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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

Theory in Love: International Comparative Literature Association, 2016

Organisers: Brendon Wocke (Université de Perpignan), Francesca Manzari (Université d’Aix-Marseille), Apostolos Lampropoulos (Université de Bordeaux III)

International Comparative Literature Association
XXIst Congress: “The Many Languages of Comparative Literature” July 21 – July 27, 2016,
University of Vienna, Austria
http://icla2016.univie.ac.at

This panel concerns theory speaking in terms of love, seeking to establish the relationship between “l’amour” and theory.

In The Politics of Friendship Derrida reflects on the question of the indecidable possibility, the “peut-être,” of love, of friendship, and of desire: “‘Je t'aime entends- tu?’; cette déclaration d'aimance hyperbolique ne pourrait donner sa chance à une politique de l'amitié que soumise à l'épreuve du peut-être, de l'indécidable” How then can we express a refusal, a no, without listening, without hearing? How can one express the divergent and differential possibilities opened by this phrase? And yet Derrida already has, in Envois, where he explores, theorizes and dramatizes a love affair, tracing the course of its refusal in the various postcards and letters which remain unsent, forever awaiting their destination.

What Derrida performs in Envois is effectively echoed by Lacan who, in Seminar XX, says: “people have done nothing but speak of love in analytic discourse. [...] What analytic discourse contributes - and perhaps that is, after all, the reason for its emergence at a certain point in scientific discourse - is that to speak of love is in itself a jouissance.”

If, as Lacan says, the troubadours understood that love is nothing other than form, we could perhaps establish a relationship between love’s discourse and theoretical discourse as bridging the gap between philosophy and literature.

Does love function as a theoretical paradigm? Or should we think of theory as an act of love? Or even as born out of love? Can one think of a polyamorous theory? And what would such a theory consist of, in the writhing phrases which intertwine like the honeysuckle of Tristan and Iseult.

We welcome contributions on the subject of love and its relation to theoretical writing.

Please submit your abstract online by August 31, 2015 via the conference website http://icla2016.univie.ac.at/abstract-submission/

You will need to create an account with the website and enter the seminar number 17327 into the “topic” field on the “add abstract” screen. The participants will be informed of their inclusion no later than December 31, 2015.

For further information contact brendon.wocke@gmail.com 

Papers in either English or French will be accepted. 

CFP: Positioning Love and Affect (ACLA)

Jonathan A. Allan

Following up on earlier CFPs, here is a "theory" CFP dealing with love and affect (American Comparative Literature Association's annual meeting at the University of Toronto, April 4-7, 2013). 

This seminar positions what Anna Jónasdóttrir has termed “love studies” in relation to “the affective turn,” and asks how such a conjunction illuminates and possibly repositions both areas of study.  Affect theory has concentrated on certain emotions and affects, particularly its negative, or “ugly” ones; a focused analysis of “love,” in particular, has seemingly been avoided.  How might attention to love help us to rethink affect studies?  For instance, is love an affect, or an emotion, a feeling, a mood?  Does love function as affective labour, an energy, a force?  How might love undo private/public and personal/political oppositions?  Meanwhile, love, within critical theory, is often contained as an opiate, a harmful ideology, a “cruel optimism,” or as a sentimental, naïve and non-academic subject. 

This panel follows “love studies” in its consideration of love as a serious, important area of academic study, while not precluding a playful or performative approach to the subject.  It encourages examinations of love as a “positive,” or “productive” force, and seeks to consider love itself – romantic, erotic, compassionate love, etc., human and non-human forms of love – without displacing love in favour of other terms, like “care.”  We are also interested in how subjects and objects are “positioned” in relation to love;  eg. who or what is allowed to be a subject/object of love?  Is love temporally or geographically limited/translatable? 

Papers from a variety of theoretical perspectives (psychoanalytic, queer, feminist, etc.) are welcomed, as long as they engage with intersections between “love studies” and the “affective turn.

For more information, including how to submit an abstract (due November 15, 2012): http://www.acla.org/acla2013/positioning-love-and-affect/