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. 

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

Call for Papers: Popular Romance and Sexuality/Erotica

From Jonathan Allan and Catherine Roach:

Call for Papers for a Special Issue of the journal Porn Studies focused on 

“Popular Romance and Sexuality/Erotica”

In “Mass Market Romance: Pornography for Women is Different,” American feminist scholar Ann Barr Snitow laid the groundwork for what has become something of a perpetual debate: is the romance genre pornography? For nearly fifty years, scholars, commentators, authors, publishers, and readers have debated this question, and truth be told, after fifty years, opinions are divided and there is no clear consensus. In particular, some feminist scholars favour the relationship while others dismiss it as pejorative. This Call for Papers is interested not in answering the “is it or isn’t it” question but in thinking creatively about affinities between “porn studies” and “popular romance studies.” What fruitful relationship exists between these two fields of inquiry?

To this end, the Call for Paper seeks new approaches to an old and often antagonistic question. What if instead of comparing romance novels to pornography, the relationship was about the similar ways both genres are scrutinized, dismissed, and controlled? For instance, it is very common for concerns to exist about the potential harms of pornography to the viewer and society. Strikingly, the 1970 Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography includes lengthy discussions of pulp fictions, such as love stories with sexual content alongside the visual medium. The history of American censorship debates can be written alongside the history of popular romance novels. In 1973, Miller v. California appears only months after the first blockbuster romance The Flame and the Flower (1972). During the 1960s, newsstands became sites of potential crime. In 2024, “obscenity” debates have returned in the context of book banning, library wars, and battles over school sex ed curricula. Age verification for pornography is becoming normalized in various jurisdictions. How might these moves affect popular fiction, especially erotic fiction and popular romance? It is not difficult to imagine age verification as a requirement for access to sexually explicit fiction or queer romance—or indeed to texts that challenge heteronormativity, patriarchy, or white Christian nationalism.

 More details can be found here. The closing date is 1 December 2024.

New Publications: LGBTQ+ romance, dark romance, rape, publishing, folklore and coral

Items whose titles are hyperlinked are accessible freely.

Greening, Alo (2024). History, Huh: A Post-Modern Study of the Consumption of Queer Romance. Master of Arts in Women and Gender Studies, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Hernandez, Janeth (2024). Exploring Consent: An Analysis of Consent in Dark Romance and Contemporary Romance Books. Master of Arts in Writing: Book Publishing, Portland State University. 

 

Keran, Molly (2024). The Genre of Rape: Women’s Popular Literature and Contemporary Representations of Sexual Violence. PhD thesis, University of Michigan. 

Kousholt, Moa (2024). A Time, A Place, and A Person: A comparative literary analysis of Red, White & Royal Blue and One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston and how queer representation can be problematized in a classroom context. Teacher Education Programme for Upper Secondary School, Linnaeus University. 

 

Miclea, Adelina-Cerasela (2024). The Scientification of Love: A Cognitive Literary Approach to Romance Novels. PhD, Universitatea de Vest din Timișoara. [Only an index and summary is currently available online.] 

Poirel, Carole (2024). "The long tail business model in publishing: The case of Hachette's romance division in France " Business Model Innovation in Creative and Cultural Industries, Ed. Pierre Roy, Estelle Pellegrin-Boucher. Routledge. 69-88. [Abstract available from https://doi.org/10.4324/9781032714462-5 ]

Šmídová, Monika Markéta (2024). " 'Oh, my friend, those weren’t angels': Trauma, Recovery and Folklore in The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal and Spectred Isle by KJ Charles". Journal of Popular Romance Studies 13.

 

Valovirta, Elina (2024) "Love and Loss: Corals and Cultural Sustainability in Caribbean Popular Romance Novels." Arrivals and Departures: The Human Relationship with Changing Biodiversity. Ed. Otto Latva, Heta Lähdesmäki, Kirsi Sonck-Rautio and Harri Uusitalo. De Grutyer. 109-126. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111215273-006

 

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

---

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/

---

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: Masculinity, Race, Sexuality and More

There are a couple of anecdotes from 

Joshua Thorburn (2023). "Exiting the Manosphere. A Gendered Analysis of Radicalization, Diversion and Deradicalization Narratives from r/IncelExit and r/ExRedPill." Studies in Conflict & Terrorism.

which I wanted to share. The whole article's open access, from https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2023.2244192

Amusingly, one user on r/ExRedPill stated that his deradicalization journey was prompted by reading “soppy romance novels” targeted for women, while in concurrence, another replied that romantic poems and historical period dramas helped him question his red pill beliefs. Because this media focused on romance beyond sexual gratification alone, and the fact that it was either popular with women or targeted towards them, such materials again therefore challenged manosphere claims that women are exclusively driven by an innate desire for the physical attributes of so-called alpha-males. (17-18)

On the topic of men/masculinities, I missed Jonathan Allan's Men, Masculinities, and Infertilities when it first came out in 2022, but the good news is that it's also downloadable for free, from https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003010432 or https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/57071 and includes a chapter each on LaVyrle Spencer's The Fulfillment and The Trouble with Joe by Emilie Richards.

Giovanni, Chiara (2023). "Hetero Ever After? Romance Novels, Race, and the Limits of Social Dreaming." Post45. ["Chiara Giovanni shows that popular romance novels by and about women of color often indulge a positive orientation toward heterosexual desire. Giovanni calls this orientation "heteroidealism" and sees it as an adaptive strategy to forge solidarity between men and women along racial lines."]

Heying, Sarah M. (2023). "Sealed With a Kiss on Your Artery": An Archive of Southern Lesbian Desire. PhD thesis, University of Mississippi. [This isn't specifically about romance but it does have a chapter on Ann Allen Shockley. More details here.]

 

Kamblé, Jayashree (2023). "The origins of U.S. mass-market category romance novels: Black editors and writers in the early 1980s." The Journal of American Culture. [This hasn't yet been added to a volume, so the pagination available now isn't as it will eventually appear, but it's available (albeit behind a paywall) from here. I've collected some key quotes here.]

Leenstra, Lisa (2023). Covers of Lovers: A Multimodal Comparison of the Front Covers of Romance Novels in 2011 and 2021. Masters thesis, Universiteit Utrecht.  

Nichols, Sue (2023). "Love matters: the case for an inclusive, contemporary approach to romance themes and texts in subject English." The Australian Journal of Language and Literacy. [This is about teaching YA romance/romantic fiction to future teachers of English.]

Stobaugh, Rebecca (2023). Halfway-Sexual: Exploring Demisexuality in American Literature. PhD, Louisiana State University. [This is embargoed until 2030 but apparently discusses Fifty Shades of Grey and Jack Byrne’s Ace. The abstract can be found here.]

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: 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.

Good News/Bad News: Eric Selinger, Margo Hendricks, Book Bans

Eric Selinger has made most of his romance scholarship available for free online in pre-print form. That includes:

• Disaggregating attraction: asexuality and genre critique in Alex Beecroft's Blue Steel Chain
• The wild heart of the continent: love and place in the Silk Road novels of Sherry Thomas 
• Disenchantment and its discontents: “modern love” and irony in popular romance fiction 
• Romance and/as religion (co-authored with me)
  
•  When I Paint My Masterpiece: Bob Dylan, Ekphrasis, and the Art of Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Margo Hendricks'Race and Romance: Coloring the Past  has been published by Arizona State University Press and is available to read for free online.

As reported by Sarah MacLean, in Enid & Garfield County, Oklahoma the target of book-banning is getting wider:

[From the Facebook page of the Public Library of Enid & Garfield County: "In light of recent changes to program and display policies at the Public Library of Enid and Garfield County, 2 programs have been canceled for the month of April.
The Sexual Assault Awareness program/display and the Shameless Romance book club discussion have been canceled. Displays or programs that focus on sexual content are not allowed at the library. The library respects the authority of the library board to set library policies. Community members who would like to be heard on the subject of library board policies are encouraged to contact the library board, city council or the mayor."]

As Molly Keran commented:

Not sure who this is supposed to protect but it sure isn’t women, or children, or survivors. While the SA awareness stuff is obviously most terrible here, I do think these are two sides of a coin. Not only does literature & resources dealing with SA help people recognize abusive dynamics they may experience but literature that centers pleasure & consent can do the same. We need to be able to discuss a wide range of experiences and narratives of sex (good, bad, nonconsensual, consensual, straight, queer, fictional, nonfictional, etc etc) because ignorance, silence, and shame create the conditions for exploitation and abuse.

 

New Publications: Disability, Folklore, Gender, Literature, Linguistics, Sexuality

The 2022 volume of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies is now being published (articles etc. are published throughout the year). At the moment, there is only one article available (by Bonnie White, see below) but there are also some book reviews.

Here's my round-up of recent publications:

Allan, Jonathan A. (2022). “ ‘A Most Unlikely Hero’: Disability, Masculinity, and Sexuality in Harlequin Superromance Novels.” The Male Body in Representation: Returning to Matter. Ed. Carmen Dexl and Silvia Gerlsbeck. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 215-235. [Abstract here]

Garber, Linda (2021). Novel Approaches to Lesbian History. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. [This is not just about lesbian historical romance, but there is a discussion which is particularly focussed on romance in the chapter titled "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lesbian Sex* *But Only In Historical Fiction." An excerpt can be found here.]

Ivanski, Chantelle, Marta M.Maslej and Raymond A. Mar (2022). "Empirical Approaches to Studying Emotion in Literature: The Case of Gender." The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion, Ed. Patrick Colm Hogan, Bradley J. Irish and Lalita Pandit Hogan. London: Routledge.  [See https://rsdb.vivanco.me.uk/bibliography/empirical-approaches-studying-emotion-literature-case-gender for links. At the time of writing, the chapter was available in full via Google Books.]

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques (2022). "Interpellation and Counter-Interpellation in the Novel." The Rhetoric of Literary Communication: From Classical English Novels to Contemporary Digital Fiction. New York: Routledge. [Excerpt here.]

Pierini, Francesca (2021). " “Sharing the Same Soil:” Sally Rooney’s Normal People and the Coming-of-Age Romance." Prospero. Rivista di letterature e culture straniere :141-166. [It argues "for the importance and validity of a genre and the field of expertise attached to it – scholarship of the (popular) romance – that has developed, during the last decades, and especially since the beginning of the current century, important analytical tools for reading and understanding the representation of love in literary as well as popular narratives. Despite the undeniable revitalisation generic forms of literature are currently undergoing, the romance – and its critics – tend to remain excluded from academic debates concerning such revival." ] 

Šmídová, Monika Markéta (2021). Five Thousand for Justice: The Use of English Folklore in the Novels of KJ Charles. Masters thesis, Masaryk University.

van Halteren, Hans (2022). "Automatic Authorship Investigation." Language as Evidence: Doing Forensic Linguistics.  Ed. Victoria Guillén-Nieto and Dieter Stein. Palgrave Macmillan. 219-255.

White, Bonnie (2022). "Freedom, Sincerity, and the Modern Woman in the Interwar Romances of Berta Ruck." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 11.

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]

On Libraries, Medical Romance, Sex and Consent, RWA

The RWA has announced that the RITAs will be replaced by a new contest, called The Vivian, after Vivian Stephens, one of the founders of the RWA. [Archived version here.] There was some coverage of this in The Guardian. Here's a bit more detail about Vivian Stephens and why she's such an important figure in the history of romance:

A Black editor in a predominantly white industry, Stephens sought to incorporate the voices of women of color into the burgeoning romance industry. In 1980, Dell published the first category romance by a Black author with Black protagonists- Entwined Destinies by Rosalind Welles (the pseudonym of journalist Elsie Washington). Stephens also made sure that Dell’s Candlelight lines included romances by Indigenous, Latina, and Asian authors, creating almost single-handedly the category that trade publications called “Ethnic Romance”. (BGSU University Library)

There's more about her here. Some negative responses to the proposal to rename the RWA's main awards after her can be found here, including a comment from one author who stated that

I dislike people who try to rewrite history. I live in the South-Southwest where every county seat has a memorial to the Confederate soldiers. Taking them down does not change the Civil War. We all know that was a terrible event. I hate when people try to make history politically correct. It wasn't. We can't alter it.

Possibly a comment which says rather more about the RITAs than the author intended. Also, as an academic blog, I have to point out that historians are constantly "rewriting history." For example, here's an article about the history of the rewriting of the history of the US West. Often history needs to be rewritten because the version that's currently known is inaccurate:

Black cowboys and cowgirls have shown up to support Black Lives Matter this week, but their presence also symbolizes something much more. Black cowboys have long been part of American history: Historians estimate that during the 19th century, one in four cowboys was black. Many ranchers depended on these skilled black workers to herd their cattle, and many went on to become famous rodeo stars themselves, such as Bill Pickett, who invented the bulldogging technique. Yet throughout the 20th and 21st century, the narrative shifted. Hollywood films whitewashed the idea of the cowboy, turning it into a stoic caricature. (Vogue)

I only have one new publication to report in this post. However, it's freely available online:

Veros, Vassiliki, 2020. “The selective tradition, the role of romance fiction donations, and public library practices in New South Wales, Australia.” Information Research 25.2

On a more positive note with regards to libraries, the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, which has a collection of nurse romances, now also has an online exhibition of some of these texts, Angels and Handmaidens, which is designed in part to demonstrate how romance fiction can be a useful resources for scholars working in a wide range of fields:

This exhibition is a demonstration of how to begin primary source research; it suggests numerous ways that students and scholars might approach popular romance as a resource, and gives examples of the types of questions that can be asked of resources from popular culture while inviting the viewer to generate their own questions about the sources.

The exhibition was created by Katie Stollenwerk, who recently completed a 3 year internship with the UWM Special Collections department.

On the topic of consent, K. J. Charles has written a discussion of/guide to how to write consent in sex scenes which explains how depictions of consent have changed in romance and how to write it so that it's sexy because

these days there’s a lot of people who’d agree that consent is a Good Thing, but they don’t want to hear about it. Consent in romance sex scenes is frequently covered with a single “do you want this?” or variations thereon. (Or even “If you want me to stop, tell me now because I won’t be able to control myself much longer.” That was in a book published two years ago. Wow.)
The argument goes, roughly, that we know we have to tick the consent box, but:

• it’s unsexy to ask permission
• a properly sexy alpha hero can intuit that the virgin hero/ine really wants flagellation followed by anal on their first time
• consent is wishy-washy PC nonsense that gets in the way of the good stuff
• consent is boring because it’s just endless repetition of ‘may I kiss you’/do you like this?’  and people don’t really do that.

As it happens, some recent research by Jennifer L. Piemonte, Staci Gusakova, Marissa Nichols & Terri D. Conley, provides evidence in support of Charles' thesis that consent can be sexy. Here's an excerpt from the abstract of "Is consent sexy? Comparing evaluations of written erotica based on verbal sexual consent":

In Study 1, we compared brief excerpts of erotic fiction in which verbal sexual consent was either present or absent and determined that U.S. adults judged the stories similarly and, if anything, considered the excerpts with verbal consent sexier. In Study 2, we generated erotic stories that followed familiar, heterosexual scripts and compared evaluations of erotica with consent expressed explicitly and verbally to erotica with consent expressed implicitly through no resistance. Participants considered both versions equally as sexy, indicating that public concerns about consent ruining sexual dynamics are potentially unwarranted.

Papers that would have been given: BGSU conference

The Bowling Green State University romance conference would have started yesterday. Here's Wednesday's schedule: https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/researchingromance/2020/4-22/

To help spread awareness of what colleagues are researching, at a time when people can only do this online, I'll post the titles of papers, including a link to the abstracts.

Carry Me Over the Threshold: Using Popular Romance Novels in Women’s and Gender Studies Classes to Teach Disciplinary Threshold Concepts 
Jessica Van Slooten, University of Wisconsin Green Bay

Finding a Family: The Genre World of #RomanceClass

Jodi McAlister, Deakin University, Australia
Claire Parnell, University of Melbourne
Andrea Anne Trinidad, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines

The Need for Romance Reader Studies

Mary Lynne Nielsen
Keira Soleore

Black Romance as Liberation: Beverly Jenkins' Historical Romance as Black Feminist Praxis and Historical Pedagogy

Nicole M. Jackson, Bowling Green State University

That '90s Kind of Love: Pinnacle Books and the birth of the African American romance novel

Jamee Nicole Pritchard, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

“To Be Able to Love Is Freedom”: African American Historical Romance as Neo-Slave Narrative

Qiana Whitted, University of South Carolina - Columbia

Fan Letters to Betty Cavanna: How Canonical Young Adult Literature Emerged from the Cold War Condemnation of Romance

Amanda Allen

From Pulp Tragedy to the Romance HEA: The evolution of gay pulp fiction and queer romance at Avon.

Sarah Slocum

Roar and Crash: Romance Novels of the Jazz Age and Depression Era

Jessica A. Kahan

Rare Books and Ripped Bodices: Teaching Romance as Book History

Rebecca Baumann, Indiana University - Bloomington

Romance and the Rare Book Trade

Rebecca Romney

Here's Thursday's schedule: https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/researchingromance/2020/4-23/

Appetizing Fare: a comparison of two eras in the history of Gothic literature

Malia S. Jackson

Georgette Heyer's legacy in historical romance research

Alexandra Sterling

The Problem of "Clean" Romance: Blurring the Boundaries

Lee Tobin McClain, Seton Hill University

Browsing is Hard, And Taxonomies Are Dead Sexxy

Sarah Wendell
Stefanie Hunker, BGSU

Pushing Boundaries in Romance Fiction: How Erotic Romance Became Mainstream

Anna Michelson, Northwestern University

The Cultural Significance of Indie Black Romance

Nicole Falls

Writing the Romance: Resilience and Solidarity in the Digital Economy

Christine Larson, University of Colorado Boulder

Cracked Mirrors: Mental Health Representation in Romance

Melinda Utendorf

Let’s Talk About Sex: Examining Language Choices in Contemporary Romance

Darcey Lovell, University of Rhode Island

Plus Ones: Romantic Heroines as Mathematicians and Scientists

Heather M. Schell, George Washington University

Lesbian Romance Novels and the Representation of Female U.S. Presidency

Kathleen Kollman, Bowling Green State University

Reading Alyssa Cole's "Agnes Moor's Wild Knight"

Maura Kenny, CUNY Graduate Center

The Embodied Borders of Gender, Race, and Disability in His Road Home

Trinidad Linares

An Author Reflects: Therese Dryden's PhD thesis on writing feminist romance

In 2011 Therese Dryden (who writes for Harlequin Mills & Boon as Michelle Douglas) came to Teach Me Tonight to discuss her masters thesis in creative writing. This year she completed her PhD and it's available online.

The PhD thesis has various parts. Since this is a PhD in creative writing, the first part is a novel. This is followed by analysis, drawing on the following corpus:

Nobody’s Baby But Mine by Susan Elizabeth Phillips (1997)
Blue Dahlia by Nora Roberts (2004)
Daisy’s Back in Town by Rachel Gibson (2004)
Shelter Mountain by Robyn Carr (2007)
Maid For Love by Marie Force (2011)
Somebody to Love by Kristan Higgins (2012)
Along Came Trouble by Ruthie Knox (2013)
Can’t Help Falling in Love by Bella Andre (2013)
A Single Kiss by Grace Burrowes (2015)
Stand By You by Sharon Sala (2015)

Some of these are discussed in more detail than others. The criteria shaping the corpus were publication within the past 20 years, the authors' US and New York Times bestseller status and the presence of a single mother heroine in the text. Dryden's analysis of the feminism in the texts focuses on single mothers and family law:

I explore the issue of female oppression and empowerment via the figure of the single mother heroine in the contemporary American romance novel. The situation of a lone woman raising a child on her own automatically brings to the fore questions surrounding gender roles, ideas of the family, and equality between the sexes. Referencing a corpus of ten contemporary romance novels, I investigate how these single-mother heroines are portrayed, and ask whether these depictions can be considered either empowering or oppressive to women. A granular analysis of the corpus revealed the ideological inconsistency of the genre. There were novels that provided a direct protest against patriarchal oppression by dramatizing the injustices a patriarchal society inflicts upon a single-mother heroine, while others subscribed fiercely to traditional gender roles and models, and in some cases there were novels that did both, highlighting the genre’s complexity. My research demonstrates that, while the romance genre is too big and unwieldy to be called either feminist or anti-feminist, it is possible for individual romance novels to incorporate a feminist ethos.

Finally, Dryden describes her own writing process and how it was changed by reflecting on this issues she'd uncovered in the previous section. She realised that in her published work she'd written "books that, politically, I do not agree with" (384). This she ascribes to the fact that

Writing a book is not a straightforward linear process. As a young writer (young in terms of how long I had been published) my focus was firmly fixed on writing novels that had an internal logic that held them together. That is, stories with strong conflicts, that were suitably romantic, and that incorporated heroines and heroes that readers could relate to and sympathise with. (384)

Bearing this in mind, she wrote her novel and then "reworked and edited The Valentine Wars in an attempt to create a complex feminist novel". Given the way romances sometimes have rather fantastic medical and legal situations (e.g. amnesia and wills that seem to be affected more by plotting requirements than realism), I was interested to see that realism did require adjustments to Dryden's plot:

I wanted to balance the fantasy elements of my novel with a realistic situation and set-up. After reviewing the legislation pertaining to family law in the state of Pennsylvania, it quickly became evident that the scenario I had created—one in which Ellen feared that her daughter’s paternal grandmother would sue and win custod—proved highly unlikely. Even though Ellen has few financial resources and Myra has the financial means to hire the most expensive lawyers money can buy, such a scenario is so improbable as to be almost laughable. (390)

The whole thesis can be downloaded here.Therese's website as Michelle Douglas, which gives details about her novels, is here.

Jonathan A. Allan's Men, Masculinity and Popular Culture (2020)

For some reason the book's available now, and my copy just arrived in the post today, but it says it's a 2020 publication. I don't know why that is. An excerpt can be found here (via Google Books) and here's the publisher's webpage about the book. I've added notes about the contents of some of the chapters since that may be of interest to people who want to get a taste of Jonathan's arguments but can't afford to buy the book, or who'd like to read a bit more before they make a decision about purchasing the book.

1. Introduction
2. Studying the Popular Romance Novel
3. Desiring Hegemonic Masculinity

As mentioned in the acknowledgements, this chapter "appeared previously as '"The Purity of His Maleness": Masculinity in Popular Romance Novels,' which appeared in Journal of Men's Studies (2016).

1. Reconsidering the Money Shot: Orgasm and Masculinity
2. Theorising Male Virginity in Popular Romance Fiction

As mentioned in the acknowledgements, this chapter "brings together two articles that appeared in Journal of Popular Romance Studies, 'Theorising Male Virginity in Popular Romance Novels' (2011) and '"And He Absolutely Fascinated Me": Masculinity and Virginity in Sherilee Gray's Breaking Him' (2019)". I don't think that second paper has appeared quite yet.

1. Slashing and Queering Popular Romance Fiction
2. Towards an Anatomy of Male/Male Popular Romance Novels
3. Vanilla Sex, or Reading Pornography Romantically
4. Conclusion
5. Epilogue: Are Billionaires Still Sexy?

CFP: Edited Collection on Consent, Diversity, Inclusion, etc in 21st-Century Romances

deadline for submissions: 

December 31, 2019

full name / name of organization: 

Susan Fanetti/CSU Sacramento

contact email: 

sfanetti@csus.edu

Not Your Mother’s Bodice Rippers: The Romance Genre in the 21st Century

Editor: Susan Fanetti

The enduring stereotype of the romance novel is the dramatic cover depicting the bare-chested, Fabio-modeled “hero” holding the swooning “heroine” draped over his arm, her wild hair flowing and her bountiful pale breasts swelling from her torn dress. Hence the term “bodice-ripper.”

But neither the stereotype nor the term have aged well. Though of course there are still stories written about brooding dukes and naïve duchesses, the genre contains multitudes. Romance is more diverse and dynamic than ever before and continuing to evolve in new, more inclusive directions.

Romance is the only literary genre dominated in every facet by women, and as such is often unjustly denigrated as “mommy porn.” However, its cultural influence is significant, and we would do well to take it seriously. In the twenty-first century, the romance genre is a billion-dollar industry—as big as the mystery, science fiction, and fantasy genres combined. It is an industry juggernaut, supported by and responding to a savvy, sophisticated audience that is culturally and politically aware, engaged, and active.

Moreover, while it is dominated by women, romance is not exclusively by or for women, and the industry itself is finally taking notice of voices outside the conventional cishet, white, privileged perspective the stereotype instantiates.

This collection will examine the position of the romance genre in the twenty-first century, and the ways in which romance responds to and influences the culture and community in which it exists.

This collection is under contract at McFarland & Company, with a planned 2021 publication date. It will be peer-reviewed.

Potential topics include but are not limited to:

• The impact of Fifty Shades of Grey on the romance genre and industry
• #MeToo and questions of consent in the romance genre
• Diversity, inclusion, sensitivity and #OwnVoices in romance writing and reading
• Broadening representations of gender and sexuality in romance
• Social media and the “Romancelandia” community
• The writer-reader relationship in the genre
• The place of fanfiction in the genre
• The rise of independent publishing and its effects on the genre as a whole
• The explosion of subgenres within romance and the influences from which they might have derived
• Issues of gatekeeping and claim-staking within the genre/industry/community
• Cultural analyses of specific authors/texts/etc., or historicist analyses of the genre as it’s evolved to the present

Note: The focus of this collection is romance in the contemporary moment. Submissions that do not engage that focus in some way will not be considered.

Completed manuscripts should be 6000-8000 words (not including Works Cited or notes) and should conform to MLA 8 style and formatting.

300-500 word abstract/proposals with current CV due: 31 December 2019

If accepted, complete final submission due: 31 August 2020

Send inquiries and/or submissions to: sfanetti@csus.edu

From http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2019/11/01/edited-collection-on-the-romance-genre-in-the-21st-century (via the Romance Scholar Listserv)