Sprecher
Beschreibung
There has perhaps been no bigger recent innovation in independent bookselling than the proliferation of romance-only bookstores that have sprung up in Anglophone locations, from Los Angeles to Edinburgh. Other bookstores, sometimes begrudgingly, as in the case of New York City’s Strand Book Store, have had to expand and make more prominent romance shelving. The big chains, purveyors of the romance genre long before these books were considered something to be spotlighted for mainstream book buyers, have brought their new and expanded romance offerings to the front of their stores, often creating special displays advertised “as seen on TikTok.”
Are these romance-only bookstores "third spaces," in the words of several of the owners, where women are plotting resistance against patriarchy? Why are readers seeking out this genre with such passion and readiness to spend money? How has romance fandom made the jump from social media to physical spaces, i.e. from Instagram and TikTok to bookstores and libraries? Are we observing a resurgence of codex reading that goes along with visits to romance-only bookstores? Is this trend going strong in parallel to ebook or audio reading because of the unmatched affordances of physical books as photo props for social media? What does it mean for booksellers to respond so strongly to a genre’s online hype? How can intentionally curated displays counteract the pervasive whiteness of the most popular romance novels? Given the emergence of reader-made adjacent subgenres such as Romantasy and Dark Academia, does a bookseller’s nearness to “real” readers mean they are the new experts on the operations of genre? Is romance the escape and site of connection readers need during uncertain political times? What does this feminized genre’s economic and popular mainstream presence mean for feminist reading practices online and offline?
My ethnographic research with bookstore owners and book sellers attempts to answer such questions. After the romantic comedy movie "You’ve Got Mail" influentially enacted the end of the small indie bookstore and given Amazon’s serious ongoing attempts to destroy all brick-and-mortar bookstores, what new chapter in the life of bookselling and literary culture announces itself with the emotional and economic boom of romance-focused bookish spaces for women?