Popular Romance Project

Making modern love

We take for granted that reading has an impact on who we are as people and that reading about sex and love affects how we can imagine ourselves in relationships. Finding evidence of this, however, and explaining exactly how reading affects a person, is incredibly hard, especially when referring to reading in the past. Even when you know what was [...]

Romance and pornography

I teach an undergraduate seminar on “Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Culture” with a unit on the romance genre. This year, for the first time ever, the class consists entirely of women. Also new this year is an exercise we invented of an online, collaborative romance narrative. One question that came up in our writing experiment was how, when, and why [...]

Mrs. Robinson revisited

In her recent post entitled “Here’s to Mrs. Robinson,” Karen Dunak linked the “troubles” real romance went through in the turbulent 1960s with the “confession,” in The Graduate (1967) that sex and love may not be linked after all. Dunak concludes that through the Ben-Mrs. Robinson relationship and the film’s ambivalent final scene, The Graduate admits that there are “limits [...]

Paranormal’s popularity

Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel as inspiration? DePaul University professor of English Eric Selinger feels that paranormal fiction gives authors and readers the opportunity to think through ethics and politics of desire with higher stakes than in more realistic subgenres. What do you think triggered the popularity of paranormal romance? Why do you (or don’t you) enjoy reading the [...]

Romance in black papers

I solidified my love for books secretly reading my mother’s historical romance novels at 11 years of age. Nothing is unusual about this experience except that I was a young African American girl exploring love and romance through the eyes of Catherine Cookson, Jude Deveraux, and Johanna Lindsey. These novels would indelibly mark popular representations of love and romance as [...]

Here’s to Mrs. Robinson

As the 1960s progressed, mainstream media looked warily at a changing American sexual culture. In 1960 the Food and Drug Administration approved the marketing of Enovid, the first oral contraceptive, and by 1962, more than 1,000,000 women were “on the pill.” In 1965 the Supreme Court ruled in Griswold v. Connecticut that all women, not merely married women, had a [...]

When life imitates art

The theme of my two Regency novels, Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander and Pride/Prejudice, is the m/m/f ménage told as a romance, a love story with two happy endings. At the end of the novels, the hero—a conventionally masculine man—is in loving relationships with his wife and a male partner, and each partner is aware of and accepts the [...]

Selling books like music?

Pocket Books Senior Editor Abby Zidle has been a romance reader since she was 12 years old, and she planned to write about romance fiction as proto-feminist literature (arguing that it is not anti-feminist) when she was a graduate student. But she never finished her dissertation. Looking back on it she says, “A bad day in publishing is better than [...]

Boomers need love, too

On June 26th, I (Laurie Kahn) posted some excerpts from our interview with Gwen Osborne, and she wrote to me saying, “I really wanted to underscore the point about the ‘Boomer market.’ Readers are getting older as the heroines are getting younger (or so they seem).” So I invited her to write a guest blog here at PopularRomanceProject.org, and she [...]

Editing for satisfaction

As a long-time romance reader, a romance author, and a publisher, I figured I had a pretty good handle on what constituted a good romance, so when I was asked to be the guest editor of Best Lesbian Romance 2009 (Cleis Press), I expected the task to be straightforward. I’ve just recently turned in the manuscript for Best Lesbian Romance [...]