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by Josefine Smith (Editor), Kathleen W. Taylor Kollman (Editor)
In a time when feminism is being commodified, romance novels are being adapted into films, and the Romance Writers Association is evolving into a more inclusive representative group, it is imperative for researchers to reevaluate the cultural assumptions and gender norms in the romance genre. It is time to question the cultural capital of traditional archetypes, explore the experience of romance readers, and question how romance and cultural studies researchers create quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods research.
This work centers around a data set collected with a revised version of Janice Radway's Reading the Romance, and the contributors explore different elements of reader experience and cultural norms in romance fiction, reflect on changes since Janice Radway's seminal work, and consider the modern prevalence of romancelandia, with the popularity of Bridgerton and romance series like Ice Planet Barbarians exploding on BookTok. Relying on a core data set, this book provides a more inclusive study of popular romance, offers truly interdisciplinary research regarding how readers read romance, and generates diverse areas of future scholarship. Each contributor in this volume uses the same survey data to make unique statements about gender, intersectionality, popular fiction, and popular culture. By using a common data set but approaching it from different perspectives, this unique volume is able to apply multiple methodologies to the same subject.Author Biography
Josefine Smith is an associate professor and instruction & assessment librarian at Shippensburg University. Smith received the John S. Patterson Award for Academic Excellence in American Studies. Her research centers on the relationship between consuming information impacts identity development and gender norm construction. She has presented research on gender construction in popular fiction and in popular animated series, and is in the process of publishing two journal articles on gender in New Adult fiction, a subgenre of romance, and gender representation in the animated series Masters of the Universe: Revelation. Smith also researches learning and information literacy, and relationships between student identity and their research self-efficacy in the field of librarianship.
Kathleen W. Taylor Kollman is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in Media and Communication, Women and Gender Studies, and American Studies at Miami University in Ohio. As a graduate student, Kollman received the inaugural Roberta Gellis Memorial Paper Award at the 2018 Reading the Romance conference for her work on feminist themes in vampire paranormal romance novels. She will also cover romance novels extensively in her forthcoming monograph on representations of female U.S. presidents in film, television, and literature. Kollman serves as the Area Chair for Gender Studies at the Midwest Popular Culture conference. She writes novels which straddle the line between speculative and romance fiction.
