Romance Resources for Academics

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This page contains details of both general online resources which may be of interest to academics, and of academic libraries which have romance collections.


General Online Resources

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

Academic Libraries with Romance Collections

National Library of Australia. 
"Copies of all works published in Australia are received by the Library under the legal deposit provisions (s201) of the Copyright Act, 1968." [2] This means that the Library has substantial holdings of romances published in Australia. The library's catalogue is available online.
Bowling Green State University. 
"The Browne Popular Culture Library holds a wide range of romance materials from novels to valentines. The collection includes more than 10,000 volumes of category romance series from publishers such as Harlequin, Silhouette, Loveswept, Candlelight, Ecstasy, and others. The holdings also include a sizable collection of mass market novels, including Georgian, regency, gothic, contemporary, and historicals. [...] In addition, the Library has manuscript collections containing correspondence, fan mail, literary manuscripts, and galley sheets from many prominent romance writers, includings Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Cathie Linz, and April Kihlstrom." [3] The Browne Library also holds "RWA’s organizational archives documenting its founding 15 years ago and following its growth into the world’s largest non-profit genre organization, specializing in romance fiction." [4]
Brown University. 
Brown University's "collections of genre fiction were augmented by a group of romance novels, including translations into many European languages, the work and gift of Barbara Keiler, class of 1976, and Patricia Coughlin" [5]. The collection of "Romance Novels by Brown & Rhode Island Authors" also includes "the working papers of their authors." [6]
University of Calgary. 
The library has a special collection of early Harlequin novels (not all of which are romances) dating from 1949-1962.[7] The library also holds "research material relating to [Paul Grescoe's] book The Merchants of Venus: Inside Harlequin and the Empire of Romance including Harlequin promotional material, photographs, interviews with various Harlequin executives and writers, articles on romance by other authors, notes and material relating to 1995 Romantic Times convention and issues of Pandora's Box, the newsletter of the Published Authors Network of Romance Writers of America (Acc 705/01.11)."[8]
Library and Archives Canada. 
"The general power given to the institution to 'acquire publications and records or obtain the care, custody or control of them' is supported by more specific powers relating to sampling the Internet, the legal (that is, required by law) deposit of publications." [9] Their holdings therefore contain many Harlequin romances published in Canada. LAC's collections can be searched online via AMICUS and its "services to the public are provided in its main building located in downtown Ottawa."[10]
University of Melbourne. 
"The Romance Fiction Collection is a comprehensive collection of paper-back fiction by Australian and New Zealand - as well as British and American - romance novelists published from the 1960s up until the present by publishers such as Mills and Boon, Silhouette and the Women’s Weekly Library." [11]
Michigan State University. 
The Romance Fiction collection has at "its core [...] a group of several thousand Harlequin Romances, [but] other popular romance novelists such as Barbara Cartland are also included." [12]
New York University. 
The Harlequin Romance Collection of Treva M. Taylor 1967-1996 (Bulk 1974-1996) is held in Fales Library and Special Collections, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library and "The Harlequin Romance Collection of Treva M. Taylor contains 1671 paperbacks spanning three decades of the twentieth century (1970s-1990s). The two publishers represented in the collection are Harlequin and Silhouette." [13]
University of Otago. 
"The University of Otago Library’s rare book collection in Special Collections" includes "numerous samples of Australian Pulp Fiction Literature."[14] According to Dr Donald Kerr, Special Collections Librarian at the University of Otago, it is "a pulp fiction collection of some 900 titles, mainly published in Australia by Sydney based publishers as a result of a publishing embargo on the US based ‘pulps’ before and during the Second World War. The collection complements our more traditional rare books and features detective, westerns, science fiction and romance novels. Representative authors in this field of popular culture include ‘Larry Kent’, Marc Brody, and Carter Brown. The collection was purchased from a collector in Australia in 2005. All are catalogued, and the covers have been digitised for easy access by students, especially those in art history, design and English. It gets added to." Details of the titles in the pulp fiction collection can be found in the main catalogue and as a group they will come up in response to a subject search on the words "pulp literature". Dr Kerr adds that, "In addition, there is an uncatalogued Mills and Boon Collection in the University’s storage facilities; some hundreds of titles."
University of Queensland, Fryer Library. 
The Juliet Flesch Collection of Australian Romance Fiction at the University of Queensland’s Fryer Library consists of approximately 1,500 Australian popular romance novels acquired by Dr. Juliet Flesch (currently a Fellow at the School of Historical Studies, University of Melbourne) in the course of her research for her PhD and her subsequent publication From Australia With Love: a History of Modern Australian Popular Romance Novels (Fremantle, W.A.: Curtin University Books, 2004). The material is principally 20th century, with an end date of 2005. There are numerous variant editions, including some works not represented in the National Library of Australia, and a small collection of books by English and North American authors with Australian settings or heroes/heroines. All of the titles have been individually catalogued in the library’s online catalogue and the entire collection can be viewed by searching Australian Romance Fiction Collection as a title. The collection has been entered in AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource by AustLit staff based at UQ, further enhancing AustLit’s genre fiction coverage.
University of Reading. 
The University Library houses the Cole Library, a "collection [which] was originally the private library of Professor F J Cole (1872-1959), F.R.S., Professor of Zoology in the University of Reading from 1907 to 1939. [...] The collection [...] includes 15 books by Sophie Cole (1862-1947), the sister of Professor Cole. As an adolescent, Miss Cole suffered from a long illness, and to pass the time she wrote a romance novel, Arrows From the Dark in 1909, the first book to be published by Mills and Boon, who later became major publishers of romance novels. The book was well-received, and by 1914, 1,394 women had bought a copy. During her lifetime she wrote 65 books, and earned her living from them for many years.[...] She lived in Brighton, but in her later years came to live with Professor Cole and his wife at Eldon Road in Reading. A number of the books are presentation copies from Miss Cole."[15] The University Library catalogue reveals that the Library also holds some "Letters between George Allen & Unwin Ltd and Mills & Boon Ltd, publishers of Great Britain" from 1961 and another folder of "Letters to and from Mills & Boon Ltd", presumably also between M&B and Allen & Unwin Ltd, dating from 1967.
University of Rochester. 
The University of Rochester has an extensive collection of Silhouette romances and Silhouette desires (which are listed in the library catalogue as "love stories--periodicals").
Syracuse University. 
Syracuse University Library houses the Street and Smith Publishers' Archive and Dime Novel Cover Art. According to Dr. Kirsten MacLeod, Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Department of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta, "S and S published romance pulps [...] Of course they also issued dime novels. That "dime novels" also included romance fiction is a fact often overlooked. Bertha M Clay, E.D.E.N Southworth, etc."
University of Tulsa. 
The McFarlin Library holds a collection of "251 letters from [Georgette] Heyer to her literary agent L. P. Moore and his assistant Norah Perriam, at Christy & Moore, Ltd, concerning the publication of her books. Most of the letters are lengthy with some running to six or eight closely written pages."[16]
UK and Irish Legal Deposit Libraries. 
These libraries are entitled to "one copy of every publication distributed in the United Kingdom or Republic of Ireland" (British Library website). This does not mean that each of them holds a copy of every one of these books, but it does mean that they have extensive holdings of romances published in the UK, such as Mills & Boon's. The Legal Deposit Libraries are: Bodleian Library, Oxford; British Library, London; University Library, Cambridge; National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; Library of Trinity College, Dublin; National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. Their catalogues may be searched either directly via their websites or via COPAC: "The Copac® library catalogue gives free access to the merged online catalogues of many major University, Specialist, and National Libraries in the UK and Ireland."
US Library of Congress, Washington D.C. 
Although the library does not "have a copy of every book published in the United States" [17] it does contain many romances published in the US. It has an online catalog.
University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee. 
The UWM's "collection of [over 425] nurse romance novels was donated to Special Collections in 2005 by artist, photographer, and former UWM Art Professor Leslie Bellavance." [18] There is an online archive of Nurse Romance Covers.
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