About
I’m Julia, and Romance & Co. is where I explore the social history of romance novels: not just what happens on the page, but the forces that shape the industry, the literary roots of our favorite tropes, the books that shaped the books we love, and what they reveal about the world that produced them.
This project treats romance as both a historical artifact and a cultural barometer: part fantasy, part social script, part marketing phenomenon, and part collective wish fulfillment. If you have ever wondered why certain tropes appear when they do, or what a bestselling love story can tell us about its moment in history, you are in the right place.
My research and writing are organized into four ongoing areas:
Roots of Romance: where tropes and archetypes come from, including folklore, mythology, Gothic fiction, and supernatural tradition
Roads to Romance: the texts, legal cases, scandals, diaries, erotica, and narrative experiments that paved the way for the modern genre, from Fanny Hill to sensational trials, sentimental fiction, clandestine pamphlets, and early popular print
Romance in Context: the real social rules surrounding love and marriage, including dowries, class, property, reputation, and courtship norms
Romance and the Marketplace: how romance became an industry, including marketing, readership, adaptation, and global business models
No genre exists in a vacuum, and romance is far more revealing than it ever gets credit for. Here, we take it seriously without taking the fun out of it.