New Publications: Teaching, Translation, Sex, Psychoanalysis, Subgenres and more

Allen, Amanda K. (2025) "Introducing (Un)defined YA / Series / Romance." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 14.

Aulia, Aura Ratu, Griselda Callista, Hasya Ashila Supriatna, Muhammad Ihsan Fadhilah, Syifa Hana Nabila, and Zaira Yasmina Faizal. 2025. “A Comparison Study of the Effects of Romantic Films and Fictional Stories on Romantic Beliefs Among Young Adults”. Psikologi Prima 8 (2):222-38.

Clitheroe, Heather (2025). "Teaching Romance and Erotica: Designing a Consent-based, Trauma-informed Online Classroom." Journal of Integrated Studies 16.2:1-10.

Costa, Manoela dos Santos da (2025). The trope enemies to lovers : an analysis of Book Lovers and Love, Theoretically. Undergraduate Dissertation, Universidade federal do Rio Grande do Sul.

Crawford, Joseph (2025). “‘I'm Alright, It's Just so Horrible’: Teaching Romance Fictions, Pre‐ and Post‐#MeToo.” Literature Compass 22.4.

Cuthbert, Kate (2026). How to Judge a Book by its Cover: New Analytical Tools for the Book Covers and Titles. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. [An excerpt can be found here. I'm guessing it's based on Kate Cuthbert's thesis, details of which can be found here.]

 

Echaoui, Assala and Nada Ferdjallah (2025). The Power of Gossip: A Feminist Analysis of Julia Quinn's Romancing Mister Bridgerton (2002). Masters, Université 8 mai 1945 - GUELMA.

 

Hines, Christian M. (2025). "Main Character Energy: Black Girls Getting the Love They Deserve in Elise Bryant’s Young Adult Novels." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 14 

 

Hnatiuk, Daryna (2025). Translation project: Translating humour and witty elements in the romantic comedy novel Bananapants by Penny Reid. MA thesis, Borys Grinchenko Kyiv Metropolitan University.

Johnson, Natasha (2025). "Computing the Formal and Institutional Boundaries of Contemporary Genre and Literary Fiction." Anthology of Computers and the Humanities 1. 

 

Keeler, Janet K. (2025) "Romance In The Round: A Content Analysis Of YA Novels About Fat Girls Looking For Love." International Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences 6.10: 9-16.

 

Kollman, Kathleen W. Taylor (2026). The Fictional Female Presidency in Film, Television, and Literature: Representations from 1932 to 2024. New York: Bloomsbury. [The author said that "There are two romance novels covered: Madam President, an F/F romance by Blayne Cooper and T. Novan, and Red White and Royal Blue, by Casey McQuiston (as well as its film adaptation). I also talk in here a bit about lesbian romances in particular." There's an excerpt available here.]

 

Lathifah, Naafiatun Nur and Adjie Aditya Sanjaya (2025). "Political And Economic Ideology In The Production, Distribution, And Consumption Process Of Popular Romance Literature On The Wattpad Application." International Conference of Humanities and Social Science (ICHSS) 5: 516–525. 

 

Lauritzen, Kiara (2025). Wallpaper Historicism: Chronotopic Regency romance, popular history and British cultural imperialism. Master's, Malmö University.

 

Meredith, Tami, Maryanne Fisher and Nicole Giddens (2025, though online first). “Babies, Brides, and Billionaires: Computational and Linguistic Analysis of Harlequin Romance Novel Cover Text.” Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences. [Abstract] 

 

Nicholls, Georgia. (2025). "Between the sheets: physiological sex acts in the contemporary romance novel." Porn Studies.

Novakova, Iva,  Olivier Kraif and Marion Gymnich (2025). "Exploring the ‘language of intimacy’ in English and French romance novels by means of a corpus-driven approach." International Journal of Corpus Linguistics. Online First. [Abstract]

 

Palmer, Margaret M. (2025). “Stop Acting Like a Diva”: Responses to Sexual Violence in Young Adult Romance Novels. SSM - Qualitative Research in Health.

 

Parnell, Claire (2025). "Platform Paratext: Reading Amazon Book Product Pages." Book History 28.2: 349-369. [Abstract] 

 

Raste, Anđela (2025). Classification of PUs in Julia Quinn's Bridgerton: The Viscount Who Loved Me. Masters thesis, University of Zadar. 

Raveh, Noam (2025). "The Debasement of Love and its Cure in Romance: Psychoanalysis and Healing Through Feminization in Loretta Chase’s Lord of Scoundrels." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 14.

Ripoll Fonollar, Mariana (2025). “Romanticising the Suffragette: Historical Romances and the Commodification of the Cause.” Archivum 75.2: 465-501. [The article is open access. In the entry in the RSDB I have added a note about reader responses to it.]

 

Stevens, Alyssa, Roulstone, Sariah, Baker, Matthew J., Bergeson, Susanna

Housley, Yulin, Wood, Taylor (2025). "Book Descriptions Across Genres: A Content Analysis of “Contemporary Romance” and “Mystery and Thriller” Descriptions." Publishing Research Quarterly. [Abstract]

 

Stevenson, London (2025). Unbound Subgenres: Age Categorizations in Contemporary Romance and their Implications. Masters thesis, University of Alabama in Huntsville. [Excerpt] 

 

Tahreem, and Fatima Umay (2025). "Love Across Time: A Comparative Study of Romantic Expression in 19th-Century and Contemporary Fiction." Journal of Applied Linguistics and TESOL 8.4:1370-1378.  

 

Tebaldi, Catherine (2025). "Sex and the Supremacy of Christ: Sex and Romance in Christian Nationalism." On Christian Nationalism: Critical and Theological Perspectives. Ed. David M. Gides and Joan Braune. London: Routledge. 168-183. [Abstract. There is a short section on romance, but the name of the romance author is given incorrectly.]

 

Vargová, Veronika (2025). "Evolving Portrayals: From Freak Shows to Autism Representation in Contemporary Romance Novels." Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies. Online First. [Abstract]

 

Wallin Lämsä, Camilla (2025). Yearning Hours: Desire, Darcymania, and Readerly Attachments in the Digital Jane Austen Fandom. Linköping: Linköping University Electronic Press.

 

Witherspoon, Steve (2025). "Women Running from Houses: How Gothic Romance Paperbacks of the 1960s and 1970s Adapted a Romantic-era Visual Language of Women in Danger." Capstone, The UNC Asheville Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship 38.2. 

 

and finally an article which isn't exactly academic, but an obituary for a literary author, Fanny Howe, because

In the beginning, before the books she wrote under her own name, there were two romance novels about nurses. In discussions of Howe’s work, they are treated as a footnote, another charming detail in a life rich with incident. But read looking backward, having seen all that came later, the nurse novels come to look like more than a curiosity. Instead, they are the place where Howe first experienced the plotting of a novel as a kind of existential struggle; where she began working through, in writing, the questions that would sustain and bewilder her. They deserve the kind of careful attention Howe’s later work often likened to a spiritual imperative.

This article, by Meghan Racklin, gives them that attention. 

New Publications: Teaching, Bathsheba, Lesbian Pirates, Stay-At-Home French Canadians, Beverly Jenkins and some Socialism

Abrahamsson, Elin (2025) "Teaching Feminist Cultural Studies Using Popular Romance" Journal of Popular Romance Studies 14.

Deosun, Ceri (2025). "The Bible in Inspirational Fiction: The Case of Bathsheba." The Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction and Poetry. Ed. Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer. Oxon, Abingdon: Routledge. 348-363. [Excerpts available from Google Books and Routledge's page about the volume can be found here.]

Garber, Linda (2025). “The Present in Our Past: Reading Lesbian Historical Fiction.” Women’s Historical Fiction Across the Globe. Ed. Catherine Barbour and Karunika Kardak. Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. 59-75. [Abstract here.]

Luneau, Marie-Pier and Jean-Philippe Warren (2025). “Exoticism Without Cosmopolitanism: The Quebec Romance Novel of the 1940s and 1950s.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 29.1: 154-166. [Abstract]

 

Moore, Jeania Ree V. (2025). “The Religious Work of Beverly Jenkins’s Black Historical Romance.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 14.

 

Nielson, Annika (2025) "The Summer of YA Love: Young Adult Romance, Tiktok, and the Classroom," The Utah English Journal 53, Article 14.

 

Timlin, Carrie (2024). "“The Workers Must Strive if the Butterflies Must Live”: Ethel Mannin’s Love’s Winnowing , the Socialist Romance Novel, and British Working-Class Women." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 43.2:197-217.

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).

--- 

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/

---

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]

New Publications: Comics, Second Hand Bookshops, Islands, Hispanisms, Race, Young People, Fatness, Radway and Chinese Readers

Brunet, Peyton and Blair Davis (2022). Comic Book Women: Characters, Creators, and Culture in the Golden Age. Austin: University of Texas Press. [Chapter 8 is about romance comics: https://doi.org/10.7560/324110-010]

Farooqui, Javaria (2022). "Romance in an Old Bookshop." The Bridge Magazine 1:66-69. [This is available freely online. It discusses the distribution of second-hand romances in Pakistan and the connection with social class.]

Fresno-Calleja, Paloma (2022). “Repurposing Fantasy Island: Lani Wendt Young’s Telesā Series and the Politics of Postcolonial Romance.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2022.2054011

González-Cruz, María-Isabel. 2022. Hispanicisms in Romance Fiction. An Annotated Glossary. Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press. [Details from the publisher.]

Hendricks, Margo (2022). Race and Romance: Coloring the Past. Arizona State University. [This is available to read for free online. This includes discussion of two novels by Beverly Jenkins and also Margo Hendricks's own romance novels (written as Elysabeth Grace).]

Herrera, Carolina M. (2022). Examining the relation between media engagement and developmental outcomes in adolescents and emerging adults: an exploration of engagement with and impact of young adult literature media among youth. PhD thesis, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. [Discusses romance reading.]

McDavis-Conway, Shana (2022). “Self-conscious, unapologetic, and straight: fat protagonists in romantic fiction.” Fat Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/21604851.2022.2047337

Stetson, Suzanne (2022). "Reconciling Reader Response and Feminism in Late Twentieth-Century Erotic Historical Romances." INCITE: Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship 13.

Tang, Ning (2022). "Reading Online Romance Novels Is Related To Chinese Readers' View of Love." Academic Journal of Humanities & Social Science 5.2:32-45.

New Publications: Medical Romance, Romance in the Caribbean, Iran, Philippines, Quebec, Sweden and more

Arnold-Forster, Agnes (2021). “Racing Pulses: Gender, Professionalism and Health Care in Medical Romance Fiction.” History Workshop Journal. [Open Access]

Abrahamsson, Elin (2021). “Superwomen, Latte Dads and Feminist Alphas: Negotiations on Feminism in Contemporary Swedish Popular Romance Novels.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 10.

Boivin, Karol'Ann and Marie-Pier Luneau (2021). "Qu’ont en commun Mimi Estival, Roxanne d’Avril et Georgette Mars? Auctorialité et roman sentimental québécois de l’après guerre (1944-1965)." Authorship 10.1

Egilsdatter Sleire, Maria (2021). “Only I shall taste your body’s joys:” The Erotic Function of Female Corporeality in The Flame and the Flower and Fifty Shades of Grey. Master's Thesis, University of Bergen.

Hughes, Bill (2021). "Genre Mutation in Young Adult Gothic: The Dialectics of Dystopia and Romance in Holly Black's The Coldest Girl in Coldtown." Young Adult Gothic Fiction: Monstrous Selves/Monstrous Others. Ed. Michelle J. Smith and Kristine Moruzi. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. [More details here.]

Naeej, Elham (2021). "Parting the Curtain: The Virgin Heroine and the ‘Westoxified’ Villain in Contemporary Iranian Romance Novels." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 10.

Nickel, Eleanor Hersey (2020). Christian Popular Culture from The Chronicles of Narnia to Duck Dynasty. Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers. [There is a chapter about Francine Rivers's Redeeming Love. Excerpt available here.] 

Parnell, Claire, Andrea Anne Trinidad & Jodi McAlister (2021). "Live literature in the Philippines: an ethnographic study of #RomanceClass and reading as performance." Creative Industries Journal. Online First. [Abstract]

Parnell, Claire, Andrea Anne Trinidad & Jodi McAlister (2021). "Hello, Ever After: #RomanceClass and Online-Only Live Literature in the Philippines in 2020." M/C Journal, 24 (3).

Pierre-Robertson, Petronetta (2021). "Literature as an Agent of Change." Gender and Domestic Violence in the Caribbean. Ed. Ann Marie Bissessar and Camille Huggins. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. 87-103. [More details here and here.]

Warren, Jean-Philippe and Marie-Pier Luneau (2021). "The Best Romance Dime Novels on the (French-Canadian) Market: The Promotional Strategies of Police-Journal, 1944-1963." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 10.

New to the Romance Wiki Bibliography: African Love Stories, Masculinity, Pirates, Pregnancy, Virginity and Some Romance History

Here's what's new to the Romance Wiki Bibliography:

Clasen, Tricia. 2017. 

“Masculinity and Romantic Myth in Contemporary YA Romance.” In Gender(ed) Identities: Critical Rereadings of Gender in Children’s and Young Adult Literature, edited by Tricia Clasen and Holly Hassel. New York: Routledge, pp. 228–241.

Gehrmann, Susanne, 2018. 

“Remediating Romance: Forms and Functions of New Media in Contemporary Love Stories from Togo and South Africa”. Africa Today 65.1: 65-84.

Harris, Racheal, 2018. 

“Really Romantic? Pirates in Romantic Fiction.” Pirates in History and Popular Culture, edited by Antonio Sanna (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company Publishing), pp. 109–119. Excerpt

McAlister, Jodi Ann, 2015. 

"Romancing the Virgin: Female Virginity Loss and Love in Popular Literature in the West". PhD thesis, Macquarie University, 2015. [Abstract and link to pdf]

 

Rosanowski, Annika, 2019. 

"Can She Have It All? Pregnancy Narratives in Contemporary Category Romance", Journal of Popular Romance Studies 8 (2019).

Waller, Philip, 2006. 

Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [See chapters "In Cupid's Chains: Charles Garvice" (681-701) and "Hymns and Heroines: Florence Barclay" (702-728).]

PopCAANZ 2018: Byron, Disenchantment, FBI, Feminism, Gender, Italy, "Magical Negroes", Names, South-East Asia, Telenovelas, Twitter, YA

Details are available for the PopCAANZ conference which is currently taking place at Auckland University of Technology. This year there are lots of papers on romance and I'll include excerpts from their abstracts. The conference continues tomorrow, and I'll add links to Twitter threads as they appear.

Donna Maree Hanson - Popular romance fiction: flirting with feminism

popular romance fiction regularly depicts feminist social issues. In this sense, the concept of Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’ applies — ‘this partly unconscious “taking in” of rules, values and dispositions...’ (Webb, Schirato, & Dahanher, 2002, p. 44). Contemporary popular romance novels are set in the everyday context and as such cannot but help portray the world in which the authors and their characters exist, including social issues present in the mind of the author, whether consciously or unconsciously. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s and since, the woman’s movement has been politically active and concepts of feminism have entered into everyday discourse. [...] research indicates that writers as well as readers of popular romance fiction have no issue reconciling their concept of feminism with writing and reading in the genre.

Lucy Sheerman - “Exempt from all affection and from all contempt”: necessary evil and the figure of the Byronic hero in romance novels

Two hundred years since his first appearance in print, the Byronic anti-hero - ‘that man of loneliness and mystery, / Scarce seen to smile, and seldom heard to sigh’ - is a figure who continues to define representations of the hero in romance novels.

The influence of this angry and defiant fallen angel on the writing of the Brontës has been well documented. In my paper I will consider four Governess novels, published by Mills & Boon in 2016 as a homage to Charlotte Brontë’s iconic romance novel Jane Eyre, and the Byronic traces of the heroes who feature in them.

The romance novel’s continued preoccupation with the Byronic anti-hero is central to the genre’s staged encounters with otherness and its exploration of emotional affect. The literary device of the anti-hero shaped the development of romance tropes such as plot, conflict and point of view, and also (as I will argue) gave rise to the Byronic anti-heroine.

Kathrina Haji Mohd Daud - Cross-cultural romance, feminism and femininity in Southeast Asian fiction

In this paper, I explore how the negotiation of cross-cultural romance also elicits a particular Southeast Asian feminism in three texts: Zen Cho’s The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo (2012, Malaysian), Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan’s Sarong Party Girls (2016, Singaporean) and Ayisha Malik’s Jewel (2017, Bruneian). [...] I argue in this paper that these novels construct a feminist femininity that allows the heroines to remain connected to and sanctioned by their individually patriarchal heritages, while also allowing them to critique and expand existing expectations of feminine identity through the negotiation of cross-cultural relationships.

Jodi McAlister's tweeted a thread on Hanson, Sheerman and Daud's papers.

Ellen Carter - What’s in a romance hero/ine’s name? a corpus study of gay and straight romance character names

The first names parents give to their female versus male children have different phonological (sound) characteristics. My work extends this from the real to the fictional world, studying names given by authors to their romance heroes – gay and straight – as well as to straight heroines. My corpus contains 2,536 contemporary romance novels: 1,668 with a male/female pairing and 868 with a male/male couple, resulting in 3,404 heroes (1,668 straight; 1,736 gay) and 1,668 (straight) heroines. My results demonstrate that the phonological characteristics of names given to gay heroes are statistically significantly less masculine/more feminine than the names of straight heroes. Given that gay romance is a fast-growing romance sub-genre predominantly written and read by straight women, I explore possible cultural implications of this finding and how it may feed stereotypes and shape perceptions within (straight and queer) societies.

Carter: striking result - male characters much more likely to have names with /k/ sounds, especially male characters in M/F romance. #popcaanz18

— Jodi McAlister (@JodiMcA) 2 July 2018

Eden French - Loving invisible bodies: transgender representation in popular romance

The few novels that do feature trans heroines and heroes — niche even in small LGBTQ presses — are hailed as daring simply for permitting trans protagonists to be plausible subjects of love and desire. [...] romance’s historically heteronormative politics of gender has constrained writers and even scholars from treating transgender themes; mainstream discussion around trans bodies still manifests routinely in fetishistic and dehumanising ways. Moreover questions of embodiment (for example, the politics of gender-affirming surgery) remain contested even in the trans community. Speaking as a scholar and writer, I will discuss existing examples of trans embodiment in romance, and outline possible reconciliations for the challenge of bringing trans love into the mainstream.

French has found disclaimers and disavowals in some of her corpus which make it clear that the assumed readership is entirely cis. #popcaanz18

— Jodi McAlister (@JodiMcA) 2 July 2018

Francesca Pierini - “He looks like he’s stepped out of a painting”: The idealization and appropriation of Italian timelessness through the experience of romantic love

Marina Fiorato’s The Glassblower of Murano (2008) tells the story of Eleonora, a young woman who travels to Venice in search of her genealogical past and existential roots. Coming from London, Eleonora incarnates a “modern” outlook on what she assumes to be the timeless life and culture of Venice. At one point in the novel, admiring the old houses on the Canal Grande, Eleonora is “on fire with enthusiasm for this culture where the houses and the people kept their genetic essence so pure for millennia that they look the same now as in the Renaissance” (2008, 15). [...] Within narratives centred on this notion, “falling in love in Italy” occasions the appropriation of a privileged relation with history and the past, often contrasted with the displacement and rootlessness that seem to characterize the modern places, people and lifestyles of England and North America. Through a discussion of two Anglo-American historical popular novels set in Italy, this paper proposes an exploration of the notion of romantic love as a force reconnecting displaced and fragmented souls with a supposedly timeless and unbroken society; a society perceived as holding a privileged relation with ancient traditions and the past.

Pierini has a paper freely available online which is quite similar, though lacking the focus on romantic love.

Jodi McAlister's tweeted a thread about Carter, French and Pierini's papers.

Maria Ramos-Garcia - This is not a romance novel but a telenovela”: metafiction and bilingualism in Jane the Virgin

Jane the Virgin, based on a Venezuelan telenovela, is at the same time a parody and an homage to the popular Latin American television genre. Among the many unusual features that contribute to the originality and success of this TV series are an omniscient narrator, a metafictional discourse, a bilingual and bicultural setting and an unapologetic, unabashed, and explicit use and abuse of the conventions of the soap-opera, with a touch of Latin American magical realism. [...] This paper will provide an overview of the series, concentrating both on the Latino socio-cultural aspects that rarely make it into mainstream US television, and on the metafictional discussions of the telenovela and the romance novel — both as genres and as philosophies of love — that permeate the narrative.

Angela Hart - Combating the romance genre stigma: reading romance in the digital age

Avid readers of the romance genre can find their voices in the online sphere using social media platforms such as Twitter, utilizing the hashtags #amreadingromance and #romancelandia. Romance readers utilize the technological affordances of the platform to form groups, post about novels, and find relevant information on their specific genre. By using anonymous user login information, unidentifiable profile pictures, and unique hashtags, romance readers are turning to Twitter.

Jodi McAlister tweeted a thread about Ramos-Garcia and Hart's papers before stopping so she could present her own.

Jodi McAlister - Not quite YA, not yet adult: the short but complex history of “New Adult” fiction

This paper will trace the history of the new adult genre category, using the notion of the “genre world,” as theorised by Lisa Fletcher, Beth Driscoll, and Kim Wilkins (2018). [...] this paper will explore the generic roots of new adult fiction in young adult fiction, popular romance fiction, and fan fiction, and how these parent genres have given shape to popular forms and structures of the new adult category. It will provide a much-needed scholarly framework for understanding this emergent genre category, its gradual formation, and its complex place at the borders of several different genre worlds.

Eric Selinger - Disenchantment and its discontents: Weber, Illouz, and popular romance fiction

Modernity and romantic love make uncomfortable bedfellows. As Max Weber explains, modernity is marked by “disenchantment,” not just of the natural world, but also of the inner life and of interpersonal relations. Building on Weber, Eva Illouz argues that we now live in an “ironic structure of romantic feeling, which marks the move from an ‘enchanted’ to a disenchanted cultural definition of love” (Why Love Hurts). This talk will look at how several contemporary authors negotiate and resist “disenchantment.” Of particular interest will be Ayisha Malik’s Sofia Khan is Not Obliged and The Other Side of Happiness, a pair of “hijabi chick-lit” novels that take both sides in this great debate, Courtney Milan’s Hold Me, which casts a cool, modern eye on romantic love without yielding to the irony that Illouz describes, and/or Alexis Hall’s Glitterland, which deploys religious discourse to redeem both love and popular media culture.

Nattie Golubov - The surveillant gaze in FBI romance

This paper is my first effort at thinking through several issues recurrent in the subgenre of the romance police procedural: the configuration of the spaces of home, homeland and nation as domestic territories, besieged not by a foreign but a home grown threat that violates the integrity of the boundaries between private and public, interior and exterior; the role of individual trauma as a mark of the vulnerability of the self and the foundation of an affective investment in the protection of national territory; the "Americanness" of the values and practices that govern social dynamics in the workplace, the self-chosen family and the couple. National character is defined in opposition to the rendering of the criminalised enemy and, together with collective, institutional agency and cooperation, is also the best safeguard against social disorder. Eventually I intend to show that this romance subgenre mediates and manages social fears and anxieties by highlighting the strengths of a systemic framework and ignoring the negative aspects of surveillance: anxiety and fear lie at the heart of romantic relationships and the novels offer a means of managing them with the emotional investment in family and trust in law enforcement.

Jodi McAlister's tweeted a thread about Selinger and Golubov's papers.

Kecia Ali - Writing while white: black martyrs as “Magical Negroes” in Nora Roberts’ novels

Roberts’ heroes and heroines are nearly always white; occasional Black characters are typically what Ikard (2017:94) describes as “magical negroes ... whose raison d’être in white redemption narratives is to support/heal/enlighten/inspire the white character(s) in crisis.” This paper explores four Roberts’ novels in which the violent murder of a Black character serves as the catalyst for vital emotional developments between a white couple or among a team of white characters [...] the single-title adventure romance Hot Ice (1987), the category romance Convincing Alex (1994), the stand-alone mystical romance Three Fates (2002), and Morrigan’s Cross (2006), the first installment of a paranormal romance trilogy.

New to the Wiki: Items on Mary Stewart, Nora Roberts, adoption, economics, monsters and more

Laura Vivanco

Recently added to the Romance Wiki bibliography are:

Blouin, Michael J., 2018. 

Mass-Market Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism, 1972–2017. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.[13] [See Chapter 3 on 'Danielle Steel and the New Home Economics' because Blouin refers to romance scholarship and describes Steel as "the undisputed master of the mass-market romance" (75). This is, however, disputed, both by many romance readers (thanks to everyone who responded to my tweets about this!) and by Steel herself, who has "insisted that her books aren't romantic fiction. 'They're not really about romance ... I really write more about the human condition,' she said. '[Romance] is an element in life but I think of romance novels as more of a category and I write about the situations we all deal with – loss and war and illness and jobs and careers, good things, bad things, crimes, whatever'." (The Guardian) ] 

Bradford, Clare, 2013. 

"Monsters: Monstrous Identities in Young Adult Romance", (Re)Imagining the World: Children’s Literature’s Response to Changing Times, ed Yan Wu, Kerry Mallan and Roderick McGillis. Heidelberg: Springer. 115-125. Excerpt and unpaginated version

 

Chelton, Mary K., 2018. 

“Searching for Birth Parents or Adopted Children: Finding without Seeking in Romance Novels”, Reference & User Services Quarterly 57.4: 266-273. Abstract and link to pdf.

Golubov, Nattie, 2017. 

"Reading the Romance Writer as an Author-Entrepreneur," Interférences littéraires/Literaire interferenties 21 (December), "Gendered Authorial Corpographies", Ed. Aina Pérez Fontdevila & Meri Torras Francès, 131-160.

 

Keen, Suzanne, 2018. 

"Probable Impossibilities: Historical Romance Readers Talk Back." Style: A Quarterly Journal of Aesthetics, Poetics, Stylistics, and Literary Criticism, vol. 52, no. 1-2, 2018, pp. 127-132. Excerpt [This is about readers of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series, which is not necessarily considered to be composed of "romance novels".]

Keegan, Faye Jessica, 2016. 

"Soft metafiction(s) : Mary Stewart and the self-reflective middlebrow." Ph.D. thesis, University of Newcastle. Details and pdf

 

Keegan, Faye, 2017. 

"‘Snob Value’: Gender and Literary Value in Mary Stewart." Women: A Cultural Review 28.3: 240-261.

 

Killeen, Jarlath, 2018. 

'Nora Roberts: the Power of Love', in Twenty-First Century Popular Fiction, ed. Bernice M. Murphy and Stephen Matterson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), pp.53-65.

New to the Wiki: Islands in Romance, YA, NA, Crusie's Buildings, Military Romance, the British Empire.

Laura Vivanco

Crane, Ralph and Lisa Fletcher, 2016. 

“The Genre of Islands: Popular Fiction and Performative Geographies.” Island Studies Journal 11.2 (2016): 637-650.

Gillis, Bryan and Joanna Simpson, 2015. 

Sexual Content in Young Adult Literature: Reading between the Sheets (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield). [See Chapter 6 on "Sexual Content in Young Adult Romance".] Excerpt

 

Gleason, William, 2016. 

"The Inside Story: Jennifer Crusie and the Architecture of Love." Popular Fiction and Spatiality: Reading Genre Settings. Ed. Lisa Fletcher. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 79-93. Excerpt Abstract

Kitchen, Veronica, 2016. 

"Veterans and Military Masculinity in Popular Romance Fiction." Critical Military Studies. Abstract

Teo, Hsu-Ming, 2016. 

"Imperial Affairs: The British Empire and the Romantic Novel, 1890-1939", New Directions in Popular Fiction: Genre, Distribution, Reproduction, ed. Ken Gelder. (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 87-110. Excerpt

 

Tienkamp, Aaf, 2016. 

"New Adult Romance: An Emerging Genre." Master’s Dissertation Literary Studies. Programme: Writing, Editing and Mediating, University of Groningen.