Links and New Publications: Politics, Pakistan, Empire, Race, Tourism

From The Guardian (via Jodi McAlister):

Over the last four years, many in the romance community, sometimes known as romancelandia, have thrown themselves into activism. Fated Mates, the podcast that compelled Lee to run for office, operates a phone-banking campaign called Fated States, which has logged more than 900,000 calls in support of Democratic candidates and causes since 2020. Separately, a group of authors who write under the names Alyssa Cole, Kit Rocha and Courtney Milan started an organization called Romancing the Vote, which has since 2020 raised more than $1m for voting rights groups.[...]

many popular romance writers today – such as Casey McQuiston, Alexis Hall and Helen Hoang, to name just a few – take a more progressive view of gender roles, portraying marriage and babies as options rather than necessities. Between 2022 and 2023, booksellers also sold more than 1m LGBTQ+ romance novels – a 40% spike over the previous year, according to Circana.  [...]

Novels by Sarah J Maas, who writes bestselling “romantasy” novels, are among the most-banned books in the US. Schools have also banned books by McQuiston and Hall, as well as those by popular romance writers like Ali Hazelwood, Emily Henry and Colleen Hoover.

From Javaria Farooqui:

 

🎙️ Ever wondered about reader-fans in Pakistan? Here is a link for my chat with Dr Priyam Sinha about the fascinating world of Regency romance book clubs in South Asia! https://newbooksnetwork.com/romance-fandom-in-21st-century-pakistan

 

[Edited to add: Javaria later clarified "romance reading communities, not book clubs."] 

 

And on to the new publications:

Gopalakrishnan, Manasi (2024). "Nostalgia for the Empire: British nationalism in the spatial representation of colonial India in contemporary romantic novels." NEGOTIATIONS: An International Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies 6.1: 100-108.

 

Moussaoui, Abdelghani and Abdellah Benlamine (2024). "Gender, Identity, and the Politics of Difference in Popular Romance." Arab World English Journal for Translation & Literary Studies 8.3:78-89.

 

Moussaoui, Abdelghani and Abdellah Benlamine (2024). "Race as a 'Sign of Difference' in Romance Discourse." Journal of Applied Language and Culture Studies 7.2:114-128. 

Pérez-Gil, María del Mar (2025). "Tourists not welcome: perceptions of tourism in popular romance novels." Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change. https://doi.org/10.1080/14766825.2024.2448189

Simón Brumos, Ana (2024). Jane Austen’s Influence on Contemporary Romance Novels Honours Dissertation, Universidad de Zaragoza.

Zaini, Ahmad Zuhdi (2024). Personality structure of the main character Reid Buchanan in Susan Mallery's Sizzling. Undergraduate, Universitas Islam Negeri Maulana Malik Ibrahim.

Roundup of Mostly 2019 Bibliography Entries

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

Bazenga, Aline, 2019. 

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

Cella, Laurie J. C., 2019. 

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

 

Fernández Rodríguez, Carolina, 2019. 

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

 

Gerlitz, Laura Michelle, 2019. 

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

Jarvis, Christine, 2006. 

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

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

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

 

Toscano, Angela, 2019. 

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

Valovirta, Elina, 2019. 

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

 

Veros, Vassiliki, 2019. 

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

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