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Continue reading →: Article in Library Journal and a quick update!
Hi y’all. It’s been a very long summer here at the homestead, but I haven’t forgotten about you. I recently wrote a piece for Library Journal that detailed the controversy over the Romance Writers of America award for Best Romance with Religious or Spiritual Elements. Regular readers of this blog…
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Continue reading →: A Brief History of “Indian Romance”Like so many things that eventually go wrong in American history, the story of the so-called “Indian Romance” can, I think, be traced back to a white person who thought they had good intentions. In 1881, an east coast social crusader named Helen Hunt Jackson wrote a non-fiction book called…
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Continue reading →: Romance Scholarship & Collections- Where We’ve Been, Where We Can Go
On June 10, 2021 I was part of a panel at the RBMS 2021 conference titled “Happily Rarer After: The Radical Act of Taking Popular Romance Fiction Seriously” with my fantastic friends Rebecca Baumann of the Lily Library at Indiana University and Rebecca Romney, co-founder of the rare book firm…
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Men Writing Romance- Tom Huff (1938-1990)
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Continue reading →: Men Writing Romance- Tom Huff (1938-1990)A short time back, friend of the blog Katrina Jackson raised a question that comes up every once in a while- what’s the history of cishet men writing cishet romance? It’s a good question, with no simple answer. Most of the cis men whose names I’ve come across use(d) female…
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Continue reading →: Towards an Accurate HistoryOr, Why I’m Always Carrying on about Janet Dailey. If you follow me on twitter, I’m sorry. You’ve likely heard me banging on about inaccuracy and Janet Dailey’s first book, No Quarter Asked. So what’s that all about, anyways? Well, it’s a story about misinformation, half-truths, and what’s missing from…
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Continue reading →: You Just Never Know…For me, a research rabbit hole can come from anywhere or anything. It can start with a line in a newspaper article, the off-hand mention of a name in a YouTube video, or even a book in the free bin. The free bin is where I came across one of…
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Continue reading →: Video: Romance in Graphic Novels and Comics Panel
On February 18, 2021 I had the great pleasure of appearing on an amazing panel for the Escondido Public Library with Sarah Kuhn, Sydney Heifler, and Johnnie Christmas, talking about two of my favorite things- romance and comics. It was great fun, and I always love hearing really smart people…
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Continue reading →: Lucy Agnes Hancock (1877-1952)The nurse romance- the story of a woman committed to caring for others finally finding love for herself- has long been a popular sub-genre, going back to the early part of the 20th century. Today, Harlequin publishes these stories though its Medical Romance line, but for many years they were…
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Continue reading →: A Black Romance Author TimelineI want to start by saying that this will not be a static post. I’ve been piecing together the history of Black authors in romance for something close to five years and I feel like I’m constantly turning up something new. My goal with this post is to get the…
Hello,
I’m Steve.
For more than a century, romance fiction has served as a mirror for societal ideas of gender, class, and race. I explore the stories behind the books to shed light on how authors, publishers, and editors shaped the genre.
Romance Fiction Has a History 