Romance Collection in an Academic Library - by Sarah E. Sheehan and Jen Stevens
 
Editor’s Note: Issue 5.1
 
True Love’s Kiss and Happily Ever After: the religion of love in American film - by Jyoti Raghu
 
Chick Lit in Historical Settings by Frida Skybäck - by Helene Ehriander
 
Love in the Desert: Images of Arab-American Reconciliation in Contemporary Sheikh Romance Novels - by Stacy E. Holden
 
Stacy Holden’s “Love in the Desert”: An Author’s Response - by Megan Crane
 
14 Weeks of Love and Labour: Teaching Regency and Desert Romance to Undergraduate Students - by Karin Heiss
 
An Interview with Susan Elizabeth Phillips - by Eric Murphy Selinger
 
Review: Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema, by Sangita Gopal; Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema, by Monika Mehta
 
Review: The Contradictions of Love: Towards a feminist-realist sociosexuality, by Lena Gunnarsson
 
Review: The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and its Discontents, by Laura Frost
 
Review: Sex, or the Unbearable, by Lauren Berland and Lee Edelman; Overcoming Objectification: A Carnal Ethics, by Ann J. Cahill; Erotic Memoirs and Postfeminism: The Politics of Pleasure, by Joel Gwynne

Call for papers on Critical Love Studies

Essay submissions are invited for a special issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies on critical love studies, edited by Michael Gratzke and Amy Burge. 

The Troggs said it first. Wet Wet Wet said it. Even Hugh Grant as the UK Prime Minister said it: love (really) is all around. Love is durable and it is flexible. It is shaped and reshaped by physiological and psychological constants, by the extremely longue durée of evolutionary processes, by centuries of love doctrines, and by profound changes in society that have occurred in the last century and decades. While we tend to believe in eternal values of love and even eternal love, our experiences often feel new, unprecedented and challenging. 

The growing field of critical love studies looks at experiences and representations of love. Romantic love, the type of love with which popular culture is chiefly concerned, has long been of key significance for producers and scholars of popular romance. 

What is romantic love? What are its cultures, its artefacts, its residues? How do romantic love and competing concepts such as confluent love or “erotically charged intimate love” relate to each other? Is there a specifically queer type of romantic love? How does romantic love fare in the age of digital economies and consumer capitalism? What is romantic love in a post-colonial context? What are the emerging hybrid forms of love which may incorporate elements from different cultural settings such as arranged marriage and individualised romantic love at the same time? Does romantic love exclude parental love or culminate in it? These are a few, largely unanswered questions critical love studies have been asking in recent years.

Submissions are welcomed on the topics below; although all papers engaging with the subject of romantic love will be considered. We are open to submissions from a wide range of humanities and social science disciplinary contexts, including (but not limited to): sociology, philosophy, literature, cultural studies, law, psychology, anthropology, political science, management, geography, music, art.

• The (material) cultures of romantic love
• Intimate love 
• Erotic love 
• Romantic love and (kinky) sex 
• Friendship and romantic love
• Parenthood and romantic love
• Love, romance, and form
• Love, romance, and genre 
• Love and creativity 
• Romantic love and normativity 
• Love and intersectionality 
• Love, romance, identity

Published by the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR), the peer-reviewed Journal of Popular Romance Studies is the first academic journal to focus exclusively on representations of romantic love across national and disciplinary boundaries.  Our editorial board includes representatives from Comparative Literature, English, Ethnomusicology, History, Religious Studies, Sociology, African Diaspora Studies, and other fields.  JPRS is currently available without subscription at http://jprstudies.org. 

Please submit scholarly articles between 5,000 and 10,000 words, including notes and bibliography by 31^st December 2015. Manuscripts can be sent to Erin Young, Managing Editor, managing.editor@jprstudies.org. Submissions should be Microsoft Word documents, with citations in MLA format. Please remove all identifying material (i.e. running heads with the author’s name) so that submissions can easily be sent out for anonymous peer review. Suggestions for appropriate peer reviewers are welcome. For more information on how to submit a paper, please visit http://jprstudies.org/submissions. 

Feel free to contact the editors of this special issue to discuss possible topics before submission of an article: 

Dr Amy Burge amy.burge@ed.ac.uk   

Professor Michael Gratzke M.Gratzke@hull.ac.uk