New Publication: "Still Reading Romance: Identity and Engagement with Popular Romance Fiction"

 

Still Reading Romance: Identity and Engagement with Popular Romance Fiction

Edited by Josefine Smith and Kathleen W. Taylor Kollman

This edited volume explores multiple issues in romance fiction, based on survey data from real romance readers. An updated version of Janice Radway’s influential survey looking at romance readers in the early 1980s, this time scholars explore romance readers’ habits and attitudes in the twenty-first century. Each contributor in this volume uses the same survey data to make unique statements about gender, intersectionality, popular fiction, and popular culture. By using a common data set but approaching it from different perspectives, this unique volume is able to apply multiple methodologies to the same subject.

This was due in April from Rowman & Littlefield but I didn't see any information about it on Google Books so I assumed it had been delayed. It probably wasn't, because although there's still not a lot of information out about it, it has indeed been published.

The full abstract can be found on the publisher's website (Rowman & Littlefield has been taken over by Bloomsbury, so although it was published by R&L, the details are on the Bloomsbury site here).

Luckily Jonathan Allan has now received a copy and was able to send me images of the contents pages, so I'll include the titles of the articles below:

----

Jacqueline Burgess and Gaja Kolodziej - "Re-Reading Romance: Exploring Practitioner, Reader, and Industry Perceptions of the Genre"

Ayşegül Rigato - "From Private to Public: #Bookstagram as a Safe Space for Romance Readers"

Josefine Smith - "Romance Readers' Perceptions of New Adult Fiction"

Natalie Duvall and Matt Duvall - "Which Women Want What?: The Shifting Demographics and Perspectives of Romance Readers"

Jessica Caravaggio - "Social Media, Critical Analysis, and Feminist Action: Popular YA's Role in Disseminating Theory Online"

Joann Stout - "Beyond the Bodice Ripper: Why Erotic Romance is Feminist Literature" 93-110

Lise Shapiro Sanders - "Reading Historical Romance/Reading Romance Historically"

Anna Michelson - "Romance Reading as a Social Activity"

Andrea Barra - "Escaping the Negativity of "Escapism": Rethinking Romance Reader Notions of Why They Read"

Jessica M. W. Kratzer - "Love, Romance, Sex, and Happily Ever After: A Feminist Exploration of Women who Read Romance Novels"

Kathleen W. Taylor Kollman - "Coming of Age and Coming Out: The Intersection of New Adult and Queer Romance"

Trinidad Linares - "Getting Love Out of the Margins: Race, Disability, Sexuality, and the Idea of a Happy After for Marginalized People"

Christina M. Babu - "Retellings and Re-readings - Romance, Representation, and Reimaginations in Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix (2022)"

Louise Schulmann-Darsy - "Mr. Darcy as the Perfect Book Boyfriend, or the Impact of BookTok on Male Characters in Romance Books"

Sara Partin and Josefine Smith - "Reading Romance and Erotic Literacy"

Arkansas Romance

I recently received an email from Guy Lancaster who works for the Central Arkansas Library System:

I edit the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas, a project of the Central Arkansas Library System. Among other things, I've been trying to ensure that we develop entries on any professionally published work of fiction set in Arkansas, including romance novels. You can find many of them just doing a search for the word "romance" on our site: https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/?s=romance

I thought I'd share that with readers of the blog, in case some of you have a particular liking for/research interest in romances set in Arkansas.

CFP: Romantasy

 CFP Edited Collection: Feral: Romantasy and Its Readers

Editors: Kacy Tillman, University of Tampa, kacytillman@gmail.com
Sarah Walden, Baylor University, Sarah_Walden@baylor.edu

Proposals Due: June 30, 2025

 

This will be a book-length, peer-reviewed volume, and we plan to market it as a trade publication with the University of Iowa Press. We are committed to diverse representations of texts and fan experiences, especially given that the genre is often criticized (rightly so) for centering white, cishet women. This collection will include chapters on queer romantasy, romantasy and disability, romantasy and book bans, romantasy and race, and more. This is a highly interdisciplinary collection, so we encourage a variety of approaches.

We are currently looking for chapters that explore any of the following topics:
● Representations of race and ethnicity in romantasy
● Romantasy reception and BIPOC booktok creators 
● Adult readers of YA romantasy
● Romantasy and colonialism

 

Submission Guidelines: Please send the following to BOTH kacytillman@gmail.com and
Sarah_Walden@baylor.edu.
● Contact Information (name, email, phone, and preferred method of contact)
● Working title
● 200-word abstract
● Short professional bio
● Note on whether any of this research has been previously published

New Publications: Readers and Relationships

Here's a list of the latest publications on romance which I've come across:

Cassady, Zoe A., Laura Crisp and Corrine M. Wickens, 2025. “Struggling in the Heartland: Romance Novels and Rural Adolescent Identity of Failure.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy. Online First. [Abstract here.] 

Dahy, Faten Abdelaziz (2025). "Love-Bombing, Gaslighting, and Hoovering: A Psychological Study of Selected Romance Novels by Colleen Hoover." Transcultural Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 6.3:56-75.

Rizkyane Machmuri, Alya, Yuyun Nurulaen & Pepen Priyawan (2025). "Romance Formula in Zoulfa Katouh’s Novel As Long As The Lemon Trees Grow." ELS Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities 8.1: 224–234. 

Rowe, Simone 2025. “The Map to Black Love: The Information Behaviours of Black Readers Seeking Romance Books With Black Character Representation”. The IJournal: Student Journal of the Faculty of Information 10 (2). Toronto, Canada: 107–120.

Swanson, Alexandra (2025). "“Bluebeard’s Castle”: Reconsidering Romance and Revenge in Netflix’s You". #MeToo TV: Essays on Streaming Rape Culture. Ed. Ralph Beliveau and Lisa Funnell. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. 101-110. [Excerpt here. I had some concerns about the framing of this, which I discuss in the Romance Scholarship Database.]

Tristanty, Anggie Ayu Isra and Johny Alfian Khusyairi (2025). "Mass-produced romance: BookTok society and the homogenisation of literary culture." Jurnal Studi Komunikasi 9.1:249-260. [Details and some concerns about the works cited here.]

CFP: Conference Session Sponsored by the University of Tasmania

ROMANCING ACADEMIA: PLACING ROMANCE

Friday 22 August 2025

Wrest Point, Tasmania

 

The concept of location is a powerful one in popular romance studies, driving several recent conferences in the field. For Romancing Academia 2025, we want to extend this idea further to approach the genre from several angles in relation to the idea of ‘place.’ Place or setting is crucial to the romance narrative in many ways – whether it is a small town, a cabin in the mountains, a deserted island, or, on a broader scale, cities, states and nations. The dynamic concept of ‘place’ is equally useful to interrogate the place of the genre in institutions related to book culture, including academia and the publishing industry. In addition, as Catherine Roach notes, the “literary landscape, human community, and online discussion world” of the romance genre are together often described by readers and writers using the spatial metaphor of “Romancelandia” – the genre itself is therefore also a place (2016, p. 197). Through exploring these different interpretations – place as setting, status, or genre itself – this symposium is aimed towards mapping romance onto contemporary scholarship in book culture practices and literary studies, and bridging industry practices and scholarly engagement.

Proposed papers or roundtables should fit under the broad umbrellas of place as ‘setting,’ ‘status’ and ‘genre,’ and could be related to (but are not limited to): 

• “Romancelandia” and its different characteristics 
• Places as tropes (e.g., small town romances)
• Clothing and textiles as a marker of place and time in romance novels
• Food as a metaphor for place 
• Digital romance – virtual places and online spaces
• Media (ebooks, comics, paperback, etc) and reading spaces
• Modifications of the genre in different locations across the world
• Romance studies in academia/literary studies/in relation to other disciplines
• Publishing romance (or specific subgenres)
• The place of romance in public libraries 

We invite you to submit your 250-word abstracts and a brief bio by 16th May 2025 to romancingacademia@gmail.com.

 

More details here: https://willorganise.eventsair.com/2025-romance-writers-of-australia-conference/romancing-academia

CFP: Essay Collection on Laura Kinsale

From Alexandra Vasti:

Not One Word But True: Romance Authors and Scholars on Laura Kinsale

USA Today bestselling romance novelist and literature professor Alexandra Vasti is seeking abstract submissions for an edited collection of essays on New York Times bestselling romance novelist Laura Kinsale.

Over her thirty-year career as a RITA-award-winning writer of historical romance, Laura Kinsale produced twelve expansive and genre-defining novels. From the Medieval Hearts series with its extraordinary Middle English dialogue to the textual representation of receptive and expressive aphasia in Flowers from the Storm, Kinsale’s novels pushed at the edges of the romance genre both thematically and formally, challenging and upending its most familiar tropes for her devoted audience of millions of readers.

In this collection of essays, bestselling romance authors including Olivia Waite, Alexandra Vasti, and Freya Marske will reflect on Kinsale’s impact on the genre as a whole, as well as their own personal relationships with Kinsale’s work. From essays on metaphor, symbolism, and sentence construction to larger considerations of Kinsale’s immense global and chronological range, these authors will explore Kinsale’s work and contextualize her novels within the scope of romance currently being written and published.

In addition, scholars of romance are invited to consider Kinsale’s work from a critical lens. Her novels frequently include Orientalist stereotypes and villainous representations of queer men, even as she repeatedly challenges, undermines, and flips those tropes. Her complex portrayals of trauma and disability precede and precipitate conversations about those topics in the genre. And her own critical engagement with gender in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992) is frequently reiterated and challenged by authors and readers today.

These collected essays will invite renewed consideration of one of the defining authors of the genre, aimed at new and long-time romance readers, creative writing students, and teachers and scholars of romance. We anticipate that the collection will appeal to both academic and popular audiences.

Interested essayists are invited to contribute essays on single or multiple books within Kinsale’s oeuvre. Topics might include:

• Kinsale’s work in the context of 21st-century romance novels

• War and trauma

• Orientalism

• Gender and gender performance

• Sexuality, particularly representations of queer characters

• Sex, kink, and power

• Disability

• Language use, especially her use of vernaculars, accents, and Middle English

• Genre

At this stage, interested scholars are invited to submit a title, abstract, and brief bio for consideration. Once the book proposal is accepted, final dates for the essay submission (4000-8000 words) will be set. 

Please send materials to Alexandra Vasti at alex@alexandravasti.com by May 31, 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.

 

Timlin, Carrie (2024). "“The Workers Must Strive if the Butterflies Must Live”: Ethel Mannin’s Love’s Winnowing , the Socialist Romance Novel, and British Working-Class Women." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 43.2:197-217.

Can you help a Romance Scholar with their Research?

Romance Genre Browsing and Engagement in the Digital Age

Birmingham University PhD student Katie Deane has produced a questionnaire as part of a study which "looks at how romance novels circulate amongst their readership in the digital age, from recommendation cultures online to digital shelving, search, and discovery". She's looking for romance readers to fill in this questionnaire. Can you help?

 https://app.onlinesurveys.jisc.ac.uk/s/bham/romance-reader-survey

She promises it's "pretty short". And if you could also share it with any other romance readers you know, particularly ones aged 18-24 who've not responded in large numbers yet, that would be really appreciated.

Call for Papers: Special Issue on Decolonising Affective Relationships in Contemporary Romantic Narratives

Special Issue Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses
Editors:
Irene Pérez-Fernandez (University of Oviedo)
and Cristina Cruz-Gutiérrez (University of the Balearic Islands)

Popular romance has traditionally been decried as low-quality and escapist genre by conservative canon gatekeepers and feminist scholars alike, scornfully repudiated on account of its allegedly endless recreation of old-fashioned romantic fantasies and harmful gender stereotypes, and generally understood as stubbornly impervious to politics and, as a result, unworthy of academic attention. Despite the complex evolution experienced by the genre in the last few decades and its indisputable popularity, romance fiction continues to be perceived by many as unsuitable for classroom discussion and postcolonial critical thinking. Our aim in this special issue is to reflect on how romance in its multiple print and media forms–, can be a suitable vehicle for postcolonial/decolonial critique.

The deadline is the 30th of March. More details here.

IASPR Conference 2025

Registration has opened for the 2025 IASPR Conference. The conference is being held in Mexico City from 24-25 June. There's both an in-person and hybrid option and you don't have to be a member of IASPR to attend.

Early Bird registration rates apply until February 28th, 2025. Regular registration will last from 1 March until 6 June, 2025.

More details from IASPR here.

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.

Ants as Consumers of Romance Novels

Just came across a bizarre use of romance novels:

In Termitaria (2001), contemporary environmental artist Perdita Phillips collaborated with termites. For this artwork, Phillips buried 850 romance novels in soil for a year. The insects, commonly known as white ants that consume decaying materials buried underground, ate the books. In so doing, the insects were also likely intermingling with nematodes, moulds and other microscopic organisms in the soil. While many of the books were completely consumed, Phillips was able to 'excavate' some remaining works and display them as 'sculptures'. These half-eaten copies look as though they might have been buried centuries ago, the edges of the pages undulate with holes and gaps, and only the spines of the books retain their structure.

However, while their forms are indeed sculptural due to the layers of pages, arrangements of the holes and aging patina, Termitaria is less a work for humans than a multiscalar engagement. The novels are now part of a 'romance' with the soil, a more-than-human sharing of cells. (2011)

from 

Paterson, Eddie and Lara Stevens (2025). Performing Climates. Routledge, London.

You can see an image of one of the 'sculptures" at the artist's website: https://www.perditaphillips.com/portfolio/termitaria-657/