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 university 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

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." [2] 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." [3]
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" [4]. The collection of "Romance Novels by Brown & Rhode Island Authors" also includes "the working papers of their authors." [5]
University of Calgary. 
The library has a special collection of early Harlequin novels (not all of which are romances) dating from 1949-1962.[6] 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).[7]
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." [8]
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." [9]
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." [10]
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").
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