Showing posts with label teaching romance fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teaching romance fiction. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 30, 2025

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 TitlesAbingdon, 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 ReidMA 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 2024New 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. 
 
 
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
 

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 NovelsSSM - 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. 


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. 

Tuesday, December 09, 2025

University of Liverpool's Online Romance Course

 

Dr Sam Hirst (who runs Romancing the Gothic) will be teaching "Falling in love with love: A History of Popular Romance", a course comprising 10 weekly sessions online (via Zoom), on Wednesdays at 6 - 7.30pm UK time, starting from Wednesday 21 January. 

There will be "online learning materials for you to engage with before and after each live session" and the course fee is £155 (concessions £80).

This module will explore the evolution of romance writing from the 18th century to the current day, looking not only at the novel but at the intertwined relationship between the romance novel and cinema. [...]

This course is aimed at romance readers and anyone who wants to explore the best-selling genre and most influential genre in publishing. Each week there will be a set text but extracts will also be provided as we are aware that participants will need to prioritise their reading.

Syllabus

  1. Amatory Fiction: 18th-Century Women Writing Desire
    • Text: Eliza Haywood, Fantomina (1724)
  2. The Society Romance: Austen and her Legacy
    • Text: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
    • Pride and Prejudice (BBC, 1995, dir. Simon Langton)
  3. The Rise of the Byronic Hero
    • Text: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)
  4. Orientalism and the Romance
    • Text: E. M. Hull, The Sheik (1919)
    • The Sheik (dir. Melford, US, 1921)
  5. The Regency Romance
    • Text: Georgette Heyer, The Quiet Gentleman (1951)
    • The Reluctant Widow (Knowles, UK, 1950)
  6. Mills and Boon, Category Romance and the 'Nursies'
    • Betty Neels, Tabitha in Moonlight (1972)
  7. Race and Romance
    • Beverley Jenkins, Indigo (1996)
  8. The Romantic Comedy and Second Chance Romance
    • Texts: The Philadelphia Story (dir. George Cukor, US, 1940)
    • The Lovebirds (dir. Michael Showalter, US, 2020)
  9. Queering the Romance
    • Text: Olivia Waite, Hen Fever (2020)
  10. Romantasy, Mixed Genres, and the future(s) of Romance
    • Text: Tasha Suri, The Isle of the Silver Sea (2025)

Full details can be found on the University of Liverpool's website.

Wednesday, July 09, 2025

New Publications: The Meaning of Life and Work; Sexuality; Race; Language; the Environment and More

I probably should have posted this list before it got so long, but more and more notifications kept arriving in my inbox and I kept thinking I'd post once I'd added all the news items to the RSDB and that took me longer than anticipated. Anyway, I'll begin with a couple of not-strictly academic pieces which are, nonetheless, quite academic:

In the Arkansas Democrat Gazette (June 8) Guy Lancaster (mentioned recently on this blog and who has a publication below) gives his backstory as a non-romance reader before exploring the societal implications of the denigration of romance:

For so long, we have regarded the consumption of Harlequin paperbacks as nigh pathological on the part of women, when in fact, it was the rejection of romance that typified the pathological condition beginning to emerge in American culture at large. After all, these stories center the phenomenon we call love. And as no less a thinker than G.W.F. Hegel, perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 19th century, wrote in "Elements of the Philosophy of Right" (1820): "Love means in general the consciousness of my unity with another, so that I am not isolated on my own, but gain my self-consciousness only through the renunciation of my independent existence and through knowing myself as the unity of myself with another and of the other with me." (https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2025/jun/08/the-thrill-of-love/, archived here and also here)

And that's not entirely unrelated to Jessica Taylor's ponderings about the value of her research into romance now that she's outside academia, and how success is measured (in publishing and academia): "What is writing a romance for? What is this essay for? Is work all there is?" Jessica's PhD thesis, Write the Book of Your Heart: Career, Passion and Publishing in the Romance Writing Community (2013) can be downloaded here.

AztecLady suggested that readers of Teach Me Tonight might be interested in reading this analysis by Gin Jenny of a sex scene in Cecilia Grant's A Gentleman Undone

And the latest additions to the Romance Scholarship Database:

Ahmed, Iman and Michael-Zane Brose, Lara Dengs, Lucie Elfering, Elena John, Mira Kalcker, Alice Kronenberg, Charmaine Küllenberg, Laura Le Donne, Alican Nazik, Lena Neisen, Öznur Zeynep Özdal, Hanna Schneemann, Antonia Steven, Julie Bøglund Strand (2025). A “Messy Complexity”? On Coming-Out, Identity Formation, and Community in Queer YA Romance NovelsHeinrich Heine University Duesseldorf.

Barta, Orsolya and Ann Steiner (2025). "Between Desire and Responsibility: Unplanned Pregnancies in Contemporary Romance Novels." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 14.

Bausela Buccianti, Lucía (2025). “Demisexuality in Ali Hazelwood’s STEMinist Series: The Love Hypothesis (2021) and Love, Theoretically (2023).” REDEN. Revista Española De Estudios Norteamericanos, 6(2), 52–69. [I've included a direct link to this open access article, instead of the DOI, because the DOI wasn't working yet when I started working on this post.]

 Burkes, Jordan (2025). The Love Hypothesis: Exploring the Consumption of Romance Novels. PhD, Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College. [Embargoed until 2032 but the abstract can be found here.]

Chan, McKenzie (2025). Silly Little Romance Books: Analyzing the Value and Function of the Popular Romance Genre. Honours Dissertation, Seattle Pacific University.

 Cobb, Karie L. (2025). Controlling the Narrative: How the United Daughters of the Confederacy Shaped Collective Memory Through Romance Novels. Master of Arts thesis, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

 Egidia, Clara & Ida Puspita. (2025). "Psycho-social Development of the Main Characters in the Novels Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers and Cantik itu Luka by Eka Kurniawan: A Comparative Study." INTERACTION: Jurnal Pendidikan Bahasa 12.1: 892–905. [But note that I was unable to locate some of the items in the list of works cited, as discussed here.]

Farooqui, Javaria (2025). "Broken Slippers and Glass Ceilings: Exploring the Romance of Reading Romance." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 14.
 
Hodson, Jane (2024). "The Significance of Stance in Fictional Representations of Non-Standard Language and Prescriptivism". New Horizons in Prescriptivism Research, edited by Nuria Yáñez-Bouza, María E. Rodríguez-Gil and Javier Pérez-Guerra. Bristol, Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters: 103-119. [https://doi.org/10.21832/9781800416154-007 I was late in finding this, probably because it doesn't mention romance in the title or the text of the essay. It does, though, focus on the use of "non-standard" language in Georgette Heyer's The Unknown Ajax. Currently, most/all of this is visible via Google Books.]
 
Kamblé, Jayashree (2025). "The Women Who Changed the American Mass-Market Romance Genre: BIPOC Editors, Authors, and Category Romance Novels from 1980 to 1988." Contemporary Women's Writing 19. [Abstract available here and excerpts here.]
 
Kilian, G. Charles (2025). Gender, Genre, and Pleasure: Eroticism and Its Limits in French and Francophone Literature (1950–2010). PhD, University of Wisconsin - Madison. [As noted in the RSDB, this may be of interest to romance scholars because of its attempts to define the differences between erotic literature, pornography and romance.]

Lancaster, Guy (2025). " ‘It had turned them all into voyeurs’: Celebrity as the Antithesis of Community in Molly O’Keefe’s Wild Child." Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies 56.1:25–36. [Details here.]
 
 
 
Raffloer, Gavin and Melanie Green (2025). "Of Love & Lasers: Perceptions of Narratives by AI Versus Human Authors." Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans. [This is Online First, so does not yet have pagination. Also note that the paper discusses romance generated by AI versus romance written by humans, and I've written some comments on the methodology from the perspective of a romance scholar.]
 
 Sutton, Denise H. (2025). “Romance Publishing for a New Generation: The Case of Harlequin and Mills & Boon In India.” Publishing History 89:7-27. [More details in the RSDB]

 Suwanban, Rapeeporn Pauline (2025). Popular Romance & Orientalist Fantasy 1721-1930. PhD, Birkbeck, University of London.
 
Valovirta, Elina (2025). "Romancing the Caribbean Sea: Size, Mobility and Sustainability in Cruise Ship Romance Fiction". Anglia 143.2: 382-397. https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2025-0026
 
Wilder, Mims (2025). (Wo)Men in Love: An Analysis of Sexual Scripts, Escapism, and Queer Explorations Among Woman Readers and Authors of Male/Male Romance Novels. Doctor of Philosophy in Human Sexuality, California Institute of Integral Studies.  [More details here.]

Tuesday, March 18, 2025

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

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

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

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

Luneau, Marie-Pier and Jean-Philippe Warren (2025). “Exoticism Without Cosmopolitanism: The Quebec Romance Novel of the 1940s and 1950s.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 29.1: 154-166. [Abstract]
 
Moore, Jeania Ree V. (2025). “The Religious Work of Beverly Jenkins’s Black Historical Romance.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 14.
 
Nielson, Annika (2025) "The Summer of YA Love: Young Adult Romance, Tiktok, and the Classroom," The Utah English Journal 53, Article 14.
 

Tuesday, February 13, 2024

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.]

Sunday, August 20, 2023

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.]

Thursday, June 16, 2022

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.

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:

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:

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:

  • 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.

Monday, December 21, 2020

New at JPRS: Special Issue on The Sheik (and a bit about teaching romance in Sweden)


The final additions to issue 9 of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies have now gone online and are (as always) freely available to read, both on the website and in downloadable pdf.

[Edited to add: JPRS have just added another article to issue 9

 That was added on 22 December.]


In the Special Issue on The Sheik are:

Introduction to the special issue on The Sheik
Amy Burge

The Oriental Beast: The Sheik and Fairy Tales
Pauline Suwanban

Garçon manqué: A Queer Rereading (of) The Sheik
Jessica Taylor

Olive Skin Chocolate Eyes: Echoes of The Sheik on Descriptive Patterns of the Italian Romantic Hero in Harlequin Short Contemporaries
Francesca Pierini

Let’s Not Get Carried Away by The Sheik
Laura Vivanco

The Sheik and Modernism
Ellen Turner

The Depiction of Masculinity and Nationality in The Sheik
jay Dixon

In Defence of the Perverse: Reflections on The Sheik (George Melford, 1921)
Elisabetta Girelli

On Eligible Princes: The Medieval Modernity of Sheikh Romance
Amira Jarmakani

Review essay on The Sheik
Amy Burge and Rachel Robinson

On Teaching, Not Teaching, and Teaching The Sheik
Eric Murphy Selinger

Authors on The Sheik: A conversation with Liz Fielding
Elizabeth Cole

Thursday, April 23, 2020

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

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

Mary Lynne Nielsen
Keira Soleore
Nicole M. Jackson, Bowling Green State University
Jamee Nicole Pritchard, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

Qiana Whitted, University of South Carolina - Columbia

Amanda Allen
Sarah Slocum
Jessica A. Kahan

Rebecca Baumann, Indiana University - Bloomington
Rebecca Romney

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

Malia S. Jackson
Alexandra Sterling

Lee Tobin McClain, Seton Hill University
Sarah Wendell
Stefanie Hunker, BGSU
Anna Michelson, Northwestern University
Nicole Falls

Christine Larson, University of Colorado Boulder
Melinda Utendorf
Darcey Lovell, University of Rhode Island

Heather M. Schell, George Washington University

Kathleen Kollman, Bowling Green State University
Maura Kenny, CUNY Graduate Center


Trinidad Linares

Friday, September 13, 2019

Scheduling The Sheik

There was a screening of The Sheik (1921) at the University of Birmingham on Thursday and today's programme is:

Friday 13 September 2019
10-11:15 – Academic panel on The Sheik
  • Pauline Suwanban, Beastly Figures: The Sheik and Fairy Tales
  • Francesca Pierini, The Legacy of E.M. Hull’s The Sheik on the Depiction of the Italian Romantic Hero in Harlequin Short Contemporaries
  • Respondent: Amy Burge
  • Chair: Melissa Dickson
Tweet summary by Ali Williams here. To summarise the summary:

Pauline Suwanban is a PhD student at Birkbeck, doing research into orientalist romances. She argues that the hero of The Sheik takes on the 'devil husband figure' that has been popular over the years within popular romantic fiction. She draws parallels between the 'devil husband' and the 'beastly lover' or 'monster husband' character that can be thread through myths and fairytales. Examples include 'Beauty and the Beast'. There lies within the Arabian communities in the novel a 'sinister promise of sexual material pleasure, as well as financial security for women who can tolerate it'.

Francesca Pierini's research is focused on representations of Italian culture in Anglophone literature. Instead of the 'Latin lover', she recommends the term 'Mediterranean men', as she feels that it draws parallels with the way that South European and some Middle Eastern heroes are represented. There is a focus on the perceived 'traditional' nature of these heroes, and there are similar discursive patterns seen within the writing of these heroes within short contemporary romances. Pierini talks about the importance of the focus on 'darkness' in these 'Mediterranean men' that is qualifyingly 'foreign', especially in comparison to the white Anglo-Saxon male. Often these novels seem to play on an assumed upon link between the Mediterranean men and the natural world.
12:00-1.15pm – Author and editor panel on diversity in popular romance publishing
  • Featuring Ali Williams, Ria Cheyne, Eleanor Harkstead and Jeevani Charika/Rhoda Baxter
2pm-3pm – Learning and Teaching The Sheik
  • A conversation with Professor Deborah Longworth and Professor Eric Selinger
Again, a summary has been tweeted by Ali Williams. Here's small part of it:


Eric Selinger was sharing his approaches to romance. The first sets out four approaches (Historical, Philosophical, Psychological and Literary). The second tool was derived from teaching Rose Lerner's Sweet Disorder: Improving Tale; Erotic Fiction; Novel of Ideas; Novel as Aesthetic Object. Selinger translates this as
  • How does this book want me to behave?
  • What does this book tell me that I might desire?
  • What does this book want me to think about?
  • What does this book want me to appreciate about itself?
Deb Longworth commented that thinking about formalised approaches like this allows the genre of popular romance to be legitimised for students.

3:30-4:30pm – Final roundtable and discussion – where now for The Sheik

There should be a special issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies appearing soon, dedicated to The Sheik in its centenary year.

Friday, April 08, 2016

New Pages (and Videos) on Love (and Romance Scholarship)


Documentary-maker Laurie Kahn invited Eric
to curate some “Resource Pages” of links relevant to topics raised in Love Between the Covers, the romance documentary, and they’re now live!  They’re designed to be of use both to teachers and curious readers.
The pages include links to video-clips, documents and other web-pages on the topics of

Over on the website of Kahn's production company, you can see videos taken at the Library of Congress during
What Is Love? Romance Fiction in the Digital Age [...] a two-day Popular Romance Project conference that brought romance authors, readers, publishers, and scholars in many disciplines together for four fascinating panel discussions.
The links below take you straight to the videos on Vimeo:

Panel 1 discussed "What Belongs in the Romance Canon?"

Panel 2 asked "What Do The Science and History of Romance Reveal?"

Panel 3 looked at "Community and the Romance Genre"

Panel 4 focused on what's "Trending Now: Where is Romance Fiction Heading in the Digital Age?"

Details about all of the panelists, panels and the introduction to the conference as well as all the videos can be found here.

Also out recently is a podcast featuring Lisa Fletcher,
one of the scholars working on a project called Genre worlds: Australian popular fiction in the 21st century (2016–2019). This project won an RWA (US) grant, followed by a very prestigious grant from the Australia Research Council. Lisa talks about the project’s goals and  methodology, as well as other themes and topics in popular fiction that pique her interest. She also talks about the challenges of teaching romance at university, and some of the books and techniques she uses in her classes.
The podcast can be found here.

Thursday, January 28, 2016

Good News! More Romance Studies at DePaul


I can't find any more details yet on DePaul's website but Julie E. Moody-Freeman is:
an Associate Professor in African and Black Diaspora Studies.  She received her Ph.D. in Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  Her teaching and research interests include studies in Black Feminist Theory, the Rhetoric of Colonialism and Post-Colonialism, African American popular romance fiction, and Black Speculative fiction.

Moody-Freeman’s publications include co-edited books The Black Imagination, Science Fiction, and the Speculative (Routledge, 2011) and The Black Imagination: Science Fiction, Futurism, and the Speculative (Peter Lang, 2011) as well as a co-edited special issue of African and Black Diaspora Studies: an international journal (Routledge, July 2015) on “Remapping the Black Atlantic: Diaspora, (Re) Writings of Race and Space.”

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Teaching Romance at Ithaca College


Ithaca College's Jennifer Wofford will be teaching a seminar on romance this semester (fall 2015):

Reading Popular Romance
Jennifer Wofford
Theme: Inquiry, Imagination, and Innovation; Perspective: Social Sciences

CRN 24024 ICSM 10824-01, TR 04:00 PM-5:15 PM, M 12:00 PM-12:50 PM
U.S. Representative Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.) introduced a bill in 2014 proposing to prohibit the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) from funding any project relating to the research of love or romance (H.R.5155). Yet, popular romance is the highest selling book genre in the world today, representing the largest share of sales revenue in the industry. Moreover, 84% of romance readership are women. Popular romance is a women’s industry, perhaps the largest in the US. Yet a US legislator made a point of crafting a law against it. Why? This courses uses popular romance as both a cultural subject and as a vehicle of inquiry into readers and reading. It asks questions like: What is romance? Who are our heroines? What is a reader? Why are women reading and writing these stories? How have archetypes and plot lines changed since the 1960s, when mass market romance novels emerged, and what does that say about fans of the genre? What’s the relationship between literature and commerce? Should popular romance be studied? If so, for what purpose?

Thursday, September 17, 2015

Teaching Tainted Lit: Sneaking Romance Into the Classroom



Teaching Tainted Lit: Popular American Fiction in Today's Classroom is available for pre-order now (it'll be published on 15 November 2015). It contains:
Losano, Antonia, 2015. 
"Sneaking It In at the End: Teaching Popular Romance in the Liberal Arts Classroom," Teaching Tainted Lit: Popular American Fiction in Today's Classroom, ed. Janet G. Casey (Iowa City: U of Iowa P), pp. 77-88.

Losano details the difficulties she had teaching popular romances. On her first attempt she introduced Heyer's Frederica to a "senior seminar course on canonicity and literary aesthetics" (81) but
Unfortunately, Heyer's novel was received with only derision and contempt. [...] The kicker came [...] when one student confessed that he didn't actually think much of either [...] Pride and Prejudice or Frederica. Maybe if he'd read Pride and Prejudice in a different context, he argued, he wouldn't have noticed that it was just about romance and not much else. Much of the rest of the class nodded in agreement. (82)
That did set Losano's teaching of popular romance back for a while, but she kept trying and eventually found more productive ways to bring popular romance fiction into the classroom. There's an excerpt of her article here.

Tuesday, September 08, 2015

Something Old, Something New (Romance Teaching 2/2)

--Eric Selinger

Quick Recap: the "old" is me, the "new" is the set of texts I just finished teaching in a summer romance class.  I blogged about three of those in part 1--Maya Rodale's Dangerous Books for Girls, Laura Florand's The Chocolate Thief, and A Bollywood Affair by Sonali Dev--and now I'll post about the rest, in the order I taught them.

Book #4: Sherry Thomas, My Beautiful Enemy.  I had heard great things about this novel for months, but hadn't read it, so I put it on my summer syllabus.  It's a historical novel set partly in China and partly in England, and it moves around chronologically between the 1881 and the early 1890s; it's also, as Thomas has said, an homage to the wuxia martial arts fiction and film that the author grew up on, which I take to be an instance of "Romance" (in Northrop Frye's sense) from a non-Western tradition.
  • What Went Well:  I find this a beautiful, haunting novel: one of those romances I keep thinking about long after I've finished it.  We had a great discussion of the heroine, and of what Thomas does (and does not do) with her biracial heritage; we had a great time discussing the hero and contrasting him with those of our first two novels, using and then complicating the "alpha" and "beta" terminology that you find in romance reviews.  The tone and structure of the novel were sharp contrasts as well, so students began to glimpse the variety available within the genre. Wonderful discussion of the novel's allusions to other narratives and texts, especially to the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl, which comes up a few times, and to The Heart Sutra, an engraving of which turns out to be central to the plot.  (I'm a sucker for allusions.) One Chinese student offered some great observations about how the novel deals with its paired generic inheritance (wuxia and Western romance fiction); unfortunately, due to medical issues, she was only there for a portion of the discussion, and we didn't really finish it.
  • What Went Less Well:  I'd originally had students order both My Beautiful Enemy and its non-romance prequel, The Hidden Blade. When it became clear that students were falling behind in the reading, I dropped the prequel, but simply knowing there was one threw some students off, and they struggled to see My Beautiful Enemy as a stand-alone text. Others found the novel's structure, which loops around between two time-frames, difficult to follow when reading quickly for class.  None was prepared for our allusion discussion, but that didn't really surprise me.  It's not as though the Heart Sutra is an easy text to think through, no matter the context!
  • What I'd Do Differently Next Time:  I'd really like to teach the pair of novels, as originally planned, and I want to find some way to think through and set up the Buddhist side of the novel more effectively, the way I do with Christian / Biblical contexts for other novels.
5) Alex Beecroft, Blue-Eyed Stranger.  I've been teaching British novelist Alex Beecroft more or less continuously since 2009, when her first novel, the historical m/m romance False Colors, was published.  Blue-Eyed Stranger is one of her new trilogy of contemporary novels, also m/m romances, and like the other two, it deals a lot with issues of difference: in this case, racial difference (one of the heroes is of Sudanese descent; the other is white) and disability (one of the heroes is bipolar). One hero does historical re-enactments of Vikings, the other is a Morris dancer, so the novel offers not only some interesting meditations on history and diversity, but also the chance to learn something about Morris dancing and folk music, as the books before it in the syllabus offered us the chance to learn about wuxia and Bollywood film.
  • What Went Well:  Great discussion of the novel's problematic packaging, which does not offer any image of the black hero, Martin; great discussion of the novel's themes and politics, which students thought stood in sharp contrast with that packaging.  Several students in the class deal with depression or bipolar disorder, and they were fascinated by the text, although one was quite wary until she read that the author was fictionalizing her own experience; several students were fascinated by the differences between how this British novel dealt with race and homosexuality vs. what they'd have expected from an American interracial m/m romance.  Beecroft's blog posts about folk culture were helpful in giving context to the novel and in thinking about the ways the novel might be framing popular romance writing as similar to folk culture practices (rather than commercial / luxury culture practices, as in the Florand novel). We had fun watching YouTube clips of Morris dancing, too.
  • What Went Less Well:  Blue-Eyed Stranger works well both as a love story and as a novel of ideas, a book about historical romance as a genre (albeit refracted through discussions of historical re-enactment, Morris dancing, and folk music sessions).  I put it on the syllabus before Beverly Jenkins's historical novel Captured to set up and give us terms to talk about the Jenkins, but in retrospect, it might have worked better afterwards, since it ended up preempting some of the things students might have said about that book.  
  • What I'd Do Differently Next Time:  In the fall I'm going to teach the first book from Beecroft's new trilogy, Trowchester Blues, and in the winter I'll probably try the third one.  Nothing jumps out at me as a different approach to try for this one, other than perhaps to assemble a better set of audio-visual supplements (dancing and music and Vikings) to show my students.  It might also be interesting to teach all three books together at some point--I've thought about doing that with Victoria Dahl's Talk Me Down, Start Me Up, and Lead Me On, which work well together and would teach well together, too.
6) Beverly Jenkins, Captured.  In the ten years I've been teaching romance, almost every survey class I've done has featured a novel by Beverly Jenkins.  Usually it's been Something Like Love, which was the first novel I read by her, and which teaches beautifully, because a version of what the novel is doing with history (filling us in, revising our sense of the past) takes place within the text itself, as characters use stray bits of knowledge to make things happen in their fictional world.  I tried Captured when it first came out, but then went back to Somethig Like Love; this year I decided to try Captured again, because I was trying to play up the armchair travel settings of my course, and it's a pirate romance set in the Caribbean during the American revolution.
  • What Went Well:  a great discussion of the novel's cover and back-cover copy, which use genre tropes in ways that the novel itself often avoids or varies; good comparison / contrast work in terms of the hero, the heroine, the barriers, and other elements; a very interesting discussion of the romance novel (this particular one and the genre more generally) as alternative historiography. 
  • What Went Less Well:  the cover discussion was fascinating, but when it started again the second day, things began to drag; several extravagant moments in the novel's plot drew skepticism from students, and here (as elsewhere) I found myself wondering whether this novel wouldn't teach better if I had it paired with another pirate romance, so that the particular tropes of that subgenre were more visible as conventions which Jenkins then plays with.
  • What I'd Do Differently Next Time:  Captured is the third Jenkins novel I've taught, and for my students I'd have to say that it taught almost as well as Something Like Love, and better than Topaz.  There are several others I'd like to try--Indigo, which has been re-released as an e-book, and The Taming of Jessie Rose, which has also come back out now--and I'd also like to begin pairing Jenkins's African American historical romances with some of the new voices in that subgenre.  (I'm thinking here especially of Piper Huguley's Migrations of the Heart series, and of the Brightest Day anthology.)  Since the discussion of romance as historiography went so well, I'd like to try assigning my students Hsu-Ming Teo's essay on that topic, from the New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction anthology, even though it focuses on a novel from a different author and time-period, Bertrice Small's The Kadin.  
  • Note to Self:  Try teaching The Kadin sometime alongside Magnificent Century, the Turkish soap opera.  
7) Meljean Brook, Riveted.  Although my students split on many of our novels--some liking the book, some wary or resistant or simply disengaged--there was unanimous enthusiasm for our last novel, the steampunk romance Riveted.  Students loved the world-building, the characters, and the politics of the novel; they were both fascinated by it and emotionally caught up in it.  
  • What Went Well:  great discussion of gender in the novel, especially its construction of masculinity; interesting discussion of disability and sexual politics; the genre-hybridity of the book, which nods to the history and conventions of "scientific romance" (as science fiction used to be called) as well as to the popular romance novel.  
  • What Went Less Well:  nothing, really.  A win all around.
  • What I'd Do Differently Next Time:  I'm teaching this novel in the fall, actually, in a unit on romance and SF/Fantasy.  I'll be teaching it between Alexis Hall's Prosperity , a "queer steampunk western set in a city in the sky," and The Midnight Hunt, a lesbian werewolf romance by L. A. Raand (AKA Len Barot / Radclyffe).  My only concern is that one week might not be enough time to do the book justice, but we'll see how it goes!
That's the lot of them, folks!  Six novels and one work of criticism; of the new books in the group, I'd say two (My Beautiful Enemy and Riveted) are on my list of novels to teach again as soon as I get the chance, and others will likely come round again once I've had the opportunity to test drive some other recent romances, too.  My syllabus had grown a little stagnant since 2009-10, which worked for me as a teacher but not so well for me as a scholar, trying to keep up with the current state of the genre, and my students were beginning to wonder why I would talk about a book from six or seven years ago as a "new" book.  As I try new texts, I'll try to note them here.