In a world that commodifies feminism, is adapting romance novels for small and big screen projects, and the Romance Writers Association is evolving to a more inclusive representative group, it is imperative for researchers to reevaluate the cultural assumptions and gender norming work happening 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 survey that will be shared with all the authors of this anthology. By having access to this pool, authors will have the opportunity to explore different elements of reader experience and cultural norms in romance fiction, and potentially reflect on changes since Janice Radway's seminal work. The norms and negotiations readers experience while consuming romance is especially interesting as romancelandia becomes a more mainstream part of popular culture with the popularity of Bridgerton and romance series like Ice Planet Barbarians exploding on BookTok. No other book in romance or popular culture studies identifies a data set as the connecting element, and to do so creates an exciting opportunity to create a more inclusive study of popular romance, offer truly interdisciplinary research on the question of how readers read romance, and generate diverse areas of future scholarship. This edited volume explores multiple issues in romance fiction, based on survey data from real romance readers. An updated version of Janice Radway's influential survey looking at romance readers in the early 1980s, this time scholars explore romance readers' habits and attitudes in the twenty-first century. 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.
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.
