Still Reading Romance: Identity and Engagement with Popular Romance Fiction

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.