Not, apparently, in university English departments. At least they don’t seem to have any for popular romance novels. But perhaps that’s about to change. The Smithsonian reports on
a new breed of literary scholars who are throwing open the velvet curtains behind which romance fiction has long been cloaked (or these days, behind the leather pages of Kindle cases), turning their highbrow spotlight on one of the most popular and underrated lowbrow pastimes (a genre so beloved that it is often pegged for floating the publishing industry —more than half of the mass market paperbacks sold in the US are popular romance novels
That romance novels are worthy subjects of study seems undeniable: they are a conspicuous and long-lived cultural phenomenon. But should they be studied as literature? Or history? Social science? Anthropology? Cultural studies?