Popular Romance Project

Popular romance sells. And it reveals deep truths about people and cultures, fantasies and fears. The statistics are staggering: According to the Romance Writers of America, romance fiction generated $1.37 billion in sales in 2008, and romance was the top-performing category on the New York Times, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly best-seller lists. . . .

The Popular Romance Project will explore the fascinating, often contradictory origins and influences of popular romance as told in novels, films, comics, advice books, songs, and internet fan fiction, taking a global perspective—while looking back across time as far as the ancient Greeks.
Passion and Diversity
Just as Laurie Kahn’s earlier films, A Midwife’s Tale and Tupperware!, revealed the lives of unsung women and their work, allowing us to see the past in new, more complete and complex ways, the Popular Romance Project will carry us into the present, revealing a misunderstood but flourishing worldwide community of romance novel readers, authors, editors, bloggers and fans. With its website, library programs, and symposium, the Popular Romance Project will invite us to think deeply about the canonical romance and courtship stories that are repeated and reworked in each era. . .
Global Community
The romance community has been on the forefront of the digital revolution. They were early pioneers in the creation of e-books, social networking tools, and fan fiction sites. Authors and readers communicate directly with one another, bypassing the publishers who used to act as go-betweens. Writers invite their readers to write alternate ending of chapters they’ve written, readers suggest main characters for future books, and authors offer prizes and special incentives. Authors even host cruises to European castles and California pajama parties for their fans . . .
Telling the Story
Popular romance fiction is a remarkable, worldwide phenomenon that’s wired. The Popular Romance Project’s Executive Director, Laurie Kahn, finds it deliciously ironic that tech savvy readers and writers are pushing the boundaries of digital publishing and social networking, all in the service of reshaping archetypal stories that can be traced back hundreds, even thousands of years…
The Popular Romance Project is poised to bring together disparate groups of scholars, writers, readers, editors, romance fans, and the general public, to launch an entertaining, substantive, lively discussion about how popular romance is created, who consumes it, and how it helps shape private lives and public cultures.
From: About Popular Romance Project.org
Recommended in March 2014 issue of ALA's Choice.