Romance-Adjacent Scholarship Reading List
9 More Books & Articles Recommended by Scholars
Romance scholarship is, by its very nature, a multi-disciplinary area of research. Scholars may have backgrounds in media studies, gender studies, literary studies, sociology, and more.
It’s no surprise, then, that people studying romance often find inspiration in scholarship that isn’t about or exclusively about romance novels themselves.
In this round-up, you’ll find romance-adjacent book & article recommendations from romance scholars.
Context: When I was at the IASPR 2023 conference in June, I collected recommendations for favorite romance and romance-adjacent scholarship from in-person attendees.
You can hear their responses in the latest episode of Shelf Love, and read a collection of the romance-specific recommendations in this Substack post:
Love & Romance in Culture
Modern Love by David Shumway
My favorite work of scholarship relevant to romance fiction is Modern Love by David Shumway, which helps me think through issues of passion versus intimacy.
—Jodi McAlister
Consuming the Romantic Utopia by Eva Illouz
University of California Press, 1997 | Buy used for under $15
I think that was the first book I read that combined mass advertised images of romance, as well as feminist theory and post modern theory, and it really fascinated me and motivated me to do the work I'm doing now.
—Meghna Bohidar
At Home With Pornography Jane Juffer
NYU Press, 1998 | Buy used for under $10
It's a book from the late 90s, I believe. And it's a really interesting look at how sexually explicit materials come into the home and find women. And it does some really interesting work that I think would give romance scholars ways of talking about culture and like the circulation of content in ways that maybe help them escape some of the things they're less comfortable with Radway.
—Katie Morrissey
City of Dreadful Delight by Judith R. Walkowitz
The University of Chicago Press, 1992 | Buy used for under $10
I'm studying the sexualisation of Jack the Ripper and an academic gothic text that has influenced me the most has to be City of Dreadful Delight by Judith R. Walkowicz and it talks about the narratives of sexual danger in late Victorian London.
—Katina Jan
Even Farther Afield
Ecogothic Edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes
Manchester University Press, 2013
The scholarship work that's most influenced my work would be all the work on gothic nature. I'm always looking for animals all the time.
—Kaja Franck
The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas by Diana Taylor
Duke University Press, 2003
I come from theatre and performance, but my favorite scholarship, which I think applies to romance, is the theatre historian Diana Taylor has this theory of the archive and the repertoire, and the archive as documents and texts stay apparently stable objects, but the repertoire is the transference of embodied knowledge and I think that's really relevant to what romance is doing.
—Ros Haslett
The Cultural Politics of Chick Lit: Popular Fiction, Postfeminism and Representation By Heike Missler
Routledge 2013
it's formed the foundation of my PhD thesis and it just talks about a lot of the similar things that I do and yeah, I just think it's really inspiring
—Charlotte Ireland
The Heart Has Its Reasons: Young Adult Literature with Lesbian/Gay/Queer Content by Michael Cart and Christine A. Jenkins
Scarecrow Press, 2006
It was the first full length study that looked at queer representation in YA.
—Carly Bennett
Feminism, femininity and popular culture by Joanne Hollows
Manchester University Press, 2000 | Buy used for under $10
It has a chapter on reading romantic fiction. And it was really transformative for me because up until then, everybody only kept talking about Janice Radway as if it was the only text that was available. And finding out someone else was working on the genre, or had some other things that I could look at, was a huge relief.
—Jayashree Kamble
Speaking of romance scholars, and Jayashree specifically (what a segue!), she just visited Shelf Love (the podcast) to talk about her latest book of romance scholarship about HEROINES!
What makes a heroine in romance, a genre invested in exploring how can women be happy in culture? Is the genre a place where heroines create integrated identities that reject binaries of what society tells them to be?
JUST FOR YOU (a Shelf Lovely), you can use the Shelf Love Discount code to get 35% off: use “UShelflove” for 35% between September 15, 2023 and November 2, 2023
Creating Identity: The Popular Romance Heroine's Journey to Selfhood and Self-Presentation by Jayashree Kamblé
I'm going to pick up a few of these! Thanks!