Introduction to the Romance Scholarship Database

With the Romance Scholarship Database I've tried to collect details of all the scholarship on popular romance novels. I hope the database will be useful to scholars working in the field, those who'd like to start working in it, and anyone else who'd like to see what's going on in the field or would just like to check some details about a particular work.

Popular Romance Studies is still quite a small field, but it's definitely far, far larger and more varied than it was in the days when Janice Radway's extremely well-known Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature was first published, in 1984. The database also lets you see quite how many items of romance scholarship had already been published by that time; some predate Reading the Romance by a couple of decades.

The main page lists all the works in alphabetical order but the table view allows for sorting by publication year (this can be sorted ascending or descending).

To assist in cases where the name of a scholar isn't immediately coming to mind, there's a scholar view page.

Since it can be helpful to search by topic, there is also a tags view.

For each entry I've tried to give all the basic publication information and then added more where it's available. This means you should usually find some links to more information about each entry, there are often quotations from the work and/or its abstract, and I've added tags about the topics/authors discussed in the work.

If you spot errors or omissions, please do let me know! It's particularly difficult for me to identify items written in languages other than English and published outside the UK and US, so I'd particularly appreciate assistance finding items which fall into those categories. I can be contacted via my "contact" page.

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