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 generates over $1 billion in sales annually, and romance is often the top-performing category on the New York Times, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly best-seller lists.

The Popular Romance Project explores 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.

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 carries 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 invites us to think deeply about the canonical romance and courtship stories that are repeated and reworked in each era.

**The Popular Romance Project includes four ambitious, high-profile, carefully integrated programs**

Love Between the Covers Trailer

An award-winning, feature-length documentary film that focuses on the remarkable global community that romance readers and writers have built.

To find out more, click here.

Popular Romance Project

An interactive, content-rich website created by the Center for History and New Media, allowing the website’s users to see romance novels in a broad context across time and place.

It includes interview clips with romance readers, writers, & publishers, and blogs about everything from Jane Austen to Korean TV dramas! Check it out!

To see more video clips from the project, click here.

What is Love? Romance Fiction in the Digital Age

An academic conference on the past and future of romance fiction, hosted by the Library of Congress, February 1o-11, 2015, organized by the Popular Romance Project, the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance, and the Library of Congress.

National Public Library Screening tour

A nationwide series of library programs built around screenings of Love Between the Covers, starting in the Fall of 2015, and continuing through 2016.

In the film Love Between the Covers we meet readers who devour as many as seven books in a week, and writers who regularly write two, three, and four books per year. Some of the romances they love to read are set in the past (most of the “historical romances” take place in the early 19th century Regency period, usually featuring dukes and duchesses). But the romance genre encompasses dozens of other types of courtship stories: mystery/suspense romances with daring detectives and crime fighters, contemporary small town romances (with settings ranging from a main street yarn shop to the Nascar racetrack), Christian/inspirational romances with strong religious themes (and very little explicit sex), romances with vampires, shapeshifters, and other paranormal creatures, gay romances with female couples and male couples, sci-fi romances, African American and Hispanic romances, Western romances (with cowboys, of course), and romances written for young adults.

Novice romance writer Joanne Lockyer's DIY cover shoot in Love Between the Covers — Novice romance writer Joanne Lockyer's DIY cover shoot in *Love Between the Covers*

The romance community has been on the forefront of the digital revolution. They were early pioneers -- and they continue to be pioneers -- of social media, e-books, fan fiction sites, and self-publishing. 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.

PARTNERS

Library of Congress Center for the Book | Center for History and New Media (George Mason University) | International Association for the Study of Popular Romance

FUNDERS

Board of Advisors

Darlene Clark Hine
Professor of African American Studies, Professor of History and Director of the Center of African American History, Northwestern University

Tara McPherson
Professor of Gender Studies and Critical Studies, University of Southern California

Jack Santino
Professor of Popular Culture, Bowling Green University

Ronald Walters
Professor of Social and Cultural History, Johns Hopkins University

Sarah Frantz
Former President of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance

Eric Murphy Selinger
Professor of English, DePaulUniversity and Executive Editor, Journal of Popular Romance Studies

Stephanie Coontz
Faculty member, History and Family Studies, The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and Director of Research and Public Education for the Council of Contemporary Famlies

Eli. J Finkel
Professor of Social Psychology at Northwestern University

William Gleason
Professor of English and associate faculty in African American Studies, Princeton University

Pamela Regis
Professor of English, McDaniel College

Daniel Raff
Associate Professor of Management,
University of Pennsylvania