Eric's had a post published as part of Read-a-Romance Month. Among other things, he discusses the importance of teaching romance fiction in universities:
To keep romance novels out of the classroom is to teach students
there’s something radically unworthy about both these books and their
readers. Sometimes it’s not even subtle. I had a senior colleague, now
retired, who used to ask his intro to literature students if they’d ever
read a Harlequin romance, and if anyone raised her hand—and it was
usually a “her,” as you might expect—he’d say, in a withering tone, “You
should be ashamed of yourself.” I had a student—a junior, a philosophy
major, in our honors program—who couldn’t bring herself to buy the books
for my seminar. “It’s just too embarrassing,” she told me. “I’m not the
kind of person who reads books like these.”
I teach my classes for students who already love romance, and finally
get the chance to say so. I teach my classes for students who’ve never
thought about the genre, but are willing to give it a go. But most of
all, I teach romance for students like that philosophy major: the
students who think—or who’ve been told—that they’re too gifted, too
jaded, too literary, too skeptical, too smart; too happily single, or
married, or poly; too feminist, too radical, too queer, too male, and so
on, to bother with “books like these.”
You can read the rest
here. Jen Lois and Joanna Gregson, sociologists working on romance fiction, have also written a post for this month and it can be found
here.
Amy Burge took romance scholarship to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with
a one-off show this afternoon. It went well but since it's not scheduled to be repeated, for anyone who's in Edinburgh and wants to see a performance about romance novels Amy recommends Charlotte Gallagher's "
Carlotta de Galleon - A Fool for Love!"
The Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love
have a new blog, featuring interviews and updates on recent research.
New to the Romance Wiki Bibliography
- Allan, Jonathan A., 2016.
- Reading from Behind: A Cultural Analysis of the Anus. Regina: University of Regina Press. [See chapter 3, "Topping from the Bottom: Anne Tenino's Frat Boy and Toppy". A review of the book by Catherine M. Roach has been published in the Journal of Popular Romance Studies]
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- Crawford, Joseph, 2014.
- The Twilight of the Gothic? Vampire Fiction and the Rise of the Paranormal Romance, 1991-2012. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014. [See also María T. Ramos-García's review of this book in the Journal of Popular Romance Studies]
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- Kahn, Laurie, director, 2015.
- Love Between the Covers. Blueberry Hill Productions. [This is a documentary about popular romance fiction and a review of it by Beth Driscoll was published in the Journal of Popular Romance Studies.]
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- McAlister, Jodi, 2016.
- '“You and I are humans, and there is something complicated between us”: Untamed and queering the heterosexual historical romance', Journal of Popular Romance Studies 5.2 (15 July 2016). [Focuses on Anna Cowan's Untamed (2013). A short response to this article can be found here.]
- Wilkins, Kim, 2016.
- '“Ravished by Vikings”: The Pre-modern and the Paranormal in Viking Romance Fiction', Journal of Popular Romance Studies 5.2 (15 July 2016).
