New Publications: Censorship, Pulps, Royals, Readers, Pirates, Empire, Holidays

 

A volume titled Travel and Colonialism in 21st Century Romantic Historical Fiction: Exotic Journeys, Reparative Histories? (kind of 2024/2025 publication date, given what's available online versus in print) is out from Routledge. The Introduction is open access and although most of the chapters are about romantic rather than romance fiction, the second chapter is definitely about romance. It's by Sarah F. Ficke: "Falling in Love Outside of the Law: Piracy, Race, and Freedom in Caribbean Historical Romance." That looks in particular at Captured (2009) by Beverly Jenkins and What the Parrot Saw (2019) by Darlene Marshall but Sarah Ficke's said that it "covers a bit about pirate romances by Julie Garwood and Johanna Lindsey as well."

Another chapter, by Hsu-Ming Teo and Astrid Schwegler-Castañer, examines Dinah Jefferies' bestselling novels, The Tea Planter's Wife (2015) and Before the Rains (2017) and I'm not really sure if everyone would classify them as romance, but they did seem more romance-inclined than the texts studied in the other chapters (with the exception of Ficke's).

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The first romance pulp—or “love pulp,” as they are sometimes called—to hit the market was Love Story Magazine, which debuted in May of 1921 (or, at least, it is dated “May 1921”; when it actually hit the newsstands remains something of a debate). 

Lucynka's introduction to romance pulps can be found here: https://lucynka.wordpress.com/an-introduction-to-the-romance-pulps/

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And here are more new publications:

Allan, Jonathan A. (2024) "Forever Amber, Censorship, and Popular Romance Studies." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 13.

 

Betts, Sarah (2024). "Royal Biography Between the Lines: Georgette Heyer’s Regency Romances and the Life of Princess Charlotte of Wales (1796-1817)." Royal Studies Journal 11.2:239-284.

Datta, Sreepurna (2025) "'A holiday that could be whatever anyone wanted it to be': The Indian American Holiday Season in Sonya Lalli's A Holly Jolly Diwali". Under the Mistletoe: Essays on Holiday Romance in Popular Culture. Ed. Liz W. Faber. McFarland. [Excerpt here.]

Farooqui, Javaria (2024). "Buildings, books, and memories: Analysing the culture of reading anglophone romance in Pakistan." Journal of Postcolonial Writing. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2024.2433024

 

Fortune, Teagan Bailey (2024). Rape Beyond Fantasy: Exploring the Influence of BookTok's Erotica and Dark Romance Literature on Young Adult Perceptions of Consent and Boundaries. Master’s thesis, University of Northern Colorado.

 

Franck, Kaja (2024). "Reader, I Included It: Reading Lists and Romance." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 13. 

 

Haglund, Tuva (2024). "Enkelsängar, äkta fiendskap och oplanerade graviditeter: Bruket av troper bland Booktoks romanceläsare." Passage - Tidsskrift for Litteratur Og Kritik 39(91): 99–116.

 

McNamara, E. K. (2024). Young Adult Contemporary Realistic Romance: Rhetorical and Intersectional Narratologies. PhD thesis, Ohio State University. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1723733528520264 [Embargoed until December 2029]

Conference Programme for the 6th International IASPR Conference (23-25 June 2016)

The full conference programme is now available here. Among the papers are:

Elin Abrahamsson, Stockholm University, Sweden:
“Consuming Passions: a queer reading of the popular romance genre through the concept of masturbation”

Katherine Morrissey, Rochester Institute of Technology, New York:
“Keeping It Classy: Studying Sex and Romance”

Len Barot, Bold Strokes Books, New York:
“Diversity in Lesbian Romance Fiction: The Impact of Gender and Race on Marketing and Sales”

Heather Schell, George Washington University, DC:
“Two Nerdy History Girls: Historical Romance Novelists as Teachers of History”

Caryn Radick, Rutgers University, New Jersey:
“Writing about History and Becoming Part of the Historical Record: Romance Writers’ Use of Archives and Archival Collections Documenting Popular Romance”

Jessica Matthews, George Mason University, Virginia:
“Romance as Propaganda: White Fantasy of Indian Love in the 19^th –century ‘Civilize the American Indian’ Movement”

Javaria Farooqui, Institute of Information Technology, Lahore, Pakistan:
“‘Raging Seas and Cloudy Skies’: Macro to Meso Level Psychosemantic Movement in Stephanie Laurens’ Black Cobra Quartet”

Erin Young, SUNY Empire State College, New York:
“Love in the Last Frontier: An Analysis of Alaskan Romance Novels”

Margot Blankier, Trinity College, Dublin:
“‘The Sweetest Story Ever Told’: ‘Cinderella’ as American Dream Narrative”

Pavla Stefanska, Masavyk University, Czech Republic:
“Blurring the Lines: Irish mythology and symbolism in Nora Roberts’ The Cousin O’Dwyer’s Trilogy”

Eric Murphy Selinger, DePaul University, Chicago:
“‘Use Heart in Your Search’: Erotic Faith, the Heart Sutra, and the Allusive Art of My Beautiful Enemy”

Jayashree Kamble, Assist. Prof. of English, City University of New York:
“Epistemes and Cultural Dominants: What Popular Romance Novels’ Heroes and Heroines Tell Us About Postmodernity”

Lesley Ann Smith, Curtin, University, Australia:
“Understanding the Formula”

Maryan Wherry, Independent Scholar & Writer, Quad-Cities, Illinois:
“Love and the American Dream in Popular Romance”

Amy Burge, Edinburgh University, Scotland:
“‘Shipping magnates and oil sheikhs’: Decoding the exotic hero in ‘Harlequin Presents’ romance novels, 2000-2015”

Kecia Ali, Boston University:
“Triangulating Desire: Navigating Islamland, Arabiastan, and Romancelandia in Suzanne Brockmann’s Into the Night”

Sarah Ficke, Marymount University, Virginia:
“When Vampires Meet Clockwork: Fantasy Creatures in Steampunk Romance”

Maria-Isabel González-Cruz, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain:
“Intercultural and interlingual relations in a corpus of popular romance fiction novels”

Mallory Jagodzinski, Bowling Green State University, Ohio:
“Playing Tricks: Neoliberalism, Postfeminism, and Postraciality in Theresa Romain’s Secrets of a Scandalous Heiress”

Hsu-Ming Teo, Macquarie University, Australia:
“When a Jew loves a Nazi: Romance novels and the Holocaust”

Amira Jarmakani, San Diego State University:
“Radioactive Love: Mapping Desire from Agrabah to Abbottabad”

Jonathan Allan, Brandon University, Canada:
“What is the Ever After doing in Happily Ever After? Temporality and Futurity”

Maria Ramos-Garcia, South Dakota State University:
“Creating the Sense of an Ending in Urban Fantasy”

Romance I: Romance Across the Canon

Laura Vivanco

The PCA/ACA annual conference is very special for romance scholars but not everyone can get there (I haven't even been once). We can, though, read the abstracts of papers which will be presented in the many sessions on romance. I'll be putting them up here at Teach Me Tonight, session by session.

Romance I: Romance Across the Canon (Fairy Tale, Shakespeare, Lit Fic)

Navigating the Fantasy of Romantic Love Through Popular Romantic Adaptations of "Cinderella"

(Margot Blankier, doctoral candidate at Trinity College Dublin's School of English)

This paper, part of a larger thesis project on “Cinderella” as fairy tale and American myth, will examine contemporary popular romance fiction that announce themselves as adaptations and use “Cinderella” as their structural framework. The narrative concerns of the popular romance and the fairy tale often overlap: in her article “Guilty Pleasures: Reading Romance Novels as Reworked Fairy Tales,” Linda J. Lee observes that classical fairy tales and romance fiction are both formulaic, invoke fantasy realms, and are often dismissed as trivial entertainments. However, where fairy tales are noted for their abstract and “depthless” characters, writers of contemporary popular adaptations of “Cinderella” justify the length of their novels by according their protagonists an interiority that, according to Max Lüthi’s The European Folktale, opposes the generic expectations of the fairy tale. In this way, the writers of these texts “betray” the expectations of the classical fairy-tale heroine by emphasizing her agency and wit over her “archetypal” qualities. She meets the prince character early in the novel and experiences an intense physical desire for him, but their relationship ebbs and flows over the course of the novel. Generally, the culmination of their relationship—the “happily ever after” ending—occurs after they have been “tested,” and the prince character has proved that he “deserves” the love of the Cinderella character. Thus, while the romantic implications of Cinderella’s marriage in Charles Perrault’s original fairy tale are largely reader-generated rather than textually present—there is no mention of love between the pair—writers of popular romance develop the physical and emotional relationship between Cinderella and the prince as the most important element of the story. This paper will consider the transformative power of love as a substitute for the fantasy aspect of fairy tale, the readerly movement between in and out of the textual world as a source of pleasure, and the stepmother figure as a source of repressive social milieu and patriarchy.

Texts to be considered include, but are not limited to, Eloisa James’ A Kiss at Midnight (2010), Claire Delacroix’s The Damsel (1999), Teresa Medeiros’ Charming the Prince (1999), Katherine Kingsley’s Once Upon a Dream (1997), Mercedes Lackey’s The Fairy Godmother (2004), and a selection of titles from Harlequin’s Silhouette Romance imprint.

(EMS:  Margot Blankier was unable to attend, but we hope to hear more about her research in the future!)

Taming Shakespeare: Historical Romance Novel Adaptations of Taming of the Shrew

(Tamara Whyte, Piedmont Virginia Community College)

Despite its less romantic elements, many romance novelists allude to and adapt William Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. In my research, I have found 40 romance novels since 2000 that allude to the play. Most of these novels have little to do with Shakespeare’s text, but six recent historical romance novels attempt to rewrite elements of the taming plot for a modern audience: Sabrina Darby’s Woo’d in Haste and Wed at Leisure, Johanna Lindsey’s The Devil Who Tamed Her, Christy English’s How to Tame a Willful Wife, and Eloisa James’s Kiss Me, Annabel and The Taming of the Duke. Darby breaks her adaptation into two separate narratives. The first, Woo’d in Haste, focuses on Bianca’s perspective, vilifying Kate. But then the second, Wed at Leisure, focuses on Kate, redeeming her. Lindsey’s novel adapts the taming plot to make it more acceptable to romance readers without changing the gender dynamic in which an aggressive man attempts to change the behavior of a woman who fails to conform to societal expectations for her sex. English includes a commentary on Shakespeare’s work within her adaptation. James depicts a failed taming attempt in Kiss Me, Annabel and inverts the gender roles in The Taming of the Duke. In my paper, I will analyze these various adaptations and appropriations of The Taming of Shrew with particular emphasis on how romance authors make the taming plot more palatable for modern romance authors. 


Love and the Machine: Romance in the Victorian Industrial Novel

(Sarah Ficke, Marymount University)

My most recent paper on popular romance (presented at this year’s IASPR conference) examined the Iron Seas steampunk series by Meljean Brook to discover how these texts configure the relationship between technology and humanity. I found that the language and actions of romantic relationships were instrumental in demonstrating a positive connection between people and technology in the stories. However, this made me wonder about the 19th-century novels that provide much of the foundation for steampunk. How did they represent romance within an industrialized, mechanized context? The paper I am proposing will answer this question by analyzing the role of romance and its relationship to technology in several important industrial novels from the Victorian period, including works like Hard Times by Dickens, North and South and Mary Barton by Gaskell, and Shirley by Charlotte Brontë. I will be using digital humanities tools to uncover language patterns and points of connection across the texts, as well as examining their individual representations of romance. I hope to discover how these industrial novelists imagined technology describing, enabling, or disrupting romantic relationships. This is part of my larger project on how steampunk romances adopt and reconfigure Victorian ideas about technology for a 21st-century world.


 “Stay away from my sister”: Romance and the Asian American Male Canon

(Erin Young, SUNY Empire State College)

No abstract provided.

PCA/ACA 2012 - (3)

Laura Vivanco

Romancing Race I: African-Americans in Popular Romance Fiction

Wednesday, April 11, 2012 - 6:30pm - 8:00pm

African American Romance Novels: Reinventing Images of African American Women
Ann White and Tamara Buck - Southeast Missouri State University

Despite stereotypes of romance fiction as “trashy” and “poorly written” Americans spend millions of dollars each year on romance novels, and many of those books are African American romances – books that are written by African American writers and feature characters in settings familiar to their readers. According to market reports, African-American readers make up the fastest growing segment of the romance reading community, accounting for about 25 percent of the romances sold.

African American romances have a unique history.  One of the goals of African American publishers has been to provide outlets for the publication of material that enlightens and informs African Americans, and another has been to oppose the stereotypical images of African Americans that have pervaded mainstream media. The earliest of these efforts began in the late 19th century with the publication of work by African American women writers who created characters that were in opposition to the stereotypes of African American women in antebellum literature.

In this paper, I look at the history of African American romance novels through the lens of cultural representation. This is particularly significant for producers of African American romances because it gives those producers the power to control images of African American women that circulate in culture. The production of contemporary African American romances also provides writers an opportunity to challenge to the stereotypical images of African American female characters that appeared in American literature during the 19th and early 20th centuries, and that have reinforced stereotypical images of African American women.

“Outlaw stories in our own papers”: Heroic Outlaws in African American Romance
Sarah Ficke - Marymount University

The popularity of Beverly Jenkins’s novels set in the West testifies to our continued fascination with outlaws and other desperados from America’s frontier. However, the novels Jenkins writes do more than simply translate the character of the White outlaw into a Black story. Her engagement with the complex experiences of African Americans in the West and the nuanced motivations of her outlaw heroes (and sometimes heroines) encourage her readers to see these novels as educational interventions that recapture stories that were untold, or untellable, in the nineteenth century. Black outlaws, and cowboys like Nat Love, were instrumental Western figures, but they were not translated into fictional heroes until the late 20th century.

In this paper I will examine the outlaw as hero, focusing particularly on the historical novels of Beverly Jenkins, including The Taming of Jessi Rose, Something Like Love, and Wild Sweet Love, and their relationship to nineteenth century works of African American romantic fiction, including Winona by Pauline Hopkins and Clotel by William Wells Brown. As Jenkins notes in Wild Sweet Love, the presence of Black outlaws mattered to the African American population, and for more than their entertainment value. However, there were few outlaws in nineteenth century African American romances, and none of them are the heroes. The heroes are doctors, soldiers, or intellectuals. The outlaws haunt the margins of these stories, but never get a happily ever after.  I argue that the absence of black outlaw heroes in nineteenth century African American romantic fiction highlights the connections between personal romances and national politics in the history of American race relations, and the outlaws’ appearance in Jenkins’s novels in the twentieth century shows the key role that romances continue to play in our national dialogue.

You Still Can't Do That on Television! (Or Can You?): Racism and Interracial Coupledom in American Television
Jacqueline Brown - Independent Scholar