A very long list of new (and some not so new) publications about romance

The open access journal TEXT dedicated a special issue to romance/romantic fiction, under the subtitle "Trope Actually – Popular Romance" but it wasn't just about romances in the 'central romantic relationship +HEA' sense: there were pieces of short fiction as well as an article on bonkbusters and another on historical fiction. You can find the whole issue here. 

Here, though, is a list of the articles in it which focus on romance:

Matthews, Amy, Justina Ashman, Millie Heffernan, Payton Hogan, Abby Guy, Harrison Stewart, Kathleen Stanley, Alex Cothren, and Elizabeth Duffield. 2025. “Editorial: Degrees of Love and Trope Actually.” TEXT 29 (Special 75): 1–7.

O’Mahony, Lauren, and Yolandi Botha. 2025. “Reading the Romance in Australia: The Preferences and Practices of Romance Readers from ARRA Survey Data.” TEXT 29 (Special 75): 1–22.

Matthews, Amy, Alex Cothron, and Rachel Hennessy. 2025. “Happily Ever after in the Age of Climate Crisis: The Argument for ‘Cli-Ro.’” TEXT 29 (Special 75): 1–18.

Mulvey, Alexandra, and Hsu-Ming Teo. 2025. “‘You’re a Total Dick Sometimes, but It’s a Tolerable Kind of Dickishness’: Hegemonic Masculinity and Sports Romances.” TEXT 29 (Special 75): 1–20. 

Rouse, Lucy. 2025. “A Real Bad Boy: How Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us Exploits Romance Tropes.” TEXT 29 (Special 75): 1–17.

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Moving on to other new (or at least new to the database) publications: 

Abdul Majid, Amrah (2025). “Faith, Love and Spiritual Growth in Norhafsah Hamid’s Will You Stay? and Will You Love Me?.” Akademika 95.2: 319-332.

 

Aprieska, Rizkana and Bayu Kristianto (2025). "Penerjemahan Portmanteau dari Bahasa Inggris ke dalam Bahasa Indonesia dalam Novel Seri The Ravenels 1–4." Linguistik Indonesia 43.2:263-280.

 

Cho, Hyerim, Denice Adkins, Alicia K. Long, and Diogenes Da Silva Santos. "Webtoon Romance Reading and New Ways to Look at Genre Reading." Library Trends 74, no. 1 (2025): 148-169. 

 

Clement, Ella. 2025. “What Women Actually Want: Professions, Prestige, and Desire in Bestselling Fiction.” SocArXiv. [This is a pre-print and I'm not sure of its final destination. It's not all about romance, but there is a significant section which is.]

García-Aguilar, Alberto (2023). "De la novela rosa a la comedia romántica: Mi marido es usted (1938), de Mercedes Ballesteros, y el guion de Volver a soñar (1942), de Claudio de la Torre y José López Rubio." Ogigia. Revista Electrónica De Estudios Hispánicos 33: 97–118. [I know this one isn't very new, but it describes (in Spanish) a plot with a secret baby, in a novel from 1938, and I thought that was worth noting. I've come across an early Mary Burchell with a secret baby too (another one where the protagonists were married at the point the baby was conceived). Anyway, thought that might be of interest if anyone, at some point, decides to look into the history of various types of romance plot.]

Horáčková, Martina (2025). Exploring Romantasy Tropes: Analysis of Ali Hazelwood’s Bride. Bachelor’s thesis, Silesian University in Opava.

Horpestad, Amalie Fogtmann (2025). Beyond Romance: Generic Innovation in Lucinda Riley’s The Seven Sisters Series. Masters thesis, The University of Bergen.

 

Karamat, Yashfa and Rukhma Nawaz and Zainab Firdos. (2025). "Negotiating Reality and Fantasy through Magical Realism in Suleikha Snyder’s Big Bad Wolf." Advance Social Science Archive Journal 4.1: 2860–2876. 

 

Keran, Molly (2025). "Generic Guarantees." Mid Theory Collective. [This was looking at Hoover's It Ends with Us (and contrasting it with Jennifer Crusie's Crazy for You).] 

Knowles, Thomas and Christopher Smith (2025). “Female Labour at Bletchley Park: reality and (romantic) fiction.” Intelligence and National Security. Online First. Open access.

Larson, Christine (2025). The labor of love: romance authors and platform solidarity. Journal of Communication. [Abstract available here.]

 

Martín Coloma, Ricardo, 2025. “On Activist Mothers and Gentrifying Lovers: From the Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement to the Model-Minority Myth in the Caribbean Romance Novel.” Journal of American Studies. [Abstract here, though as I mention in my entry for this in the RSDB, I think maybe only one of the two novels looked at has a happy ending for a romantic relationship.]

 

McAlister, Jodi and Kate Cuthbert (2025). "Romantasy: An overview and a history." Synergy 23.2. [Abstract] 

Niebling, Laura (2025). "Consent capital: From Romantasy’s “Alpha male archetypes” toward a new cultural theory in post-digital storytelling." New Media & Society. Online First. 

Pataki Šumiga, Jelena (2025). "The Sweet Bonds of Society: Food Symbolism in Bridgerton." [sic] - A Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation 15.2. 

Pelegrina Gutiérrez, Alicia. (2024). "Los modelos femeninos en Idilio bajo el terror (1938) y María Victoria (1940), de Josefina de la Torre." Ogigia. Revista Electrónica De Estudios Hispánicos 35: 139–161.

Pelegrina, Alicia, 2024. “Franquismo y guerra civil en dos novelas rosas: Idilio bajo el terror (1938) y María Victoria (1940), de Josefina de la Torre”. Philologica Canariensia 30: 425-441.

Pradhan, Anil, 2025. "Return to Nature, Love: The Queer Potential of Rural Spaces and Travels in Contemporary Indian Gay Romance Fiction." Non-Western Approaches in Environmental Humanities. Ed. Gabriela Jarzębowska-Lipińska,  Aleksandra Ross and Krzysztof Skonieczny. Göttingen: V&R unipress. 183-199. [It is open access and should be available as a pdf from https://www.vr-elibrary.de/doi/pdf/10.14220/9783737018791 (the first page is blank, so keep scrolling!) and/or https://doi.org/10.14220/9783737018791.183 I haven't given it a separate entry in the database because it seems to be based on a chapter of the author's PhD thesis, and also many of the works discussed do not have happy endings, so are "romantic fiction" and not "romance". There are synopses in the thesis but not in this chapter.] 

Sare, Madelynn (2025). Assessing The Accessibility Of Queer Romance Book Covers As Digital Thumbnails: An Analysis Of Color Contrast, Colorblind Safety, And Typography Legibility. Master of Arts in Writing: Book Publishing, Portland State University.

 

van Peer, Willie and Anna Chesnokova (2025). "Love in Literature: Why Read About It?". International Handbook of Love: Transcultural and Transdisciplinary Perspectives (2nd edition).  Ed. Claude-Hélène Mayer and Elisabeth Vanderheiden. Springer, Cham.

Viklund, Julia (2025). Romantiska städer och spöken: Genreanvändning i samtida romance med magiska inslag. Bachelor’s thesis, Umeå University. 

New Publications, an Exhibition on Romance, and Coverage in the Media

• Indiana University's Lilly Library has an exhibition (from August 19th 2024 – February 15th 2025) celebrating romance:

In 2021, the Lilly Library became the first major American special collections library to take romance seriously—and we owe the foundation of this visionary collection to author, scholar, and antiquarian bookseller Rebecca Romney, cofounder of the bookselling firm Type Punch Matrix. A romance reader herself as well as an expert on the history of the book, Romney set out to assemble a collection of 100 important works in the history of romance fiction from 1769 to 1999. Because some of the hundred entries in the catalog contain multiple titles (such as the first 1,500 Harlequin Presents romances), these substantial and carefully researched selections became the core of the Lilly’s new romance collection. One of the things we love most about Romney’s selections is her focus on diversity—the history of the romance novel has never been only about straight white men and women.

As we continue to add historical and 21st century titles to the collection, our focus remains on the importance of the romance genre in the history of the book, the ways in which it empowered readers and writers, and also on the potential the genre holds for those who are not taken seriously by people in power to tell their stories of finding a “happily ever after” ending.

• Women's Weekly has an article marking Harlequin Mills & Boon's Australia office's 50th birthday. The article on M&B's history heavily features IASPR's Dr Jodi McAlister. 

• Slate reports on a trend in anti-billionaire romance novels.

New books are questioning the ethics of billionaires, having the heir to a family fortune come out against his father’s unethical business practices, and (in the historical context) having the wealthy risk their place in society by supporting progressive causes like the abolition of slavery. At least one author is trying to put together an antibillionaire romance anthology.

• Time has an article on the evolution of romance covers. This complements their list of the best 50 romances to read, curated by author Casey McQuiston, who also wrote an article for them explaining why "Romance Novels are Literature."
  

Even at its cheekiest or darkest or most satirical, it’s a genre made of sincerity. Opening ourselves earnestly to an emotional experience feels dangerous, and danger makes us nervous, and when we’re nervous, we laugh.But if we don’t laugh, if we don’t turn away, if we stop pretending to be too cool or too intellectual or too ironic to acknowledge our own desire, romance has so much to show us about ourselves. Which is exactly what literature should do.

And here are the new publications I've come across:

 

Horst, Lauren (2024). "The Romance Novel." The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 8: American Fiction since 1940, Ed. Cyrus R. K. Patell and Deborah Lindsay Williams. Oxford University Press. 468–483. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192844729.003.0041

 

Horst, Lauren (2024). "Exemplum J. R. Ward, Dark Lover (2005)." The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 8: American Fiction since 1940, Ed. Cyrus R. K. Patell and Deborah Lindsay Williams. Oxford University Press.  484–489. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192844729.003.0042  

 

Kamrath, Kelly (2024). French Interwar Popular Romance and Ideals of Femininity: A Literary and Historical Study of Magali. Master of Arts, University of Nebraska. 

 

Moussaoui, Abdelghani (2024). "On the Racialization of the Moroccan ‘Other’ in Orientalist Romance." International Journal of Language and Literary Studies 6.2:103–116.

Moussaoui, Abdelghani (2024). "The Discursive Formation of Ethnic Subjectivities and Identities in Popular Romance." International Journal of Language and Literary Studies 6.3:106-119.

 

Stewart, Eowyn (2024). A Hero in Tears: How the Female Gaze Elicits Male Emotional Vulnerability in Romance Novels. Honors Thesis, Abilene Christian University.

Past Conference Videos, Current Exhibition Feedback and New Publications

Videos are now freely available of some of the events from last year's Popular Romance Fiction: The Literature of Hope conference, held at Yale University.

https://romancefictionconference.yale.edu/gallery/popular-romance-fiction-literature-hope-conference-photos-and-video

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Andrea Martucci's Shelf Love podcast episode about this exhibition of John Ennis's art for romance covers is available here: https://shelflovepodcast.com/episodes/season-2/episode-153/covering-romance-john-enniss-art-thoughts-on-fandom

Smart Bitch Sarah's feedback (including lots of photos) on the exhibition can be found here: https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2024/02/covering-romance-romance-novel-cover-art-by-john-ennis/

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And here are the new publications:

Burge, Amy, Jodi McAlister and Charlotte Ireland (2024). '“Prince Charming with an Erection”: The Sensational Pleasures of the Bonkbuster.' Contemporary Women's Writing https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpae002 [This shows how bonkbusters are not romance.]

Johnson, Jacqueline E. (2024) "Lusting out loud: racialized aurality, podcast intimacy, and the uses of thirst". Communication, Culture and Critique. Online First. [Excerpt and details here. As I mentioned over on BlueSky, the focus on "the expansive middle" reminded me of Athena Bellas and Jodi McAlister 's (non-paywalled) recent article on audio erotica. So I wondered if such a focus might have something to do with an audio experience? And/or a difference between what readers/listeners seek from erotica vs. romance fiction? Jodi suggested it could be to do with the length of time available and that the episodes could be thought of as 'a little slice of life from what An Goris calls the "post-HEA"'.]

 

Markova, M. V. (2024). "Georgette Heyer, history, and historical fiction." Voprosy literatury 1:198-203. [This is written in Russian, and in any case I could not access the pdf from https://doi.org/10.31425/0042-8795-2024-1-198-203.]

Morden, Christina (2023). Innovations in Romance Novel Distribution at Harlequin, Sourcebooks, and Raincoast Books. Master of Publishing, Simon Fraser University. 

 

Pates, Giuliana (2023). "Reading Practices and Gender Politicization: How do Young Argentinean Women Read Romantic Novels." Revista Interdisciplinaria de Estudios de Género de El Colegio de México 9.1:1–26. [This is in Spanish.]

Spencer, L. (2024). '“Walk like a chameleon”: Reflecting on my teaching journey at a South African university'. Educare, (1), 192–215. https://doi.org/10.24834/educare.2024.1.1093 [Dr Lynda Gichanda Spencer, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Literary Studies in English at Rhodes University, discussed her teaching of African romance fiction as part of a panel at the IASPR 2020 conference. There are a couple of paragraphs about her 2019 third-year elective course titled Global Chick-Lit or Trans-Global Literature? Re-reading Contemporary Women’s Fiction in this online paper, discussing how she asked students to compare Harlequin Mills & Boon romances with romances by African publishers.]

New Publications and an Exhibition: Gender and Agression, Publishing and More

Lots of open access articles!

Golubov, Nattie (2023). "Female Warriors, Social Injustice and the Transformational Force of Anger in Jaye Wells' Sabina Kane Series." Esferas Literarias 6: 21-37.

Larson, Christine, and Ashley Carter (2023). "Love is love: Reverse isomorphism and the rise of LGBTQ+ romance publishing." New Media & Society.

Markasović, Valentina (2023). "Challenging Gender Stereotypes in Holly Black’s The Folk of the Air Trilogy." Breaking Stereotypes in American Popular Culture: Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference of the Croatian Association for American Studies: 41-56. 

Miclea, Adelina (2023). "Colleen Hoover’s Formulas for Best-Sellers as Seen in Reminders of Him and It Ends with Us." Romanian Journal of English Studies 20.1:72-79.

Mulvey, Alexandra Hazel (2023). Gender and Sex Stereotypes in Sports Romance Fiction. Masters thesis, Macquarie University. [The link is to a pdf.]

Pierini, Francesca (2023). "Towards a Regime of Authenticity: Reading A Room with a View through the Lens of Contemporary Romance Scholarship." LEA - Lingue E Letterature D'Oriente E D'Occidente 12: 217-228.

And quite a bit less accessible, but no doubt still of interest to readers of this blog:

"Covering Romance", an exhibition and sale of romance novel cover art by John Ennis, will be taking place in Yardley, Pennsylvania, at the AOY Art Center Gallery from February 10th (Opening Reception), with viewing open to the public on 11, 16, 17, 18 February (12-5pm). More details about the party for the opening can be found here: https://www.aoyarts.org/event-5484048

 

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.

New: Courtney Milan, Historical Romance, Teaching Romance, Podcasts, Mills & Boon Vintage Covers, New Frontiers, and more

I'm going to start with the two new articles in the Journal of Popular Romance Studies for the entirely biased reason that one of them is by me.

• Pierini, Francesca (2022). "Critical Approaches to the Modern and Contemporary Anglophone Romance Novel (From A Room with a View to Fifty Shades of Grey)." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 11. [This is an article describing a seminar taught by Pierini.]

• Vivanco, Laura (2022). "Historical Accuracy, Racism, Courtney Milan, and The Duke Who Didn’t Conform to Genre Norms." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 11.

There have been a couple of podcasts that I thought would be of interest to readers of this blog:

In the first, Lucy Hargrave gives an overview of her PhD research:

Queer Romance: A History w/ @phdlifewithlucy is live! Lucy has dated queer romance w/ an HEA back to 1906, but it's been a rollercoaster with distinct eras since then. Learn more: listen or read!https://t.co/7wb0iRjSQNhttps://t.co/e2E1O0TdRO
transcript: https://t.co/aOka5buKwr pic.twitter.com/WDcnlv3vlq

— Shelf Love: Romantic Love Stories in Pop Culture (@ShelfLovePod) June 7, 2022

In other news, Angela Toscano has joined forces with Molly Keran (a PhD student) and Candy Tan (who I think is the same Candy who used to be half of Smart Bitches Trashy Books) and in this first episode they're discussing bodice rippers:

Holy alabaster orbs, Batman! We've released our first episode, and you can listen to it here: https://t.co/N9kPQZyF1t. Give it a listen to learn (perhaps more than you ever wanted to know) about what bodice rippers are, where they came from, and why they matter.

— Let the Bodice Hit the Floor (@bodicehitsfloor) June 14, 2022

The University of Reading has been cataloguing their Mills & Boon romance collection and as part of that process they've been digitising many of covers. You can find them here, mostly sorted by decade: https://vrr.reading.ac.uk/browse/Special_Collections_Library/Mills_and_Boon

New Frontiers in Popular Romance: Essays on the Genre in the 21st Century, edited by Susan Fanetti, appears to be available now as an ebook but is still forthcoming in the print version. It includes:

• "Healing Toxic Masculinity in Sweatpants Season by Danielle Allen" - Jonathan A. Allan
• "From Darcy to Dickheads: Why Do Women Love the Bad Boy?" - Ashleigh Taylor Sullivan
• "Tingles and Shivers: First Kisses and Intimate Civility in Eliza Redgold’s Historical Harlequin Romances Pre–and Post-#MeToo" - Debra Dudek, Elizabeth Reid Boyd, Madalena Grobbelaar, and Rose Williams
• "I Thought You’d Never Ask: Consent in Contemporary Romance" - Courtney Watson
• "“Say, could that lass be I?” Outlander, Transmedial ­Time-Travel, and Women’s Historical Fantasy" - Ashley Elizabeth Christensen
• "“Place the glass before you, and draw in chalk your own picture”: The Recasting of Jane Eyre" - Lucy Sheerman
• "“The Realness” in Jasmine Guillory’s Sista Lit Rom Com Novels" - Camille S. Alexander
• "Eating Disorders and Romance" - Ellen Carter
• "The “Grandly and Inhospitably Strange” World of Autistic Heroines in Romance Fiction" - Wendy Wagner
• "Women Policing Whiteness: Deviance and Surveillance in Contemporary Police Procedural Romance" - Nattie Golubov
• "“I’m a mehfil, I’m a gathering to which everyone is invited”: Reading “Outcast” Romances in Arundhati Roy’s Fiction" - Lucky Issar
• "The System That Loves Me: The State of Human Existence in ­Web-Based Romantic Fiction from ­Post-Socialist China" - Jin Feng
• "Original Slash, Romance, and C.S. Pacat’s Captive Prince" - Maria Albert
  

You can find an excerpt here and the publisher's page about the book is here.

Two other new items are:

• Fenske, Emma K. (2022). Romancing the New Evangelical Woman. Master of Arts, Baylor University. 

• Frederick, Rhonda D. (2022). Evidence of Things Not Seen: Fantastical Blackness in Genre Fictions. Rutgers University Press. [One of the chapters reads Colin Channer's Waiting in Vain as a romance.]

As always, I've added the details about all these new items to the Romance Scholarship Database. I thought I should just mention that I do also sometimes find and add items which are new to me but which are older, and I don't usually post about those here at Teach Me Tonight.

Forthcoming Events (Black Romance and Concepts in Popular Genre Fiction) and some Articles/Posts

On 17 September the Center for Black Diaspora at DePaul University is hosting

Black Romance: Past, Present, and Future

Moderator: Dr. Margo Hendricks

Four panelists:

• Dr. Piper Huguley,
• Dr. Katrina (Nicole) Jackson,
• Tatianna Richardson,
• Dr. Yakini Etheridge,

This round-table brings together romance writers, scholars, editors, readers, and podcasters to discuss their views on the past, present, and future of Black Romance in the United States.

Sponsoring Institutions:

Center for Black Diaspora, DePaul University

Center for Contemporary Literature and Culture, University of Birmingham

International Association for the Study of Popular Romance.

You can sign up here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/black-romance-past-present-and-future-tickets-167463563025

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Call for Papers: Concepts in Popular Genre Fiction

Deakin University, 6-8 December 2021

Convenors: Dr Jodi McAlister and Dr Helen Young

This virtual symposium, to be held 6-8 December through Deakin University as part of the Literature and its Readers research network, seeks to open up different sorts of questions, in order to consider other ways of examining, analysing, and utilising popular genre fiction. Specifically, we seek papers exploring concepts, ideas, and motifs, and the role that they play in popular genre/s.

Submissions close on 31 August.

On Twitter it's been announced that:

The first of our keynote speakers will be Farah Mendlesohn (@effjayem). Farah is the author of several acclaimed books on popular genre fiction, including Rhetorics of Fantasy and Children’s Fantasy Literature: An Introduction. Our second keynote speaker will be Jayashree Kamble (@prof_romance). Jayashree is currently the vice-president of @IASPR and the author of Making Meaning in Popular Romance Fiction: An Epistemology. And finally, we will host a keynote panel by the research team from the Genre Worlds project, Lisa Fletcher (@lmfletcher72), Beth Driscoll (@Beth_driscoll) and Kim Wilkins. This fascinating project explores genre in 21st century Australian popular fiction.

More details here.

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Steve Ammidown's written an article titled “Romance Writers of America Rescind Award for LakotaGenocide Redemption Narrative” for Library Journal.

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Mary Lynne Nielsen interviewed veteran romance cover artist James Griffin about his work and changes in the industry. The interview can be found here and also at AAR.

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Charlotte wrote a series of posts about "paratexts." This one is about the different ways that authors market the selling points of their novels on Twitter, as compared to what appears on the books themselves: https://closereadingromance.com/2021/06/22/paratexts-part-three-the-art-of-the-one-click/

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KJ Charles wrote a post about obstacles in romance, illustrated with references to Alexis Hall's For Real:

But there’s a lot more obstacles than the obvious headliners.

Power imbalance is a big one. Where there’s any sort of difference between the characters there’s probably some sort of power imbalance, which can lead to uncertainty, insecurity, misunderstanding, resentment. Obvious areas for power imbalance are gender-related (including in queer relationships), and disparities in wealth, health, professional status, class, sexual experience, age, perceived attractiveness, perceived value as a person. It’s always worth thinking about these.

(For an entire book about power imbalance–across age, wealth, education, status, sexual experience, and class–Alexis Hall’s For Real traces a relationship between an older, authoritative, wealthy sub and a young, less secure, broke dom. It’s a masterclass in power imbalances going both ways, and the complexities of how they shift and seesaw.)

Roundup of Mostly 2019 Bibliography Entries

I'd been saving these items up in case the Romance Wiki came back online soon, but it hasn't, so I'm just going to post this list of new-ish items now.

Bazenga, Aline, 2019. 

'Turismo e Romance na Literatura Popular Cor-de-rosa Tendo por Cenário a Ilha da Madeira', Memoria e Identidade Insular: Religiosidade, Festividades e Turismo nos Arquipélagos da Madeira e Açores, Coordenação Duarte Nuno Chaves. Velas, S. Jorge: CHAM (Centro de Humanidades Santa Casa da Misericórdia das Velas), 323-335.

Cella, Laurie J. C., 2019. 

The Personal and the Political in American Working-Class Literature, 1850-1939: Defining the Radical Romance. (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington). Excerpt [Cella "make[s] the case that working-class women, in history and in literature, constructed romance narratives in which they were the heroines, reveled in the adventures created by Laura Jean Libbey, and celebrated their new entry in the working world" (5)]

 

Fernández Rodríguez, Carolina, 2019. 

"Chamorro WWII Romances: Combating Erasure with Tales of Survival and Vitality", Journal of Popular Romance Studies 8.

 

Gerlitz, Laura Michelle, 2019. 

"Judging a Book By Its Cover: Bringing the Digital Humanities into Reader’s Advisory", MA thesis, Digital Humanities and Library and Information Studies, University of Alberta. ["This study sets out to examine recurring themes found on book wrappers published by Harlequin in their first seventeen years [1949-1968] [...]. The resulting patterns will be connected to reader’s advisory as appeal factors in successful book selection by readers."]

Jarvis, Christine, 2006. 

"Using Fiction for Transformation." New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education 109: 69-77. Abstract

Legallois, Dominique, Thierry Charnois, and Thierry Poibeau, 2016. 

“Repérer les clichés dans les romans sentimentaux grâce à la méthode des ‘motifs’.” Lidil. Revue de linguistique et de didactique des langues 53: 95–117.

 

Toscano, Angela, 2019. 

"The Idolatry of the Real: Form, Formula, and Happy Endings in Romance Literature", Chapter 8, Iconoclasm: The Breaking and Making of Images, edited by Rachel F. Stapleton and Antonio Viselli. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, pp. 173-192.

Valovirta, Elina, 2019. 

"No Ordinary Love: The Romantic Formula of Stepsibling Erotica". Thinking with the Familiar in Contemporary Literature and Culture 'Out of the Ordinary', Ed. Joel Kuortti, Kaisa Ilmonen, Elina Valovirta, Janne Korkka (Leiden: Brill Rodopi), pp. 161-??. Abstract

 

Veros, Vassiliki, 2019. 

"Metatextual Conversations: The Exclusion/Inclusion of Genre Fiction in Public Libraries and Social Media Book Groups", Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association. 254-267. Abstract

And Phraseology and Style in Subgenres of the Novel: A Synthesis of Corpus and Literary Perspectives, edited by Iva Novakova and Dirk Siepmann (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) doesn't have a huge amount about romance, but there are some insights into the types of verbs used in fantasy, romance and crime fiction in French and English, as well as the discovery that people in romance novels "take a sip" a lot more than they do in other genres (full quote here).

New to the Romance Wiki Bibliography: Lots of Free Items (including some in Spanish) on Australia, Cover Art, Publishing and more

Laura Vivanco

Fletcher, Lisa, Beth Driscoll, and Kim Wilkins, 2018. 

"Genre Worlds and Popular Fiction: The Case of Twenty-First-Century Australian Romance", Journal of Popular Culture. Online First 16 July 2018. Excerpt

Golubov, Nattie, 2017. 

El amor en tiempos neoliberales: apuntes críticos sobre la novela rosa contemporánea. Ciudad de México: Bonilla Artigas, 2017. [Free from a variety of sites, including the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Amazon and Academia.edu.]

González Cruz, María-Isabel, 2018. 

"Hispanismos en el discurso romántico de Harlequin y Mills & Boon. Ámbitos temáticos y funciones socio-pragmáticas". Moderna språk 112.1: 163-184. Abstract and link to pdf

Nelson, Elizabeth, 2015. 

"The Romance of Self-Publishing". Self-Publishing and Collection Development: Opportunities and Challenges for Libraries. Ed. Robert P. Holley. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2015. 149-157.[Whole volume available as a pdf here]

 

O’Mahony, Lauren and Olivia Murphy, 2018. 

'From polite society to the Pilbara: The ingénue abroad in Evelina and The Girl in Steel-Capped Boots', Outskirts 38:1-23. [Abstract and Pdf]

Pérez Casal, Inmaculada, 2018. 

"The Romance Novel as Bildungsroman in the Works of Rosamunde Pilcher and Lisa Kleypas". Taking Stock to Look Ahead: Celebrating Forty Years of English Studies in Spain. Ed. María Ferrández San Miguel and Claus-Peter Neumann. Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de la Universidad de Zaragoza, 2018. 139-144.[Whole volume available as a pdf here]

 

Spears, Jessica D., 2018. 

The Romance Novel Cover. MA Thesis (Art History). City University of New York (CUNY), Hunter College, 2018. Abstract and link to pdf.

Washington, AlTonya, 2015. 

"An Indie Author in a Library World". Self-Publishing and Collection Development: Opportunities and Challenges for Libraries. Ed. Robert P. Holley. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2015. 139-147.[Whole volume available as a pdf here]

Georgette Heyer Conference Tomorrow

The Nonesuch? Georgette Heyer and Her Historical Fiction Contemporaries

The Nonesuch? Georgette Heyer and Her Historical Fiction Contemporaries Tuesday 19 June 2018, 9.15am - 5.30pm 

The programme can be found here but in case that doesn't work and/or to preserve the details for posterity, here's a list of the papers and their authors:

Kim Sherwood (UWE Bristol) - "Pride and Prejudice: Metafiction and the Value of Historical Romance in Georgette Heyer"

Lisa Hopkins (Sheffield Hallam University) - "Shakespearean Echoes in Heyer’s Regency Novels"

Laura George (Eastern Michigan University) - "‘A little out of the way’: the dandy heroine in Regency Buck"

Kathleen Jennings (University of Queensland) - "Heyer... in Space! The Influence of Georgette Heyer on Science Fiction"

Vanda Wilcox (John Cabot University) - "Georgette Heyer, Wellington’s army and the First World War"

Geraldine Perriam (University of Glasgow) - "The Not-so-silly-ass: Freddy Standen, his Fictional contemporaries and Alternative Masculinity"

Tom Zille (Humboldt University) - "Georgette Heyer and the Language of the Historical Novel"

Deborah Longworth (University of Birmingham) - "From Almack’s to Astley’s: Regency World-building in the work of Georgette Heyer"

Sally Moore (University of Hertfordshire) - "Divorced, Beheaded, Died . . . The Problem with the Tudors in Romance Fiction"

Holly Hirst (Manchester Metropolitan University) - "Georgette Heyer and Redefining the Gothic Romance"

Stacy Gillis (Newcastle University) - "‘Ordinary People’: Austen and the Literary Genealogy of the Regency Romance"

jay Dixon (Independent Scholar) - "The Regency Novel under Heyer’s Influence"

Louise Allen (Independent Scholar) - "Writing in Heyer’s Shadow"

Roundtable discussion on Teaching Popular Historical Romance in the Literature Curriculum - Deborah Longworth, University of Birmingham

Lucie Dutton (Birkbeck, University of London) - "A Reluctant Movie"

Amy Street (Independent Scholar) - "Guilty Pleasures: Georgette Heyer"

Helen Davidge (Independent Scholar) - "Data Science, Georgette Heyer's Historical Novels and her Readers"

Roundtable discussion on Branding for the digital generation: Georgette Heyer’s book jackets as expressions of publishing contexts and fields - Mary Ann Kernan, City, University of London; Kim Wilkins, University of Queensland; Samantha Rayner, UCL

Plenary: Professor Kathryn Sutherland, Senior Research Fellow, St Anne's College Oxford, " 'Where history says little, fiction may say much': women writers and the historical novel"

Day 2: Bowling Green State University's Romance Conference

As I mentioned in my last post, more details about the conference, which is being held on April 13-14, can be found here and you can follow events as they happen on Twitter, via #bgsuromcon18.

Today's papers are:

Contemporary Paranormal Romance: Theories and Development of the Genre’s Feminism (Or Lack Thereof)

Kathleen Kollman, Bowling Green State University

Paranormal romance is a contentious subgenre that some critics have castigated as being anti-feminist. Linda J. Lee writes that this subgenre features “male protagonists [who often] come from a cultural background in which men are dominant over women” (61), and Sandra Booth argues that paranormal romances featuring a monstrous hero and angelic heroine hearken back to highly patriarchal forms of gender roles, including consensual sex that reads like violent rape (96-99). However, as the genre proliferated beyond its initial surge in popularity in the 1990s, it—like romance novels generally—matured beyond its beginnings and manifested more complex ideologies. As Lee Tobin-McClain writes, the concept of “collective authorship” of romance causes it to be even more influenced by audience expectations than other literary genres (296), resulting in the need for heightened levels of feminist relationships in popular titles. In this essay, I will be exploring Tobin-McClain’s thesis, along with positioning paranormal romance as a twin heredity form sharing more features of horror and urban fantasy than may initially be apparent. As data points, I will be examining contemporary paranormal romance in the vampire subgenre, specifically Dead Until Dark (Charlaine Harris, 2001), A Quick Bite (Lynsay Sands, 2005), A Shade of Vampire (Bella Forrest, 2012), Immortal Faith (Shelley Adina, 2013), The Art of Loving a Vampire (Jaye Wells, 2013), and Bite Mark (Lily Harlem, 2016). Each of these six books represents an even more specific subgenre within vampire paranormal romance (urban fantasy, family saga, young adult, Amish romance, mystery, and ménage, respectively), and each was first published within the past two decades. By taking into account the scholarly genealogy of paranormal romance pre-2000, I will be seeking to assess whether the work written since that point continues to reflect those themes or if, in fact, several popular exemplars of the genre have grown to exhibit a more overtly feminist sensibility.

Love in the Time of Twitter: Identity, Relationships, and Fantasy in Modern Young Adult Romance
Patricia Ennis, Bowling Green State University

Social media has become pervasive in our society over the last 10 years. It has transformed the way we communicate and interact, has turned strangers into friends, and has allowed us to maintain a multitude of personalities, specifically curated for the platform in question. Who we are online is different than who we are in public which is itself different from who we are in private. Online we can be whoever we want to be. We can be idealized versions of ourselves. We can accept parts of ourselves we might otherwise deny or hide away those parts we — or others — might find objectionable. As the popularity of social media has increased, and as the internet has become less frightening and more widely seen as a tool of communication, so too has it become much more prevalent as a facet of young adult romantic fiction. In this paper, I analyze a number of recent novels in which social media and the internet plays a vital role and look critically at the way we construct identity and relationships online and the concerns, hopes, and anxieties modern teenagers face in these interactions. 

Not Cosplaying Around

Nicole Drew, Bowling Green State University

Novels like Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell have begun bringing fandom to the forefront of the romance genre. Cosplay, as a part of fandom, is also becoming more relevant in romance novels, but the depiction of the hobby is not always favorable. The goal of this paper is to compare the depiction of cosplay in romance novels from kink to hobby and to examine the treatment of cosplay in the romance industry and what impact it could have on those who actually participate in the hobby. I will use novels like Don’t Cosplay with my Heart by Cecil Castelucci (2018), Waiting for Clark by Annabeth Albert (20150, and A Different Kind of Cosplay by Lucy Felthouse (2015), as well as synopses for other novels like these with cosplay as an important part of the plot (or lack thereof). I will be comparing the way each novel addresses, utilizes, and treats cosplay and whether it is an accurate depiction of the cosplay community as a whole. There is plenty of study on the way audiences receive the content of romance novels; this paper will repurpose those studies for this particular subgenre to decide whether the portrayals could result in a fancified idea of those who participate in cosplay, including Stewart Hall’s audience reception theory and Ann Snitow’s example of literary analysis. I argue that most depictions are not accurate to actual cosplayers and that readers come away with false expectations of what cosplay is and how it operates.

Seriously Becky Don’t You Know Hallmark Christmas Movies are Just Romance Novels on Film?

Alexander Lester, Bowling Green State University

According, to Pamela Regis the conventions of Romance Novels are Simple and Finite. Each romance novel has eight essential elements that permeate throughout its plot. In this paper, I look at the correlation between two Hallmark Christmas Movies that were adapted from romance novels The Christmas Cottage, A Bramble House Christmas and compare them to Hallmark's made for TV movie Fir Crazy. I argue that the 8 essential elements are seen in made for TV Hallmark Christmas Movies as well as novels adapted for film thus making them Romance Novels are written for television.

I Found Romance at the Spinner Rack: The History & Evolution of Romance Comics
Charles Coletta

Following World War II, comic book publishers soon realized that sales of their superhero titles were starting to decline as the once-prominent genre was diminishing in popularity. To retain their readers’ interest, the publishers cancelled many of the superhero titles and diversified into other genres, such as science fiction, war, Westerns, crime, horror, and romance. Young Romance #1 (1947), which was created by the legendary team of Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, is widely regarded as the first romance comic. The pair produced and oversaw numerous romance comics for twelve years until Kirby left and transitioned to Marvel Comics. Young Romace gained great popularity and spawned numerous other titles featuring work by some of the industry’s top writers and artists. Aimed primarily at teen girl readers, the romance comics genre remained vital until the mid-1970s when the rise of the women’s liberation movement and sexual revolution caused the comics to seem overly innocent, bland, and accepting of traditional patriarchal concepts of women’s behavior and gender roles. This presentation will offer a history of the romance comics genre from the 1940s to the 1970s by looking at its creators, themes, and readership; it will also include an in-depth examination of the Kirby-Simon stories that helped establish the genre.

Romance covers in Brazil: online interactions between fandom and publishing houses
Giovana Santana Carlos, DePaul University

Book covers are very important for romance fandom (RODALE, 2015). They express the stories and the genre through images and design (MCKNIGHT-TRONTZ, 2002) becoming an important factor for the readers when buying a book. But not always the fan is content with the cover. While is possible to observe that sometimes the writer does not have power of decision related to the covers (GREENFELD-BENOVITZ, 2012), it becomes more complicated when the book is published in foreigner countries, depending on contracts between publishers. In Brazil the romance book market is formed by most of international titles and writers translated to Portuguese. Not always the books can have the same cover as the original, so they are adapted or completely changed. However, as Brazilian romance fans follow their favorite writers and know how the original cover was published, they use social network websites to express their opinion and interact with the publishing houses. These companies also have learned the importance of covers to fans and interact with the readers (JENKINS, 2008). Thus, in this presentation I intend to show cases of online interactions on Facebook between fandom and publishers in Brazil that depict two perspectives: first, covers changed after fan complains and, second, publishing houses posting options of cover for fan voting. The collected data on Facebook regards books from Megan Maxwell, J. R. Ward and Leisa Rayven. These interactions present the importance of fandom for the development and establishment of romance book market in Brazil.

She’s an Athlete, but Don’t Worry, She’s Still Beautiful; Images of Female American Football Players on Romance Novel Covers
Joanna Line, Bowling Green State University

This paper analyzes the portrayal of female American football players on the covers of the three romance novels in The Cleveland Clash Series from Crimson Romance and compares these covers to two Crimson Romance novels that portray male American football players, to explore similarities and differences between how female and male athleticism are depicted. While the storylines of The Cleveland Clash novels provide a space to challenge the American cultural ideology that femininity and athleticism are conflicting concepts, the covers of the romance novels affirm the femininity of the female athletes while indications of their athleticism are absent. On the other hand, the portrayal of male athletes affirms the association of masculinity with athleticism. The relationship between gender performance, athleticism, and visual portrayal will be explored through Butler’s concept of gender performativity, Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze, Duncan’s theory of discourse within sport photography, and Goffman’s framing theory to assert that the portrayal of female American football players on the covers of The Cleveland Clash Series demonstrate the conflicting ideology of femininity and female athleticism.

Wherefore Art Thou Fabio? 50 Years of Romance Novel Cover Design
Andrea J. Briggs, McDaniel College

The art of the romance novel cover is just as important in reflecting consumer desires as the material contained within its pages. This presentation provides a comprehensive look at cover art trends and tropes of popular romance novels ranging from the 1960s to today, as publishers have adapted to the changing market of readers, visually differentiating and defining subgenres of popular romance literature.

How Amazon has shaped the future of the Self-Published Author
Constance M. Phillips, MVRAI Published Author

Not that long ago self-publishing was looked down upon and referred to as vanity publishing, insinuating the author had more ego than talent. All that has changed over the last decade. When Amazon launched the Kindle, they made ebooks easily assessible to everyone. The voracious appetite of the avid reader created a high demand and savvy authors began looking at independent publishing.
This turned the traditional publishing industry on it’s ear and created a new business model for the independent and hybrid authors.
In this presentation I will look at how Amazon, and the success of their Kindle ereader, has forever changed the publishing industry—especially in the romance genre. I will also examine the lasting effects these changes have had on traditional romance publishing companies.

Researching Contemporary Settings without Traveling
Jill Kemerer

Authors don’t always have the option of researching a setting in person. Time, financial and physical constraints prevent many writers from heading out west or spending weeks in Paris. A novel’s setting shapes the story and influences the characters’ thoughts and actions. Readers want to experience the mountains or city where the book takes place, and extra care must be taken to get the details right.
One way to get an overall impression of an area is to read a memoir of someone who lived there. Another method is to use online tools such as Google Earth, weather data sites, cost of living comparison tools, historical websites and visitor guides. For sensory details and local flavor, social media networks can connect writers with people who reside in the area. For instance, Google+ has groups for photographers in many states. They’re generous with their knowledge and share great pictures.
With modern technology, memoirs and help from people who live there, any setting can come alive, and readers will feel transported to another place.

Romance Law School is Now In Session

Jill A. Smith, Georgetown University Law Center

Plotting a murder, divorce, or even a trip to traffic court for your novel’s characters? Do you know how to make that realistic? You already know what state your characters are in, but do you know what jurisdiction you’re dealing with? State? Federal? Is this a criminal matter? If so, has your character committed every element necessary to successfully charge them with a crime? Are you sure the law that you know about in your home state is the same as the state where you’ve set your book?
If these questions are making you panic, never fear, you need to consult a law librarian. But you should also be prepared for that encounter.
In this session, Georgetown Law Librarian Jill Smith (a.k.a. romance novelist Adele Buck) will teach you how to structure your research queries, both for research on your own and for interacting effectively and efficiently with law librarians (and how to find those sometimes elusive creatures so you can ask for their assistance). She will show you some free legal resources available on the internet and how to begin to navigate them. She will also cover common pitfalls and misunderstandings about how the law and civil and criminal court systems operate to ensure that your manuscript is lawyer-ready and librarian-approved.

The value of wearing two hats: Reflections of a romance writer by night/feminist media scholar by day
Jessica Birthisel, Bridgewater State University

By night, I’m likely to be tucked behind my computer, writing the spicy passages of my next contemporary romance novel under my pen name. By day, I’m likely to be teaching, analyzing or researching similar content as a professor of media studies and a feminist media scholar at a public university in New England. In this session, I’ll wear both hats, sharing my experiences of hopping across this line between producer and fan, between author and media critic, and how I’ve found these unique perspectives to inform one another in essential ways. First, I’ll share how my academic training in feminist media analysis has prepared me to join a vibrant (and growing) community of romance authors writing feminist, intersectional, women-centered and diversity-conscious romances, which I argue play a vital role within our current social and political climate. I’ll also discuss my process – and rationale – for applying a feminist critique to my own works-in-progress. Conversely, I’ll share how my experiences as a romance author and as an active member in the professional romance writing community (including the Romance Writers of America) have shaped my academic media scholarship in important and positive ways. Key considerations of the session include: the role of self-publishing in the diversification of the romance genre, romance’s potential for subverting social and cultural norms, and the increasingly blurred lines between production and reception.

Keynote- Dr. Kate Brown, Huntington University
Kate Brown, Huntington University

Originally from a suburb of Buffalo, New York, Dr. Kate Elizabeth Brown received her Bachelor of Science in Applied Economics and Management from Cornell University in 2004 and her Ph.D. in American History from the University of Virginia in 2015.
She specializes in American legal and constitutional history, politics in the colonial, early republic, and antebellum eras, as well as English legal history.
Dr. Brown was a 2017 recipient of an academic research grant from the Romance Writers of America for a project which explores how English common law and constitutionalism give fundamental structure and substance to the historical romance genre. She will be discussing her work and research.

Guest of Honor- Beverly Jenkins

Beverly Jenkins is the recipient of the 2017 Romance Writers of America Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as the 2016 Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award for historical romance. She has been nominated for the NAACP Image Award in Literature, was featured both in the documentary “Love Between the Covers” and on CBS Sunday Morning.Since the publication of Night Song in 1994, she has been leading the charge for multicultural romance, and has been a constant darling of reviewers, fans, and her peers alike, garnering accolades for her work from the likes of The Wall Street Journal, People Magazine, and NPR.

Hell Hath No Inventiveness Like a Romance-Reader Scorned

Laura Vivanco

When Gabby Maait, Kat Mayo and Jennifer Wu discovered that the Sydney Writers' Festival was ignoring popular romance fiction, its writers and readers, they were angry - and then they got inventive.

They made a range of postcards which could be left at the festival to challenge perceptions of the genre. Bearing in mind that romance novels are often judged by their covers:

This "cover remix [...] features an Australian classic, My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin, re-imagined as a chicklit romance."

This "cover remix [...] features The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde re-imagined as a paranormal romance" because, as Kat points out

Today The Picture of Dorian Gray a classic work of literature, and no critic would dismiss it because they think it will raise men’s expectations of debauched lifestyles. Contrast this to romance fiction, which is blamed for women having unrealistic expectations in relationships, of being porn for women (nothing more than a masturbatory aid rather than an expression of art or a form of literary entertainment), or of being escapist and therefore too light for serious review or analysis.

 

This one gives a clinch cover to Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles ("A classic bodice-ripper ... without the happy ending") to make the point that "in our books women always win."

The covers were designed by Jennifer Wu, who's written about the project here. You can see more of her work on her website. She also has prints/iPhone and iPod cases/skins of the original artwork for these covers available for sale. Here's Tess, The Picture and My Brilliant Career.

There are also two postcards featuring quotes from romance novels (one from Patricia Brigg's Fair Game and the other from Untamed by Anna Cowan). On the reverse, all of the cards carry a quote from Judith Arnold:

To belittle romance fiction is to belittle women. To read romance fiction is to confront the strength of women, the variety of their experience, and the validity of their aspirations and accomplishments

I think Jennifer, Kat and Gabby have given us a very impressive taste of their "aspirations and accomplishments."

Monsoon Mystery: Harlequin/Mills & Boon's First Indian Author

Laura Vivanco

According to the Deccan Chronicle,

Shoma Narayanan is the first Indian author to become part of the Harlequin Mills & Boon banner, with her maiden novel Monsoon Wedding Fever. [...] Leaving a cushy financial background for the creative life of a writer has been quite a leap for Shoma. “I was a little apprehensive initially, but I had decided to follow my dream — which is to write,” she explains. Her novel, which is set in India, is quite contemporary. “I had to keep in mind what would sell with the global audience, which is why I decided to set the plot in India,” she says.

In an interview with The Awesome Sisters she explained how she came to be published:

I saw an ad at Crossword that said Mills and Boon was ‘auditioning’ for Indian authors – I went home and wrote a short story for them, and submitted it. My story went on to become one of the three shortlisted winners of the ‘Passions’ contest, and I was assigned an editor in the UK with whom I began working on the final novel. It was only when I’d almost finished the novel that Anna (my editor) told me that my book was going to be a global release – if Anna hadn’t been safely tucked away in a different continent, I’d have run across and hugged her – even over the phone, it took her around ten minutes to get me to calm down!

You can read an excerpt of Monsoon Wedding Fever here.

Unfortunately I can't work out when Monsoon Wedding Fever is going to be published or whether, in fact, it's already been published. I've managed to track down an image of the UK Mills & Boon cover and according to the details at The Book Depository this edition was published on 1 August 2012. Amazon UK shows the same cover, gives a publication date of 3 August 2012, but lists the book as "not yet released." The RIVA line's recently been reorganised and I can't find any details about the book on Mills & Boon's website.

The Harlequin edition is also something of a mystery. Amazon.com has it listed as due for publication on 30 October 2012 but it doesn't seem to be listed at Harlequin's website in the list of October novels in the Romance line.

Can anyone clear up the mystery? I hope so, because having seen the excerpt I'd like to read the rest. Or, given earlier discussions about cover art and the representation of non-white protagonists, does anyone fancy giving me their opinion of the covers?

------
Rajagopal, Srinidhi. "Romancing the Quill." Deccan Chronicle. July 27, 2012.

Horses, Heroes and Heroines

Laura Vivanco

Heroes are not infrequently to be found on horseback and horses have often featured on the covers of romances; I've posted a short piece about heroes, heroines and horses at my website. I should probably warn you that I chose the covers above purely because they include horses, not because they're attached to any of the texts I quote from in my mini-essay.

On the topic of covers and heroes, I thought I'd return very briefly to the issue of race and cover art by posting the cover of Cindy Dee's Soldier's Rescue Mission.

And re heroines in historicals, Isobel Carr has been doing a little bit of research into the ages at marriage of Georgian and Regency aristocrats:

How old were most daughters of the peerage (the most common heroines in our books) when they married for the first time? Stone’s chart shows that during the first part of the era, the median age was ~20-22. Post 1750 (correlating with the passage of Hardwicke’s Marriage Act; Coincidence?), that age jumps up to ~23-24. So, the most common age for the daughter of a peer to marry was not when she was in her teens, but when she was in her early 20s, and an unmarried twenty-five year old would not really be much of an outlier.

She also discusses accurate ages for heroes at marriage elsewhere in her post.

Miscellaneous

Laura Vivanco

I'd been wondering when the current economic climate might begin to affect the Greek and Italian tycoons who inhabit romances, and recently I came across this in Sara Craven's Wife in the Shadows (Mills & Boon, June 2011):

any kind of open scandal should be avoided, particularly at this moment. The quality of the Galantana brand of clothing had saved the company from the worst effects of the global recession - indeed, they were planning expansion - but for that they needed extra finance for more new machinery at the Milan factory, as well as buying another site for workshops near Verona.
Which was principally why he had accepted Silvia's dinner invitation, because he'd learned that Prince Cesare Damiano, head of the Credito Europa bank would be present [...].
He and Prince Damiano had spoken briefly but constructively, and negotiations were now proceeding. And while the banker was a charming, cultivated man with a passion for rose-growing, he was also known to be a stickler for old-fashioned morality.
Any overt lapse on Angelo's part could well blow the deal out of the water. (14-15)

The situation described in the first paragraph fits rather well with the reality described in an article on the BBC website, from 1 November 2011:

There are no price tags on the clothes in Brunello Cucinelli's showroom in Milan.

The people who shop in the designer's store do not need to worry about how much they are spending.
And Mr Cucinelli doesn't feel he needs to worry about talk of a double-dip recession in Europe.
"This is the century of China," he says.
"This will mean billions of human beings coming towards us and asking to live in a different way. These people are fascinated by our quality, by our culture, by our craftsmanship."
Too true, says Italy's luxury goods trade group Altagamma.
It sees sales in European markets growing by 3.75% next year.

Jeannie Watt has taken a look at the changing trends in Supperromance covers, from 1980 to the present.

I've been guest-blogging at She-Wolf's (about medievalism and how it's shaped my approach to reading Harlequin Mills & Boon romances), at Read React Review (about "high" art and the way it's been defined in opposition to works which are commercially successful) and I've also received some nice comments about For Love and Money from Kate Walker.

I've also been updating Teach Me Tonight's look, in response to C. M. Kempe's plea that I "consider adding share buttons to the end of every post to make the redistribution easier." There are now share buttons at the end of each post and there are also some on the sidebar. This did involve redesigning the blog a little: we're still pink, but the look of the new template's a bit simpler.

The Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand (PopCAANZ) 2012 conference will be held at the Langham Hotel in Melbourne on the 27th, 28th and 29th of June. More details can be found here.

[Edited to add: Remittance Girl, an author of erotica (not romance) challenges fellow authors to write sex scenes which will evoke readers' lived experiences:

I don't want to connect with my readers over a landscape of commercialized sex. When they read a piece of my erotic work, I attempt, as far as possible, to ensure that what they're imagining calls to their real memories and lived abstractions, not a porn flick. Because I feel that the story will resonate at a deeper level if my words are associated with their real, felt, lived erotic experiences.

This is definitely an issue of relevance to romance as well as to erotica. For instance, Smart Bitch Sarah recently posted about the hymen because "I thought we'd gone over this in the past few years enough times that folks knew this information already. But it seems like we need a review because authors still don't seem to know where the hell the hymen is." As Dani A. points out in the comments, "Bad anatomy in romance isn't just aggravating, it's probably causing real harm and anxiety to people who don't know better and think that the books are right and somehow it's their bodies that are wrong."]