Dissertations/Theses, a New Issue of JPRS and more!

Altamimi, Leena (2026). Desert Desires and the War on Terror: Pre- and Post-9/11 Sheikh RomancesPost-9/11 Sheikh Romances. Master of Arts/Science in Book Publishing, Portland State University.

 

Fahmy, Zulfa, Teguh Supriyanto, Agus Nuryatin, and Yusro Edy Nugroho, 

(2026). "Islamic romance novels in the Indonesian digital sphere: Between religious ornamentation and genre standardization." Diglosia: Jurnal Kajian Bahasa, Sastra, Dan Pengajarannya 9.2: 507-524. [The authors state that they used AI tools.]

 

Ficke, Sarah (2026). "Narrating Histories of Love and Violence: The Civil War and Alyssa Cole’s A Hope Divided." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 15.1.

Filbrun, Tricia (2026). "Judging a Book by Its Cover: Exploring Ethical Solutions for Marketing & Labeling Romance Novels with Illustrated Cover Art."  Honors Project. Bowling Green State University. 

Glenn, Wendy J. (2026). "Sport as Suitor: The Presence and Disruption of Romance Tropes in Young Adult Sports Fiction." Literature 6.2.

Guhr, Svenja (2026). "Between Whispers and Screams: Loudness Standard Deviation as a Proxy for Explicit Content Detection in US Romance Novels." Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for the Digital Humanities: 368–380. 

Ingram, Toni (2026). "Romantasy and the quest for cliteracy." Sex Education. Online First.

 

Jalksjö Greksa, Olivia (2026). Relational Equality in M/M and Heterosexual Romance: A Reader Response Analysis. Bachelor's Thesis, Mälardalen University.

Kjølner, Mira Pedersen (2026). Choosing The Monster: Otherness, Desire, And Masculinity In Contemporary Monster Romance. Masters Thesis, Aalborg University.

Kryha, Veronika (2026). Translation project: Game Point by Meg Jones. BA thesis, Borys Grinchenko Kyiv Metropolitan University.

 

Kvistad, Erika (2026). "Happily Ever After?/Happily Ever After! Negotiating the Gothic in Contemporary Dark Romance." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 15.1.

Monier, Mel (2026). "Reading the dark romance: exploring audience engagement with sexual power dynamics in dark romance novels." Porn Studies. Online First.

 

Moolla, F. Fiona (2026). "Love Stories and Stories About Love: Popular and Literary Romance in Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s Season of Crimson Blossoms." Journal of Popular Romance Studies.

 

Moore, Jeania Ree V. (2026). Literature of Hope: Reading Romance in the Religious Lives of Black Women. PhD thesis, Yale University. [Links to abstract, and selected quotations]

 

Myisha, Nabila and Linusia Marsih (2026). "Loving Under Power: Politics and Tradition Shaping Gay Love in Red, White & Royal Blue." Parafrase 26.1:18-24.

 

McCray, Nia (2026). The Outcome of Falling. Master’s Program in Creative Writing, University of Texas at El Paso. [Excerpt via ProQuest]

 

Pérez Belmont, Andrea (2026). Smut: Contemporary Erotic Romance as a Discourse of Female Sexuality. Bachelor's Thesis, Masaryk University. 

 

Šmídová, Monika Markéta (2026). Kissing for Dear Life in a Dead Land: English Folkloric Liminality in Queer Paranormal Historical Popular Romance. PhD, Masaryk University.

 

Tandon, Lasya (2026). "(Dis)Honourable Escapes: Reassessing Sexuality in Georgette Heyer’s Historical Romances." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 15.1. 

Dissertation Season (and some other new publications)

Lucynka Starron has found an article from 1934 giving advice to would-be romance authors targetting the romance pulps.

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Balle, Mary, Danny Valdez, and Tori Sciara. 2026. “Adeline’s Desire: Conversation between Paranoid and Reparative Readings of Eroticism, Relationships, and Sexual Behaviours in the Dark Romance Haunting Adeline.” Porn Studies. [Abstract here.] 

 

Brenner, Naomi (2025). "Sabine vs. Aviva: Translation and Popular Fiction in Yiddish and Hebrew." Yod 25.

 

Burmeister, Aurora Grace (2026). Where Love and Obsession Overlap: An Examination of Dark Romance, BookTok, and Moral Outrage. Master of Arts, Bowling Green State University.

 

Burge, Amy (2026). "A Decolonised Alpha Hero? Negotiating Masculinities in Nigerian Romance Novels."  Journal of Popular Romance Studies.

 

Eskelsen, Ilse (2026). “I Know He Would Do Anything if I Asked”: To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, Female Power Fantasy, and the YA Romance. Undergraduate Dissertation, Brigham Young University.

 

Hildebrandt, Addie. (2026). "The Ripped Bodice, Brooklyn." World Literature Today 100.3: 80. [Excerpt here.] 

 

Horan, Molly (2026). “Thanks For Listening: A Novel” And “Asexuality in Young Adult Literature: How Ace/Aro YA Challenges Amatonormativity and Expands Possibilities.” PhD, Bath Spa University. 

 

Lu, Jie (2026). "Chinese Online Fiction: A New Romantic Imagination." The International Journal of Literary Humanities 24.1: 35-58. 

 

Montejo, Aurora (2026). "Guilty Pleasure or Attack on Feminism?: An Analysis of the Dark Romance Subgenre." The Odyssey: Undergraduate Arts & Humanities Academic Journal 1: 7-18.

 

Niebergall, Chelsee M. (2026). Resistance and Innovation: The Cultural Work of Popular Romance Novels. Master's Thesis, Dartmouth College.

Noriega Palmero, Jessica Alejandra. 2026. «¿Del quiosco a la revolución amorosa? Un análisis genológico y estructural de tres novelas rosas anarquistas de Federica Montseny». Literatura popular: lecturas y público en la Edad de Plata. Ed. Emilio José Ocampos Palomar and Guadalupe Nieto Caballero. Berlin: Peter Lang Verlag.  [Details for the volume at https://doi.org/10.3726/b23272. Excerpts from the article here.] 

 

Panek, Helena (2026). "Getting Her Off: Looking at Women Authors in Romance Compared to Other Fiction Genres." Honors thesis, Eastern Kentucky University. 

 

Rayburn, Allison D. (2026). An Ecology of the Monstrous: How Readers Shape and Are Shaped by Monster Romance. Master of Arts in Professional Writing, Kennesaw State University. 

 

Sukmaningsih, Putri Ayresti and Rahayu Puji Haryanti (2026). "Marriage as a Mechanism of Power in Regency Era in Quinn’s Bridgerton the Duke and I." IDEAS: Journal on Language Teaching and Learning, Linguistics and Literature 14.1:1701-1713. 

 

Tomas, Marina (2026). "Truhelkin Plein air: feministička romansa?" Kroatologija : časopis za hrvatsku kulturu Fakulteta hrvatskih studija Sveučilišta u Zagrebu 17.1: 7-24.  

  

Vaile, Dezi (2026). They Write Themselves: Romancing the Vampire of Lighthouse Landing. Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, Liberty University. 

Abortion, Witches and New Publications (Gaming, Asexuality, Teen Sexuality)

The Fated Mates podcast posted (on Bluesky) that "Elda Minger was the first romance novelist to put condom use on the page. When we spoke to her about the choice she made, she told us about the realities of the world before Roe, when abortion was neither safe nor legal." They've put a clip of Minger's hard-hitting comments on YouTube and it's less than 4 minutes long. The novel is Elda Minger's Untamed Heart, which as far as I can tell was published by Harlequin in 1983. [If I've got that wrong, or if you know of a romance published earlier which includes condom use, please leave a comment!]

I missed this article when it was first posted, in 2023, but it's worth a read. Taking a look at witch romances set in small towns, Jenny Hamilton argues that

After reading a certain number of these books, it becomes impossible to avoid aligning the witch fear of non-witches with white fear of non-whites, particularly given the close associations between whiteness and small-town and suburban America.

And some new publications:

 

Guajardo, Ashley ML (2024). "The BookTok to Player Pipeline: TikTok and the Baldur’s Gate 3 Fandom." Abstract Proceedings of DiGRA 2024 Conference Playgrounds

 

Heynderickx, Jasmine (2024). “It really got to me [...] The movies where the main characters freaked out about being virgins at the age of sixteen”: Narrative Subversion as a Queer Strategy in Loveless. Master of Arts, Ghent University.

Medrano-González, Claudia (2024). "On the Convergence Between Femme Theory and Popular Feminine Fiction: Adolescent Girls’ (Re)territorialisation Of Fem(me)ininity Through Young Adult Erotic Romance." Journal of Femininities (published online ahead of print 2024). https://doi.org/10.1163/29501229-bja10005

New Publications, including a lot of theses

Barta, Orsolya (2024). Surprise Babies, Bad Mothers & Happily Ever Afters: Pregnancy Narratives and the Concept of Motherhood In Eight Contemporary Romance Novels. Masters thesis, University of Uppsala. [This was not available online when I checked, but the abstract can be found here.]

Båtstrand, Johanne Marie (2024). Bringing the Male to his Knees - Taming the Dangerous Lover: Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre as the blueprint for love relations in Sarah J. Maas's A Court of Thorns and Roses. Masters thesis, Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

 

Crawford, Joseph (2024). "From Romantic Gothic to Gothic Romance, With a Little Help from Twilight." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 13.

Cuthbert Van Der Veer, Kate (2023). Cover story: developing methodologies for the analysis of book titles and book covers. PhD Thesis, School of Communication and Arts, The University of Queensland. [About half of the corpus here are Australian rural romance novels, so there's a lot of discussion of romance.]

Edmunds, Amy (2024). Revamping The Gaze: How Twilight Hosts the Conditions for Female Spectatorship. Honors Thesis, University of Michigan.

Hashim, Ruzy Suliza and Mohd Muzhafar Idrus (2024). “Unblessed Be Thy Milk: Filial Obedience, Repentance, and Forgiveness in Malay Popular Fiction”. The Asian Family in Literature and Film: Challenges and Contestations-South Asia, Southeast Asia and Asian Diaspora, Volume II. Ed. Bernard Wilson and Sharifah Aishah Osman. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. 139-160. [Abstract here.]

 

Pesonen, Sini (2024). Romance Novels and Possibilities in Life : Analyzing Ethical Aspects in Happiness and Happy Place. Masters thesis, University of Helsinki. 

 

Ramstad, Tessa (2024). Tall, Dark, and Ideal: #Bookboyfriends in six contemporary romance novels. Masters thesis, University of Uppsala.

 

Roach, Catherine M. (2024). "Fantasy and Desire: From my Mother’s Stack of Trashy Novels to an Experiment in Writing at Field’s Edge." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 13.

 

Tavallaie, Marjan (2024). ”It stops here. With me and you. It ends with us.”: The representation of domestic violence in popular romance novel It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover. Masters thesis, Karlstad University.

Wiseman, Sarah Rose (2024). Hearts and Hashtags: How BookTok is Reshaping Romance Literature. Honors Program in English and Media Studies, Guilford College.

New Publications: Genre Norms, Publishing and Creators

Green, Steff (2024). "More schlongs, more cats." Otherhood: Essays on being childless, childfree and child-adjacent. Ed. Kathryn Van Beek, Alie Benge, Lil O'Brien. Aukland: Massey University Press. [On the near-ubiquity of babies in the HEA. Excerpt here.]

 

Griffiths, David (2023). Hearing Ghosts: Writing a Low Fantasy YA Gothic Fiction for young adult males. PhD in Creative Writing, Manchester Metropolitan University.

McInnis, Lauren (2024). Filing The Serial Numbers Off: The Role Of The Author In Fanfiction Published As Original FictionFanfiction Published As Original Fiction. Master of Arts dissertation, University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Parisot, Eric (2024). Jane Austen and Vampires: Love, Sex and Immortality in the New Millennium. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. [More details here, and excerpt here.]

Pierre-Robertson, Petronetta (2023). "Librarian as Creator." Caribbean Library Journal 7:1-16.

Sabo, Oana (2024). “Translingualism 2.0.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 28.2: 302-316. [Links, and selected quotes from the section on romance, here.]

 

Bad Romance Data, Monsters and New Publications

The data does NOT exist to support the statement that romance is a billion dollar industry. Quite frankly, the data does not exist to make any sweeping statements about the size of the popular romance genre market.

So says Andrea Martucci of the Shelf Love podcast, who's been taking a hard look at the "popular romance genre market data between 1972 and today" and presented her "research on 'Bad Romance Data' at the 2023 International Association for the Study of Popular Romance conference." You can read her analysis and conclusions here (and it's archived here).

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Also via Andrea (but this time not by her), comes a call for participants:

Whether you're solely into humans or a monster romance enthusiast, I'd love for you to take part in my survey. I'm a graduate student doing my thesis on whether or not monster attraction could be explained through evolutionary anthropology.

The survey will be available from January 9, 2024, to March 12, 20204, and it will take about 20 to 30 minutes to complete (although some people have finished it in as little as 12 minutes). It's completely anonymous and only requires that you be at least 18 years old to participate.

Andrea spotted it on Reddit but there's also a more formal announcement giving details of the research on the Research Study Consent Form to be found at the website of California State University, Fullerton.

The research is being "carried out by Phoebe Santillan, under the guidance of Dr. Elizabeth Pillsworth" and

The purpose of this research study is to gather information on people who are attracted to fictional monsters. You are being asked to participate in this study because any and all data is valuable at this stage within the research process. Attraction to fictional monsters is not required to participate in this study.

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And here's a short list of new publications:

Allen, Amanda K. (2024) "Ruling the Court: Reflections on Midcentury Junior Novel Romances." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 13.

Robinson, Rachel (2023). Reading and writing dogs in popular romance fiction, PhD, University of Tasmania. [Only the abstract is currently available.]

 

Warnaar, Karin (2023). "Dresses and Drapery: The Material Essie Summers." Scope: Contemporary Research Topics art & design 25:91-96. [Full pdf available for download at the link provided and, as a bonus, here's a link to a 2018 Otago Daily Times article about Essie Summers' life and work which Warnaar cites.]

Ya’u, Mohammed Sani, Sabariah Md Rashid, Afida Mohamad Ali and Hardev Kaur Jujar Singh (2023). "Semantic Extensions of Hausa Visual and Auditory Perception Verbs gani and ji in Romance Fiction." Pertanika Journal of Social Science and Humanities 31.4:1441-1464.

News, Commentary, Registration for IASPR 2023 and New Publications

The closing date for early-bird registration for the IASPR conference is 31 March. There's a hybrid as well as an in-person option.

The BBC has published an article with the annoying premise that, as the most formulaic genre of popular fiction, romance is presumably the most at risk of being produced by artificial intelligence. However, the article does also mention that

Last year, sales of romantic fiction in the US shot up by 52.4%, compared with an increase of just 8.5% for adult fiction overall.

Meanwhile, sales of the genre in the UK have increased more than two fold over the past three years.

Erin at The Smut Report explores the preponderance of penetrative sex in m/m romance and concludes that 

Sexual fantasy and wish fulfillment is all over the place in romance. But while wish fulfillment and smoothing out rough edges (I mean, is douching sexy? Apparently not, because—while showers are prolific—these guys never do it.) is one indisputable component of genre romance, it also often contributes to certain groups of readers feeling invisible. Fantasy is great and all, but sometimes it would be nice also to stop the barrage of input that maybe something’s broken because one hasn’t met one’s perfect Romance Novel Partner yet, and that’s why one struggles to orgasm / doesn’t enjoy penetration / doesn’t enjoy sex at all / fill in the blank.

And on the topic of inaccuracies/fantasies, Scientific American offers a reminder that wolves generally do not behave the way that shifter/werewolf romances imply they do: "The idea that wolf packs are led by a merciless dictator, or alpha wolf, comes from old studies of captive wolves. In the wild, wolf packs are simply families."

This year's issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies has begun to appear online, and includes:

• Genre-savvy Protagonists in Queer YA Rom-coms
  Alex Henderson
• Literary Fiction from the Perspective of Romance: Normal People
  Francesca Pierini

Other recently published works on romance are:

Burge, Amy (2022) "Beyond Outlander: Annie S. Swan and the Scottish popular romance novel." Scottish Literary Review 14.2:1-19 [I've linked to the entry at the Romance Scholarship Database as there's both an official version (behind a paywall) and a free, pre-print version.]

Cannon, Emanni N (2022). Contemporary Romance and the Question of Literary Value. Master of Arts in English Literature, San Francisco State University. 

Ghosh, Srijani (2023). "Diversity Sells: Uzma Jalaluddin’s Muslim Adaptation of Pride and Prejudice." English Studies. Online First. [Abstract]

Lindström Kruse, Miranda (2022). Pinsamma läsningar: En affektteoretisk studie av #SpicyBooks på TikTok. Masters thesis, Uppsala universitet. 

McDade, Monique (2023). California Dreams and American Contradictions: Women Writers and the Western Ideal. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. [There is a chapter on Eva Rutland, and though the focus is not on her romance novels, this is the first significant academic work about her. See the RSDB for more details.]

Pupipat, Apisak (2023). "Should a Book Be Judged by its Back Cover? Some Written/Formal Features as Observed in Happily- Ever-After Women’s Novel Blurbs." LEARN Journal: Language Education and Acquisition Research Network 16.1:604-630.

Rattanamathuwong, Bancha (2023). "Time Is on Our Side?: Homo Economicus in Time-Travel Romance." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. [Abstract]

New Publications and Blog Update: Definitions, Canons and more (but probably less in future)

Twitter's been an important source of information for me in finding links and keeping up with what's been happening in the romance world, but with all the upheaval there, I've decided it's time to leave. Unfortunately, that means I'll lose an important source of content for this blog and there will probably be far fewer, maybe even no, notifications of calls for papers. I'll still be posting updates about items added to the Romance Scholarship Database, though.

The last thing I've been present for in online "Romancelandia" is a heated debate about the definition of "romance." I'm not the arbiter of that: my work's about romance as it has been defined, not as it will be. But I am the arbiter of what I add to the database, and so I've added an "About page" to give a brief explanation. I'm using the definition of "romance" given by the editors of The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction. [Incidentally one of the new items listed below takes a very interesting, in-depth look at debates about the definition of romance - see Michelson.]

Another contentious topic (which has not, as far as I know, been provoking controversy recently online), is that of a "canon." There's a trio of short articles about the "romance canon" (would it be helpful? is the concept intrinsically flawed?) in the Journal of Popular Romance Studies:

• Cant and Canonicity
  Eric Murphy Selinger
• Response to Eric Selinger’s “Cant and Canonicity”
  Julie E. Moody-Freeman
• Isn’t It Iconic: Canonical Logics and the Romance Genre
  Jodi McAlister

Other new publications are:

Burge, Amy (2022). "Beyond Outlander: Annie S. Swan and the Scottish popular romance novel." Scottish Literary Review. [This is still forthcoming, but a pre-print is available for free via the University of Birmingham.]

Grinnell, Natalie (2022). "The Challenge to Dominance Theory in Patricia Brigg's and Carrie Vaughn's Paranormal Romance Novels." Femspec 22.2:40-65. [Abstract]

Hua, Shaoqi and Chengli Xiao (2023). "What shapes a parasocial relationship in RVGs? The effects of avatar images, avatar identification, and romantic jealousy among potential, casual, and core players." Computers in Human Behavior 139. [Abstract and excerpt]

Konle, Leonard and Fotis Jannidis (2022). "Modeling Plots of Narrative Texts as Temporal Graphs." CHR 2022: Computational Humanities Research Conference, December 12 – 14, 2022, Antwerp, Belgium :318-336.

Michelson, Anna (2022). Redefining the Romance: Classification and Community in a Popular Fiction Genre. PhD thesis, Northwestern University. https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-4tj1-6567

Sharma, Vishal, Kirsten E. Bray, Neha Kumar, Rebecca E. Grinter (2022). “Romancing the Algorithm: Navigating Constantly, Frequently, and Silently Changing Algorithms for Digital Work.” Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery on Human-Computer Interaction.Volume 6, Issue CSCW:1–29. https://doi.org/10.1145/3555651

One last item, which I'm not adding to the database because it only mentions romance in passing, is a thesis by Leon Kooijmans titled "Christianity after the Death of God: Christian Atheism and the Materiality of Absence." In it Kooijmans observes that, "Since the 1990s, an increasing amount of (post-)evangelical Christians in North America and Europe sought to form communities in creative and innovative ways [...]. One notable group associated with this Emerging Church Movement is called ‘Ikon’, a small collective of artists and disillusioned Christians, agnostics and atheists located in Belfast, Northern Ireland that was active from 2001 to 2013." The connection with romance is that at one of their first meetings (on the topic of the prodigal son), "Around the room dozens of Mills and Boon novels that we had purchased in a second-hand bookshop have been scattered around the various surfaces" (18) and "As the service draws to a close everyone is invited to take away a Mills and Boon book as a reminder of the evening’s theme" (21).

Censored and Scorned Books, Nora Roberts, Furry Protagonists and New Publications

I'm not keen on the use of the word "spat" here, as I think it trivialises what's going on, but the news itself is of interest to Romancelandia:

Romance novelist Nora Roberts donated $50,000 Sunday to help keep the doors open at a Michigan library that was defunded in early August in a spat over LGBTQ-themed books. (Bridge Michigan)

Note that, given how prolific and popular Nora Roberts is, "Patmos Library, serving a township of 10,000 people, has 144 Nora Roberts books in its collection, compared to about 90 total books with LGBTQ themes."

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Turning from censored books to ones with low status, Vassiliki Veros has written a very personal reflection, drawing on her family history, about the importance of

the uncatalogued, the unwritten metadata of popular romance fiction [...] romance fiction collections that remain undocumented, unregistered, whose transtextual elements have been obfuscated or not fully realised—those works that remain separate, independent, successful without institutional engagement and recognition. (The Aleph Review)

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In the latest episode of the Shelf Love Podcast

Dr. Nicola Welsh-Burke, a scholar of fairy tales and romance, is here to discuss hot wolf boys, brooding Byronic figures, pseudomarriage and pseudovirginity, hot villain discourse, and why young women need beastly men to unlock their sexuality.

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And now on to the new publications:

Allan, Jonathan A. (2022). "One Sexy Daddy: Desirable Dad 'Bods' and the Popular Romance Novel." Fashionable Masculinities: Queers, Pimp Daddies, and Lumbersexuals, Ed. Vicki Karaminas, Adam Geczy and Pamela Church Gibson. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. 83-??. [Excerpt]

Aravind, G. S. Dwivedi, Laxmi Dhar (2021). "The Representation of Female Characters in the Romances of Hawthorne: A Comparison with the Popular Romance Fiction of America in the Twentieth Century." International Journal of Mechanical Engineering 6.3:1703-1706. [I'm not sure how this was published in a journal on this topic!]

Hallett, Hilary A. (2022). Inventing the It Girl: How Elinor Glyn Created the Modern Romance and Conquered Early Hollywood. Liveright Publishing Corporation. [Excerpt here. The prologue of the book makes a somewhat less sweeping claim about Glyn's relationship with the romance genre than the title does. Which, given that her most famous novel does not have an HEA, is probably for the best.]

Larson, Christine (2022). "Streaming books: confluencers, Kindle Unlimited and the platform imaginary." Communication, Culture and Critique. [Abstract]

Priyatna, Aquarini and Sri Rijati Wardiani (2022). "Naturalization and Romanticization of Violence in Indonesian Teen Lit Jingga Series by Esti Kinasih," Journal of International Women's Studies 24.5.

Events: 10 and 14 February

Coming up on the 14th is a colloquium which will be streamed live. "Figuraciones del chico malo: género, deseo y poder en narrativas románticas populares. Lunes 14 de febrero de 2022, 10:00-16:00"

One of the papers is

“El ‘chico malo’ en la novela romántica paranormal post-9/11 en Estados Unidos”

MARÍA T. RAMOS GARCÍA Universidad Estatal de Dakota del Sur

It will stream live here. More details here.  I've been told that it will remain available afterwards, so I'll post a link to that later, in a different post.

The other event is one I only found out about recently, it's in Australia, and it's on the 10th. I'm hoping I've got this up before it starts but I'm really unclear about the impact of the time difference.

Will You Be My Valentine?: Romance, Love, and Lust in Popular Culture

Join us on the 10^th of February 2022 for our free online symposium exploring the many ways love is represented in popular culture.

Keynote: Dr Jodi McAlister, Deakin University

It’s Not You, It’s Me: Breaking Up in Popular Culture

To register for attendance please send an email to popcrn@une.edu.au. Programme and book of abstracts are available here.

Two of the papers are:

Happy Objects: The Pleasures of Reading the Romance
Nattie Golubov, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

This paper argues that popular romance novels actively participate in the circulation of “happy objects” in two senses: they promise happiness as one outcome of the reading experience, on the one hand, while, on the other, they contribute to the circulation of affect by attaching the promise of happiness to certain objects which, in turn, connect to ideas and values. This affective work is accomplished through the use of literary techniques such as the familiar plot structure, the happy ending, the use of cliché and stereotype which I read as features with affordances conducive to a pleasurable reading experience. Based upon the work of new formalists such as Rita Felski and Caroline Levine and Sara Ahmed’s notion of the happy object, I argue that these formal elements incite an embodied type of reading. Contrary to much reader reception theory which dismisses the affective reaction of readers, I argue that (re)reading the romance is a positive, desirable experience because it is embodied, a style of reading that readers expect and unashamedly enjoy.

‘Love Conquers All’?: Race, Bridgerton, and the Romance Writers of America
Lisa J. Hackett, University of New England

 
Netflix’s historical romance Bridgerton (2020 - ) was notable for its colour-diverse cast. The show, however, has drawn a lot of criticism for the way it handled race within the context of the British aristocracy of Regency London. In episode 4, “An Affair of Honour” the position of persons of colour is explicitly discussed between Lady Danbury and Simon, the Duke of Hastings, both themselves characters of colour. Lady Danbury holds that the transformation of status came about because of
love, specifically that of the King for his Queen, a woman of colour: “love conquers all”. Simon demurs, they are elevated due to the King’s whim, and this can easily be reversed: “love changes nothing”.
 

While much has been made of the intersection between #BlackLivesMatter and the depictions of persons of colour in shows such as Bridgerton, in this paper I argue that depictions of Characters of Colour occupy a tenuous position within the genre of Historical Romance Novels. Bridgerton aired during a time when one of the biggest organisations devoted to the production of romance, the Romance Writers of America (RWA), was grappling with the issue of diversity. This paper compares the reception of Bridgerton with the events within the RWA. Through examining the events of the RWA from the Courtney Milan affair (2019), when the organisation imploded due to diversity issues, through to the controversy of the 2021 Vivian awards, this paper demonstrates that the current elevated position of characters of colour is held tenuously and more needs to be done to strengthen their existence within the world of Historical Romance.

 

New Publications: on paranormal, historical, Muslim, erotic, teenage and Kindle romances, among other things

Burke, Nicola, 2020. Mills and Fur: Feminism and Femininity in the Supernatural Romance. PhD, Western Sydney University. [Available for download.]

González-Cruz, María-Isabel, 2021. "On the Discoursive Construction of the Spanish Hero in Intercultural Romances." International Handbook of Love: Transcultural and Transdisciplinary Perspectives, Ed. Claude-Hélène Mayer and Elisabeth Vanderheiden. Cham: Springer. 749-767. [Abstract here.]

Hackett, Lisa J. and Jo Coghlan, Jo, 2021. "The History Bubble: Negotiating Authenticity in Historical Romance Novels." M/C Journal 24.1.[Open access online.]

Izharuddin, Alicia, 2021. "'Redha tu Ikhlas': The Social–Textual Significance of Islamic Virtue in Malay Forced Marriage Narratives Religions 12.5 (310). [Available for download.]

Kraxenberger, Maria, Christine A. Knoop and Winfried Menninghaus, Winfried, 2021. "Who reads contemporary erotic novels and why?" Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 8. [Available for download.] 

Kuchta, Estella Carolye, 2021. "Imagining Love: Teen Romance Novels and American Teen Relational Capacity." International Handbook of Love: Transcultural and Transdisciplinary Perspectives, Ed. Claude-Hélène Mayer and Elisabeth Vanderheiden. Cham: Springer. 827-842. [Abstract here.]

McGurl, Mark, 2021. "Unspeakable Conventionality: The Perversity of the Kindle." American Literary History. Online First. [Abstract]

Romantic Escapes: Post-Millennial Trends in Contemporary Popular Romance Fiction. Ed. Irene Pérez Fernández and Carmen Pérez Ríu, Carmen. Bern: Peter Lang, 2021. [This is a book which includes a number of essays on romance. The link provided is to the entry in the Romance Scholarship Database, which includes a list of the contents.]

Rader, Kara, Shelly R. Hovick & Elisabeth Bigsby, 2021. "'Are You Clean?' Encouraging STI Communication in Casual Encounters through Narrative Messages in Romance Novels." Communication Studies. Online First. [Abstract]

Today at PopCAANZ: Vampires and Listening

Today there were the following talks given at PopCAANZ:

• No Longer in the Same Vein: the changing nature of vampires in literature and romance: Kate Carruthers
• Love and Listening: the erotics of talk in the popular romance novel: Jodi McAlister

Dr Naja Later has tweeted about the session and I reproduce her tweets below:

Kate Carruthers’ 'No Longer in the Same Vein: the changing nature of vampires in literature and romance':

Carruthers describes it as ‘quite a racy genre from the start’. Vampires are all about sex, but they’re really queer, too. Vampires make vampires through transmogrification and biting, Carruthers notes, a potentially queer trope.

Science and medicine are becoming important elements in vampire narratives. Carruthers identifies a novel emergence of vampires being created by normative birth. Vampire stories like this have an undercurrent of eugenics and ‘improving the breed’. Vampire breeding gets REALLY sticky, as heteronormativity and white supremacy become clear subtexts.

Carruthers takes a close look at the Nazi concept of ‘blood and soil’ and US white supremacist policy to contextualise how reproducing vampires problematise ‘hybridising’.

Jodi McAlister's 'Love and Listening: the erotics of talk in the popular romance novel':

In ‘Faking It,’ @JodiMcA describes how the lead characters share truths as part of their growing intimacy and eroticism. Talk becomes a thrilling part of foreplay. We go back to Jane Eyre as an example of talk as eroticism, particularly talk as a process of equality. A core argument for @JodiMcA is how, in the romance narrative, the hero must come around to the heroine’s way of loving. This also happens in the process of listening.

Outlander example: Jamie believes Clare and declares ‘there is truth between us,’ @JodiMcA describes this as an eruption, the barriers dissolving between them. Listening, trust, and respect means that intimacy can build on their passion.

New to the Wiki: Publishing, Brockmann and More

I've added a new page to the blog: it's a Race and Romance Bibliography.

In addition, there are some new items which have been added to the Romance Wiki bibliography.

Billekens, F.G.W., 2019. 

Never Mind Me When There's You: The Submission Of The Heroine In YA Supernatural Romance Fiction, Bachelor's Thesis, Utrecht University. Abstract and link to pdf

Brouillette, Sarah, 2019. 

"Romance Work." Theory & Event 22.2, pp. 451-464. Abstract

Haefner, Margaret J., 2009. 

"Challenging the -isms: Gender and Race in Brockmann's Troubleshooters, Inc. Romance Novels", Journal of Media Sociology 1.3/4: 182-201.

McAlister, Jodi, 2018. 

'The literary text as historical artifact: The colonial couple in Australian romantic fiction by women, 1838-1860', Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, No. 24: 38-51. Abstract

Priest, Hannah. 2018. 

“Sparkly Vampires and Shimmering Aliens: The Paranormal Romance of Stephenie Meyer.” Twenty-First-Century Popular Fiction, edited by Bernice M. Murphy and Stephen Matterson, Edinburgh University Press, 2018, pp. 182–192.

Sagun, Karryl Kim Abella, 2019. 

Book Mavens of Manila : an interpretative phenomenological analysis of contemporary niche publishers in the Philippines. Doctoral thesis,Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. [I include this because it incorporates material from "three Wattpad self-publishers based in the Philippines: Mina V. Esguerra, Noreen Capili, and Kimberly Villanueva. All three agreed to be quoted verbatim, and to be referred to by name. They have all published both on electronic platforms (particularly Wattpad) and on print. They also share the same genre for their works: romance" (123).]

Taylor, Jessica Anne. 2013. 

“Write the Book of Your Heart: Career, Passion and Publishing in the Romance Writing Community,” Ph.D. Thesis, University of Toronto. Abstract and link to pdf

New to the Wiki: Final List of 2018

I probably shouldn't have let this post grow for so long as it's rather long now.

Abdullah-Poulos, Layla, 2016. 

“Muslim Love American Style: Islamic-American Hybrid Culture and Native-Born American Black Muslim Romance.” MA thesis, SUNY Empire State College, 2016. Excerpt

Abdullah-Poulos, Layla, 2018. 

"The Stable Muslim Love Triangle - Triangular Desire in African American Muslim Romance Fiction." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 7.

Bhasin, Neeta, 2018. 

"Romancing the 'Illegal' Immigrant", Journal of Literature and Art Studies 8.10: 1459-1474. [Focuses on Serena Bell's Yours to Keep.]

 

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

"The Publishing Ecosystems of Contemporary Australian Genre Fiction." Creative Industries Journal 11.2: 203-221. Abstract

Fernández Rodríguez, Carolina, 2018. 

"Del cuento de hadas a la novela romántica: Una visión de la sub/literatura como gimnasio mental y laboratorio de sub/versión cultural", Repercusión de la lectura y otras formas de arte en nuestra vida y nuestra obra: Memorias del VII coloquio de LART, Centro Español de Manhattan, Nueva York, 26-28 de octubre de 2016. Ed. Paquita Suárez Coalla, Sonia Rivera Valdés, Ainoa Íñigo. West Hurley, NY: Editorial Campana, 2018. 69-95.

 

Fong, Katrina, Justin B. Mullin and Raymond A. Mar, 2013. 

"What You Read Matters: The Role of Fiction Genre in Predicting Interpersonal Sensitivity". Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 7.4 (2013): 370-376.

 

Gillis, Stacy, 2018. 

“Manners, Money, and Marriage: Austen, Heyer, and the Literary Genealogy of the Regency Romance”. After Austen: Reinventions, Rewritings, Revisitings. Ed. Lisa Hopkins. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 81-101. [This focuses on the "social and sexual precarity" of female characters, in particular in Heyer's Regency Buck.]

 

Glennemeier, Jaelyn, 2018. 

“And he was an Arab!:” Imperial Femininity and Pleasure in E. M. Hull's 1919 Desert Romance, The Sheik', Honors thesis, University of Kansas. Abstract and link to pdf [Bonnie Loshbaugh reports that this contains details of "a 1922 interview with [E. M.] Hull in Nash’s and Pall Mall Magazine, and implies that it includes a photograph of Hull in front of her home." With the centenary of the publication of The Sheik coming up, it might be nice if someone could put this online.]

Gunne, Sorcha. 

‘Gender, Genre and Modernity: Popular Romance Fiction in Ireland’, Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction, Ed. L Harte. Oxford: Oxford University Press [in press]. [I've added this to the section about chick lit, because that's what the content mostly seems to discuss.]

 

Hopkins, Lisa, 2018. 

"Georgette Heyer: What Austen Left Out". After Austen: Reinventions, Rewritings, Revisitings. Ed. Lisa Hopkins. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 61-79. [This chapter looks in detail at military metaphors/language used by Heyer, as well as her allusions to Austen.]

 

McAlister, Jodi, 2015. 

‘Breaking the Hard Limits: Romance, Pornography, and the Question of Genre in the Fifty Shades Trilogy.’ Analyses/Rereadings/Theories 3.2: 23-33.

 

McAlister, Jodi, 2018. 

‘Defining and Redefining Popular Genres: The Evolution of ‘New Adult’ Fiction.’ Australian Literary Studies 33.4 (2018).

 

Parnell, Claire, 2018. 

‘Models of Publishing and Opportunities for Change: Representations in Harlequin, Montlake and Self-Published Romance Novels.’ Australian Literary Studies 33.4.

 

Sanders, Lise Shapiro, 2018. 

"Making the Modern Girl: Fantasy, Consumption, and Desire in Romance Weeklies of the 1920s". Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918-1939: The Interwar Period. Ed. Catherine Clay, Maria DiCenzo, Barbara Green, and Fiona Hackney. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 

Sewell Matter, Laura, 2007. 

“Pursuing the Great Bad Novelist”, The Georgia Review 61.3 (2007): 444-459.

 

Turner, Ellen, 2014. 

'The Sheik Returns: Imitations and Parodies of the Desert Romance', in Hype: Bestsellers and Literary Cultures, ed. Jon Helgason, Sara Kärrholm, and Ann Steiner (Lund, Sweden: Nordic Academic Press), pp. 185-202.

Vani, Christina, 2018. 

Immortal Words: The Language and Style of the Contemporary Italian Undead-Romance Novel. Ph.D. thesis. University of Toronto, 2018.

 

Williams, Elizabeth W., 2019. 

"Queering Settler Romance: The Reparative Eugenic Landscape in Nora Strange's Kenyan Novels", Archiving Settler Colonialism: Culture, Space and Race. Ed. Yu-ting Huang and Rebecca Weaver-Hightower. Abingdon: Routledge, 2019. 190-204 ??. ["Williams reads Nora Strange’s interwar romance novels as they archive settler preoccupation with white sexuality in a settled space. In Strange’s novels, a repressed and declining Britain needs the “Edenic paradise” of Kenya to let loose British sexual vitality. The Kenyan environment tests would-​be parents for their moral and physical fitness in producing good settler children and awakens healthy heterosexual desires to ready parents for reproductive duty."]

Happy reading and happy 2019!

Romance Paper Wins the Roberta Gellis Memorial Award

Bowling Green State University Libraries have announced

that Kathleen Kollman, a Ph.D. student in American Culture Studies, has been named as the inaugural recipient of The Roberta Gellis Memorial Paper Award. Kollman’s paper, titled “Contemporary Paranormal Romance: Theories and Development of the Genre’s Feminism (Or Lack Thereof)” was written for a seminar on romance novels taught in the Spring 2018 semester by Dr. Kristin Rudisill in the Department of Popular Culture, and was also presented at the Researching the Romance conference sponsored by the Library in April 2018.

An abstract of the paper and a link to download it as a pdf are available here.

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: Death, Monsters, Migrations, Du Maurier and more

Here are the new entries, recently added by Christina Martinez and me.

Leonzini, Alexandra, 2018. 

‘“All the Better to Eat You With”: The Eroticization of the Werewolf and the Rise of Monster Porn in the Digital Age.’ Exploring the Fantastic: Genre, Ideology, and Popular Culture. Ed. Ina Batzke, Eric C. Erbacher, Linda M. Heß, Corinna Lenhardt. Bielefeld: transcript. 269-294. [“Starting her analysis with 19th-century horror fiction before moving to 20th-century films and 21-century romance and erotic literature, Leonzini traces the changes in the construction of the gendered and sexualized body of the figure of the werewolf” (12) and there is therefore quite a lot of reference to romance, which is deemed to have laid the groundwork for modern monster porn. Excerpt.]

Lowery, Karalyne, 2018. 

"The Militarized Shapeshifter: Authorized Violence and Military Connections as an Antidote to Monstrosity." University of Toronto Quarterly 87.1: 196-213. Abstract.

O'Mahony, Lauren. 2017. 

"Death and the Australian Rural Romance Novel." TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, vol. (Supplement 45), Oct. 2017, pp. 1-14. [Full text]

 

Salvador Miguel, Nicasio, 1995. 

¿Hay precedentes de la novela rosa? Letras de la España contemporánea. Homenaje a José Luis Varela, ed. N. Salvador Miguel (Alcalá de Henares: Centro de Estudios Cervantinos): 319-327. [Full text]

Suman [Sigroha], 2018. 

"Gendered Migrations and Literary Narratives: Writing Communities in South Asian Diaspora." Millennial Asia 9.1: 93-108.[Full text] [On "educated skilled women from South Asia who migrate as ‘trailing spouses’" and turn to romance-writing as an alternative, portable career.]

Turner, Katherine. 2017. 

"Daphne Du Maurier's Mary Anne: Rewriting the Regency Romance as Feminist History." University of Toronto Quarterly: A Canadian Journal of the Humanities, vol. 86, no. 4, pp. 54-77. [Abstract]

Vitackova, Martina, 2018. 

"Representation of racial and sexual ‘others’ in Afrikaans popular romantic fiction by Sophia Kapp." Tydskrif vir letterkunde 55.1. 122-133. Abstract and link to pdf