Download PDFPopular Romance Studies is a new enough field that the canon of relevant scholarship has yet to be established. The expansive, interdisciplinary nature of the field, which takes as its purview “romantic love and its representations in global popular culture, now and in the past,” makes it even more urgent for popular romance scholars to read both widely and comparatively.
To help popular romance scholars broaden their intellectual horizons, we have begun taking a new, more expansive approach to the book review section here at JPRS. In our last issue, with a piece on Lynn S. Neal’s Romancing God: Evangelical Women and Inspirational Fiction (2006), we began what will be an ongoing effort to look back at works in scholarship that might have missed readers’ attention, yet which remain of signal use to this emerging field. We are pleased this time to include reviews of two other important books from the early 2000s: Women and Romance: A Reader, edited by Susan Ostrov Weisser, and Barbara Fuchs’s analysis of the literary genre (or “strategy,” as she has it) of Romance. We invite our readers to suggest other older works on love, romance, and popular culture that might be worth revisiting, and if you have an interest in writing such a piece yourself, please feel free to get in touch.
In addition to these individual retrospective pieces, we are very pleased to present a larger, tenth-anniversary exploration of Pamela Regis’s A Natural History of the Romance Novel. Including papers by Pamela Regis, Eric Murphy Selinger, An Goris, Jayashree Kamble, Sarah S. G. Frantz, and Jonathan A. Allan (myself), this forum considers the importance and continuing impact of Regis’s past work, both inside and outside the academy, along with some thoughts on where she and romance novel studies might be headed next.
Needless to say, we are also still interested in current research in the field! We are, therefore, excited to include a review of Hsu-Ming Teo’s groundbreaking new book Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels—a book with an historical sweep even longer than Regis’s study whose impact will be fascinating to trace in the years ahead.
If you are interested in reviewing for JPRS, or if you have published a book on love, romance culture, or other relevant topics, or if you simply know of a book that should be reviewed, older or brand new, please send us an email at bookreviews@jprstudies.org. [End Page 1]