Romance Resources for Academics

From this page you may return to the main Romance Scholarship page or go directly to

• Academics Who Write Romance
• Academic Online Essays (not published in academic journals or volumes)
• Bibliography A-G - the first part of our bibliography of academic articles and books about romance.
• Bibliography H-O - the second part of our bibliography of academic articles and books about romance.
• Bibliography P-Z - the end of our bibliography of academic articles and books about romance.
• Bibliography of Scholarship in Languages Other than English.
• Dissertation Abstracts
• Guides to the Genre
• Romance in the Media - lists news items/features items about romance.
• Writers on Romance - lists items written about the genre by romance authors but not published in academic journals or books.

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A Romance Review has many short articles on various aspects of the genre.

All About Romance has a short series of items on The Romance Family Tree. There are entries on the Bodice-Ripper, the Gothic, the Historical Novel, Inspirationals, Paranormals, Austen and Heyer.

American Women's Dime Novel Project which 'grew out of my [Felicia L. Carr's] research for my dissertation entitled "All For Love: Gender and Class and the Woman's Dime Novel in Nineteenth-Century America" '.

Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts Compiled by D.L. Ashliman at the University of Pittsburgh, this resource includes numerous versions of many different folk and fairy tales, including Beauty and the Beast, Bluebeard, Cinderella, St George and the Dragon, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White.

Library Career Romances - excerpts from a number of romances from the 1940s and 1950s featuring heroines who are librarians.

Librarians, writing in Reference & User Services Quarterly, the official journal of the Reference and User Services Association of the American Library Association, suggest five romances in each of five romance subgenres (contemporary, historical, Regency, suspense, and paranormal) to form the core of a library collection, and give a short description of each of these subgenres. [1]

Marriage, and the history of marriage, are topics which are, for obvious reasons, related to the study of romances. Among the many works which may be of interest in this area is

Coontz, Stephanie. 2005. 

Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Penguin). Chapter 1

Nurse Romance Cover of the Week. This collection "presents images and snippets of text from the more than 425 novels held in the UWM [University of Wisconsin Milwaukee] Libraries’ Special Collections that have nurses as central characters. These images, from works written for both young and adult audiences from the 1950s to the 1970s, often reflect stereotypes about nurses, usually negative, that are held in the popular imagination. These works raise issues concerning the image of nurses and the nursing profession in popular culture, and the books that serve to reinforce not only popular misconceptions of nurses, but of women generally, and professional women in particular. They also raise more general questions of gender construction in Western society, reader expectations, and societal/historical contexts that allow for such presentations to persist to this day."

Resources for Teaching Popular Romance Fiction

RomanceScholar - A listserv dedicated to academic discussion about romance fiction.

Sara Donati's (Rosina Lippi) analysis of a number of sex scenes, some from romance, others from outside the genre. She says that: 'Each scene was chosen because it illustrates something instructive, positive or negative. I have tried to construct a list which contains a range in matters of expliciteness, tone and approach. [...] The idea is [to] look at the choices the author made, the underlying mechanics and process, what works, what doesn't. By the time I'm done I hope to be able to articulate clearly some basic guidelines for effective sex scenes of different types. The introduction and the scene analyses - 1. Jennifer Crusie, 3. - Judith Ivory, 8. - more Jennifer Crusie were all posted in August 2004.

Sheikhs and Desert Love has a database of sheik romances and some very snarky analysis of the sub-genre in the features section.

Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies Although Buffy isn't a romance and isn't a novel, it is part of popular culture and, given the increase in popularity in vampire/paranormal romances, as well as the rise of the 'kick-ass heroine', this journal may be of interest. In the first issue, for example, there is an article comparing Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Teach Me Tonight - a blog containing 'Musings on Romance Fiction from an Academic Perspective'.

The Cinderella Bibliography Compiled by Russell Peck. This bibliography lists fiction, music, drama, movies, television programmes and criticism related to the Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast stories. This includes a number of modern romance retellings of these fairytales. Other lists on fairytales, but this time strictly limited to romances, are AAR's Fairy Tale Romances page and SurLaLune's Fairy Tale Romances page.

The Golden Age Romance Comics Archive 'A resource for scholars and fans interested in golden era romance comics, containing full scans of issues'.

The Romance Genre on the Web: Researching online romance genre communities and their perspectives