Journal of Popular Romance Studies

JPRS Archive Dive! We are joining the commemoration of the Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15 - October 15) by highlighting Nadia Lie’s article “From Latin to Latino Lover: Hispanicity and Female Desire in Popular Culture”. Follow the link to read: www.jprstudies.org/2014/02/from...

This short article may be of interest to our readers!

Quick note! We are aware that our Google search results contain some bogus information. The issue is being dealt with, but for now, use another search engine to find our articles, or go straight to www.jprstudies.org and use our search box there! The site itself is not impacted.

Coolest call for book proposals!

#romance #power #desire #AcademicSky #booksky #academicwriting #books

There's been a bit of discussion after Just Like That, Sex and the City's spin-off, ended, so we wanted to highlight a JPRS' article analyzing romance in the original series: "'Just Say Yes': the Romanticisation of Love in Sex and the City", by Beatriz Oria. Link: www.jprstudies.org/2012/10/just...

I am very excited to announce the CfP for our Special Issue "Romancing the Posthuman" for JPRS! Please share widely 😀

🚨 This CfP may be of interest to some of our readers!

🗓️ 250-word proposal by November 30, 2025.

We are joining the celebration of #ESEA (East and Southeast Asian) Heritage Month this September by highlighting one of JPRS articles related to the topic. Follow the link to read “Cultural Authenticity, the Family, and East Asian American Romance Novels”, by Hsu-Ming Teo: doi.org/10.70138/RVX...

The CfP for our Special Issue "Romancing the Posthuman" is still open!

The end of August marks the start of the new academic year for many. If you are curious about how teaching popular romance works, read “14 Weeks of Love and Labour: Teaching Regency and Desert Romance to Undergraduate Students”, by Karin Heiss: www.jprstudies.org/2015/08/14-w...

Deadline extended (to September 30) for essay proposals: Love and Resistance: Popular Romance Fiction and the Right, 2015-2025. drive.google.com/file/d/1p63T...

Post-Trump masculinity in popular romance novels - Neohelicon As an almost exclusively female-dominated medium, the popular romance novel has, throughout its history, allowed women writers to “amplify their political voice” (Teo, 2016, p. 102), especially when t...

In the meantime, here's an open access/free article by Johanna Kluger on "Post-Trump masculinity in popular romance novels" which compares Tessa Dare's A night to surrender (2011) to The wallflower wager (2019) + Sarah MacLean's A rogue by any other name (2012) to The day of the duchess (2017)

JPRS Archive Dive! Since 2025 marks the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth, we wanted to highlight Jin Feng's article about Austenian fan fiction. Follow the link to read "Time-Travel to P&P: Web-based Chinese Fanfic of Jane Austen": doi.org/10.70138/GBP...

A CFP that some of our readers might want to check out!

Prof. Bridget Kies is conducting a research study to understand the attitudes romance readers and writers have toward generative artificial intelligence use in the romance industry:

The Special Issue is jointly edited by Hanna Hoorenman and Evvie Valliou.

CfP 🚨 The Journal of Popular Romance Studies is now accepting paper submissions for its Special Issue "Romancing the Posthuman", focusing on romance, critical love studies and posthumanism:

📆 Deadline: 31 October 2025
📄 Send 300-word abstracts
➕ More information: www.jprstudies.org/submissions/...

This article may be of interest to our readers!

Anyone in the mood for a movie? 🍿 Wait until you have read Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado’s article: “Regimes of Affect: Love and Class in Mexican Neoliberal Cinema”. Find it here: www.jprstudies.org/2014/02/regi...

Just noting that the "secret baby" plot's been around a long time. This article (in Spanish) discusses a Spanish romance from 1938 in which the heroine, discovering she's only been married for her money, disappears while pregnant, intent on living as a single mother.

Some new research from @dramyburge.bsky.social and me! We have an article in Text arising from our research project on bonkbusters. This one is about our bonkbuster book club on Lace (1982) by Shirley Conran, and what we found from reading it together with our research participants.

JPRS Archive Dive! Today we wanted to bring back an article that is turning 10 this year 🎂: “True Love’s Kiss and Happily Ever After: the religion of love in American film”, by Jyoti Raghu. Follow the link to find it: www.jprstudies.org/2015/08/true...

This roundup of new work in romance scholarship is very long, because new things kept coming to my notice before I'd been able to read the ones I already knew about. I've finally caught up! I've mentioned quite a lot of them here already, but hopefully there'll still be things there of interest.

Baited: A Tropical Fish Yearns for Snow and the Anglophone Reception of Japanese Yuri Romance Manga | Journal of Popular Romance Studies Compared to the better-known genre of “boys’ love” manga, the Japanese tradition of yuri romance manga has received limited scholarly attention in the West. Also known as “girls’ love” manga, yuri dea...

New article alert! This week we get to read all about the yuri romance manga genre and its anglophone reception. Follow the link to find “Baited: A Tropical Fish Yearns for Snow and the Anglophone Reception of Japanese Yuri Romance Manga”, by Joseph Crawford: doi.org/10.70138/IOE...

No travel plans, daydreaming about a summer trip to Italy? Then this article is for you: “‘He Looks like He’s Stepped out of a Painting:’ The Idealization and Appropriation of Italian Timelessness through the Experience of Romantic Love”, by Francesca Pierini. Find it here: doi.org/10.70138/ICP...

No one has written about M&B’s colonial library and its contribution to the company’s success, yet M&B – especially after it was acquired by Harlequin – became recognized and valued for its international network of female readers and writers. HMB’s strong international presence ultimately attracted the attention of News Corp/HarperCollins, which acquired HMB in 2014 for close to a quarter of a billion dollars. At the time of the sale ninety-nine percent of HarperCollins’ revenue came from English-language markets. By contrast, forty percent of HMB’s revenue came from books published in languages other than English.

New article by Denise H. Sutton on the history of Harlequin Mills & Boon in India www.proquest.com/scholarly-jo...
Sutton emphasises the importance of the non-UK market to UK publishers:

The cover of The Bonkbuster: Women's Popular Romance in the Long 1980s. It's pink leopard print.

Cover reveal! @dramyburge.bsky.social and I revealed the cover of our new academic book, The Bonkbuster: Women's Popular Reading in the Long 1980s, at the @iaspr.bsky.social conference today. Out January 2026! www.bloomsbury.com/uk/bonkbuste...

Book Reviews | Journal of Popular Romance Studies A book review should provide a useful summary of the text and evaluate its achievement in and relevance to popular romance studies. Book reviews may be short pieces on individual works (1,000-1,500 words), longer considerations (2,500-3,500 words), or review-essays which discuss a group of related texts (over 3,500 words). Reviews of individual works are not

Lastly, for those who might be interested, information about JPRS book reviews’ submission process is available on our website: www.jprstudies.org/submissions/...
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Javaria Farooqui (@javariafarooqui.bsky.social‬) reviews Creating Identity: The Popular Romance Heroine’s Journey to Selfhood and Self-Presentation (2023), by Jayashree Kamblé (@profromance.bsky.social‬). Find the review here: doi.org/10.70138/TXE... (3/4)

Morgan Myong Jakobcic reviews Orgasmic Bodies: The Orgasm in Contemporary Western Culture (2015), by Hannah Frith. Find the review here: doi.org/10.70138/WTR... (2/4)