Welcome to the Popular Romance Project
The Popular Romance Project explores romance in popular culture and fiction.
This site is for romance readers and writers, scholars from every field, and
everyone who has ever pondered romantic love.
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Talking About Romance
Everyone knows the story: a young, Western heroine meets a swarthy sheikh, is abducted to his desert kingdom where they (eventually) fall in love and live happily ever after. This is the quintessential “sheikh romance,” a distinctive sub-genre of contemporary Harlequin Mills & Boon romance. The number of sheikh titles published has increased exponentially, with more original titles published in the UK since 2000 than in the first 80 years of Harlequin Mills & Boon publishing. This increase in popularity [...]
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Behind the Scenes
Last weekend, I drove from Boston to Connecticut to meet writers and agents and readers at Fiction Fest, the annual conference of Connecticut’s RWA (Romance Writers of America) chapter. I set up my camera in the courtyard of the conference hotel, and I had a great time talking with dozens of people. Here are excerpts from my conversations with: Jamie Schmidt, Gail Chianese, Marian Lanouette, April Grey, Louise Fury, Susan Hanniford Crowley, and Gerri Brousseau. Fiction Fest from Laurie Kahn [...]
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Interviews
At Seton Hill University, you can get an MFA in writing popular fiction. Nicole Peeler, who teaches in the program, thought she was headed for a conventional life as an English professor, armed with her PhD in English. But she began writing urban fantasy paranormal romances several years ago, and now teaches courses about dialogue and character, point of view, story structure, and worldbuilding to students who aim to be published in romance, mystery, sci-fi, horror, and fantasy (and various [...]
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