Romance Scholarship Reading List
16 Books & Articles Recommended by Scholars
When I was at the IASPR 2023 conference last month, I collected recommendations for favorite romance scholarship from in-person attendees.
You can hear their responses in the latest episode of Shelf Love, or read on for a curated list of recommendations, sorted into categories, with links to read or buy. (You can also read the list of romance-adjacent book/article recommendations!)
Highly Recommended
These were the most highly-recommended titles!
“A Natural History of the Romance Novel” by Pamela Regis
University of Pennsylvania Press ($29.95)
It was the first bit of romance scholarship that I ever read, and I was like, people are studying this? For nostalgia's sake, it's probably my favorite.
-Clarice Nicol
I love thinking about the structure of the romance novel and what that says about what we take romance to be.
-Matthew A. Hoffman
It's the first serious academic scholarship that I came across when I was getting started: it showed me that you could actually do academic research on romance.
-Inma Perez
“Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels” by Hsu-Ming Teo
University of Texas Press ($34.95 - currently you can use coupon “UTXSUMMER” to get 40% off!)
That was my gateway drug into romance scholarship. So insightful and so relevant and so well written. Complex but not so complex that I couldn't read it.
-Hanna Hoorenman
Hsu-Ming’s work has had a huge influence on my work as somebody looking at historical romance and trying to use a historical lens to study fiction.
-Sarah Ficke
Deborah Lutz
I’m grouping these works by Deborah Lutz together but technically there are 2 different books and 1 article.
“Heidegger, the Erotics of Ontology, and the Mass-Market Romance”
Purdue.edu (Read for Free)
I love it because of how it connects philosophy with the narrative structure of a romance and talks about ideas of the end of the novel and the end of the story vis a vis the imminence of love.
-Evvie Valiou
“The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative”
Project Muse (Open Access, read for free)
I love a Byronic Hero, and I thought that was a really interesting way to talk about that character.
-Chels Upton
“The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects”
W. W. Norton ($16.95)
I'm absolutely obsessed with the Brontes, and my favorite novel is Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.
-Lucy Sheerman
Romance Scholarship Books
Books that focus entirely on popular romance fiction.
“Making Meaning in Popular Romance” by Jayashree Kamblé
Palgrave Macmillan ($12.99 ebook)
I’m a PhD student working on concepts of hero and heroine in romance novels and in romance scholarship. Finding Making Meaning in Popular Romance blew the whole thing wide open for me and finally gave me the door I was looking for and the approach I was looking for and put me on the trajectory where I am now.
-Jo Kluger
“The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction” edited by Jayashree Kamblé, Eric Murphy Selinger, Hsu-Ming Teo
Routledge ($42.71 - on sale now!)
My research isn't specifically romance focused, so it's a really nice overview and I really like that it has stuff about the publishing industry as well. So it's not just focusing on the content, but around all the paratexts around it as well.
-Maria Butler
“Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature” by Janice Radway
University of North Carolina Press ($25.99-$37.50)
It was the first serious piece of work on romance that with hindsight might come across as patronizing, but I think at the time what she did was extraordinary.
She took the genre seriously. She did not have a sort of a secondary bibliography on romance, so she had to piece together her methodology and her theory from other sources, and I just think that's very difficult to do. So I admire it as a piece of research, although of course now, we think about it differently.
-Nattie Golubov
“Happily Ever After: The Romance Story in Popular Culture” by Catherine M. Roach
Indiana University Press ($9.99-$26.00)
I just think it's a lot of fun and I feel like she had a lot of fun writing it. It’s really provocative in the right ways.
-Jonathan Allan
“Romance Revolution: Erotic Novels for Women and the Quest for a New Sexual Identity” by Carol Thurston - Chapter 10!
Used bookstores like Abe Books (copies start at around $20)
The whole book is great, but Chapter 10 is about genre change in the romance genre, and uses a systems model, and it's amazing. This was written decades ago, and it's still so relevant. I love it, and everyone should read it.
-Katie Deane
“The Consummate Virgin: Female Virginity Loss and Love in Anglophone Popular Literatures” by Jodi McAlister
Palgrave Macmillan ($12.99 ebook on sale! )
-Lucy Neville
[Jodi McAlister may have tipped the scales by asking Lucy to endorse it. At the time Jodi was working very hard to make the conference happen, so I’ll allow it. I also recommend this book and have talked about it on the podcast before.]
Articles
Journal of Popular Romance Studies (JPRS)
“A Parody of Love: the Narrative Uses of Rape in Popular Romance” by Angela R. Toscano
Journal of Popular Romance Studies (Open Access, read for free)
It blew my mind and changed how I thought about bodice rippers, and it made me enjoy aspects of the genre that I didn't know that I could enjoy.
-Emma Kearney
“Freedom’s Epilogue: Love as Freedom in Alyssa Cole’s Historical Novellas” by Nicole M. Jackson
Journal of Popular Romance Studies (Open Access, read for free)
It's about Alyssa Cole and her use of politics and activism in popular romance novels. Not only do I love that piece, but I really love teaching it. It pairs really well with the Alyssa Cole novella I do teach. And students find it really accessible and it's just incredibly smart.
-Heather Schell
“‘You and I are humans, and there is something complicated between us’: Untamed and queering the heterosexual historical romance” by Jodi McAlister
Journal of Popular Romance Studies (Open Access, read for free)
It was like the first piece of academic literature I saw about queer romances.
-Lucy Hargrave
Other Journals
“Beauty and the Beautiful Beast: Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga and the Quest for a Transgressive Female Desire” by Fleur Diamond
Australian Feminist Studies (Access through institution required or $$)
It's a fantastic article about, nominally Twilight, but also talks about the supernatural animal bridegroom and sexuality.
-Nicola Welsh-Burke
“Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre” by Fredric Jameson (1975)
JSTOR (Create login to read for free)
It makes you think about the structural dynamics of the romance itself, at the same time that you end up realizing that it can't be contained.
-Margo Hendricks aka Elysabeth Grace
What to read next:
Romance-Adjacent Scholarship Reading List
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 surpri…
Have you read any of this scholarship? What’s your favorite romance scholarship? Tell me in the comments!
wow -- I have a lot of reading ahead of me 😍 thank you for compiling and sharing these resources! it's so fun knowing that there are others out there who not only share my interest but have found some great reading material
You have collated a fantastic resource. I’ve suddenly switched (a mere 2 months) from being a lifelong crime reader to a (born again) romance reader and being super nerdy I need to deconstruct its appeal and its impact. Thank you so much for making it so easy to access academic discourse. Your compilation was literally one google hit. Thanks again :)