Skip to content

Topics of Interest

Ongoing topics of interest to the journal include:

  • Romance on the World Stage: romantic love in popular culture from East and South Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East
  • Romance in translation: cross-cultural exchanges or distribution of romantic popular media
  • Romance and the Digital Age: authors, readers, Web sites, blogs, digital publishing
  • Re-reading the “rom-com”: romantic comedy and its variations in global cinema
  • Love in global popular music, including popular settings of high-art texts (fado, qawwali, etc.)
  • Metatextual romance novels, films and songs; romantic love as a self-consciously conventional experience and enterprise
  • Medieval and Medieval-set romance
  • True Romance? Confession magazines, advice columns, mass-market discourse about love.
  • Love For Sale: Marketing Rings, Dinners, Romantic Getaways, Weddings, and the material culture of love
  • Monogamy and Beyond: public debates and popular culture representations of monogamy, polyamory, infidelity, and related topics, now and in the past
  • Queering the Romance: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender romance, and representations of same-sex love within predominantly heterosexual texts
  • Love and nationalism in popular culture, and romantic love in political discourse (revolutionary, reactionary, colonial / anti-colonial, etc.)
  • Love in Telenovelas, Soap Operas, and TV more generally
  • Romance / Erotica / Pornography: drawing, blurring, and theorizing the boundaries
  • Love and the ‘other’ in popular culture; cross-cultural and interracial romance, xenophilia and repressions of difference in amatory popular culture

The Journal also solicits reviews (individual and combined) of relevant scholarly works, along with interviews, pedagogical discussions, and other material of use to scholars and teachers in the field of Popular Romance Studies.