romance reading

I got to teach a virtual class for McNally Jackson this January on multidisciplinary approaches to romance and, shock of all shocks, people actually registered? and attended? Truly cannot express how special it is to be with people who are both interesting and interested in something so precious to me.

For folks who weren’t able to attend for financial or scheduling reasons, I promised I would share the syllabus, so I’ve included that here below, along with a few notes on why and how I chose the readings I assigned. These are really brief summaries of what were really stream-of-consciousness lectures that altered in response to class interest and commentary, so let me know if I can clarify anything below!

A few notes about the class overall:

• It was a seminar-structure, so I assigned readings and opened class with a 30 minute lecture before facilitating an hour-long semi-structured discussion around the topic of the week. Every week, I asked folks to share what struck them about the required reading.

• The class didn’t have a target population beyond “people who are interested in thinking harder about romance,” and that is exactly who I seemed to attract: people with varying levels of familiarity and comfort with reading romance who were interested in talking about romance with other people.

• My goal was to offer a survey of romance genre fiction and introduce ways of thinking about romance that draw on other disciplines and scholarship because that is sort of the thing I do best. I mentioned in my first week that I’m not an author, a romance academic, or a romance historian, and so I felt just a little bit of imposter syndrome at having been asked to teach the class at all, but I think the thing I wanted to do— the thing I’m probably most qualified to do— was show people more of a rigorous critical sensibility and how that sensibility shapes how romance can be understood. I hope that comes through in the syllabus!!

• In choosing primary readings, I wanted to go for a mix of books that I love and books that I think generate a lot of conversation/won’t work for everyone. It just makes for a more fruitful conversation!!

• It was my first time teaching something like that, but folks seemed to enjoy the class (???) so I’ve been given the chance to potentially teach it again or something similar in the future. I’d love to! Let me know if you are interested!

Week 1: Historical Romance

• Primary Reading: The Queer Principles of Kit Webb by Cat Sebastian

• Supplemental Reading

  • Butler, J. (1999). 23. Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion. In S. Thornham, Feminist Film Theory (pp. 336-349). Edinburgh University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474473224-035

  • McAlister, J. (2016). “You and I are humans, and there is something complicated between us”: Untamed and queering the heterosexual historical romance. Journal of Popular Romance Studies. https://www.jprstudies.org/2016/07/you-and-i-are-humans-and-there-is-something-complicated-between-us-untamed-and-queering-the-heterosexual-historical-romanceby-jodi-mcalister/

  • Halperin, D. M. (2019). Queer Love. Critical Inquiry, 45(2), 396–419. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26621858

• Notes: The goal of this week was to tee up the premise of the class. Supplemental readings were used to talk directly about the subject of historical romance, queer romance, and queer love, but I was also interested in the Butler (1999) piece as an example of an interesting piece of critical writing. Butler’s arguments around subversion and their rebuttal to bell hooks in this review of Gender is Burning are both relevant to the content of the lecture and frame what I want to accomplish over the course of the class: giving people the vocabulary, skills, and critical eye to more specifically and rigorously articulate what does or doesn’t work about a novel.

• In the future, I’d shorten this reading list to just the Butler piece— the layout of the class is such that people were signing up right until the day before and the amount of supplemental reading was totally unrealistic given the time constraints and my propensity for freewheeling when given open lecture time.

• Other Reads I Would Have Assigned if I Had Time: Private Arrangements by Sherry Thomas, Again the Magic by Lisa Kleypas, The Jade Temptress by Jeannie Lin, An Island Princess Starts a Scandal by Adriana Herrera, Flowers from the Storm by Laura Kinsale

Week 2: Fandom and Romance

• Primary Reading: You, Again by Kate Goldbeck

• Supplemental Reading:

  • Prologue-Ch. 2 of The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood

  • Ch. 1-2 of Not Another Love Song by Julie Soto

  • Sandvoss, C. (2007). The Death of the Reader? Literary Theory and the Study of Texts in Popular Culture. In J. Gray, C. L. Harrington, & C. Sandvoss (Eds.), Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (pp. 17–32). New York University Press. https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.18574/nyu/9780814743713.003.0005/html?lang=en&srsltid=AfmBOorFkysBZJlcKBJhHRal4Oik-5zPOc3ohVk-26NNa2bqp3tuacpk

  • Leone, M. (2012). 2012 - Petition and Repetition: on the Semiotic Philosophy of Prayer. Monographic Issue of Lexia, 11-12. https://doi.org/10.4399/978885485105433

• Notes: Arguably this was my favorite week of class? Fanfiction and romance genre fiction have existed for nearly the same amount of time, but have crossed paths more often in recent decades, so it merited a separate week of discussion.

• In assigning these readings, I set myself up to lecture about three things: (1) outlining the way an archive works in fanfiction and, consequently, in romance, as a thing that responds to and alters in response to itself rather than a thing that is subject to the original work it is derived from, (2) the notion of “authority” in a text: namely, the utility of not just regarding authorial voice as sole arbiter of what is “true” in the world of fiction (a la Barthes & Death of the Author) while remaining cautious of the limitations of reader experience alone as a metric of quality and efficacy of a text, and (3) a working conceptualization I have about fanfiction as a form of prayer— that is, a thing that declares a relationship to a maker, declares the possibility of change (a kind of dissatisfaction with god), and imagines other ways of being (a kind of worldmaking).

• In talking about fanfiction this way, I wanted to draw out qualities in romance— its archival nature, the way that the genre’s more commercial origins shape the nature of ‘authority’ in the author-reader relationship, the way that repetition proves generative in both spaces.

• Other Reads I Would Have Assigned If I Had The Time: The Hating Game by Sally Thorne, Beautiful Bastard by Christina Lauren

Week 3: Contemporary Romance

• Primary Reading: 7 Days in June by Tia Williams

• Supplemental reading:

  • Waldman, K. (2019, October 31). Carmen Maria Machado’s Many Haunted Stories of a Toxic Relationship. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/carmen-maria-machados-many-haunted-stories-of-a-toxic-relationship

  • Iaccarino, M. (2025). The Otherwise of History. Saidiya Hartman’s New Radical Aesthetic of Historical Representation. De Genere - Rivista Di Studi Letterari, Postcoloniali e Di Genere, (11), 247–257. https://degenere-journal.it/index.php/degenere/article/view/249

  • First few pages (through prologue) of In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

• Notes: The supplemental readings this week attend more closely to the world of 7 Days in June to present an interpretation of the novel as a kind of critical fabulation, a concept Saidiya Hartman used to talk about historical life. I was interested in blurring the porous boundaries between “reality” and “fiction,” especially in the context of articulating “memory,” and set up Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House as a text to supplement that point of view.

• I find contemporary romance difficult to pin down, so this week I tried to express something more specific about the novel, rather than general about the subgenre, as I did the previous week. Fortunately, 7 Days in June is an enormously generative text.

• Other Texts I Would Have Assigned If I Had The Time: Kiss an Angel by Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Reel by Kennedy Ryan, Act Your Age, Eve Brown by Talia Hibbert, You Deserve Each Other by Sarah Hogle

Monday, Feb 9: Paranormal, Monster, Sci-Fi Romance

• Primary Reading: Slave to Sensation by Nalini Singh

• Supplemental reading:

  • McCormack, D. (2022). The Monstrous and Critical Posthumanism. In Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism (pp. 249–274). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04958-3_18

• Notes: Used the supplemental reading to frame the lecture, which was about Paranormal Romance and monstrousness as an uncertain, ambiguous, unknown quantity that can be politically and narratively fruitful. The conversation this week was more far-ranging— Slave to Sensation was a divisive text for folks, and we ended up talking a lot about the in-world gender politics and consent politics and reader reactions to those realities.

• Other Texts I Would Have Assigned If I Had The Time: I have a whole post on Monster Romance on my insta!

Other Readings That Came Up:

• Toscano, A. R. (2012). A Parody of Love: The Narrative Uses of Rape in Popular Romance. Journal of Popular Romance Studies. https://www.jprstudies.org/2012/04/a-parody-of-love-the-narrative-uses-of-rape-in-popular-romance-by-angela-toscano/

• Glissant, E. (1997). Poetics of Relation (B. Wing, Trans.). University of Michigan Press. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.10257

  • Specifically the chapter For Opacity