At the University of Pennsylvania’s Price Lab for Digital Humanitites[sic]—where our team studies contemporary tastes and habits of reading—we’ve been using the Goodreads social book-collection site to access data about books and reading from this more open side of the field. Among other things, the reception-side approach lets us classify books the way readers do themselves, rather than simply accepting the genre labels assigned by publishers or librarians. We’ve studied thousands of avid readers and the hundreds of thousands of books in their collections. And what we’ve learned is that romance is not just one literary genre among others.
Instead, romance is the juggernaut of contemporary literature, standing out from all other genres in its sheer scale and in the wild diversity of its subgenres. Scholars and teachers have long dismissed the genre as a narrow, hypernormative form of fiction catering to happiness addicts. But, in the world of the genre’s actual readers, romance is a vital part of the literary system: large, complex, and dynamic.
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What makes romance so unique is that it stands apart as a double-outlier: both much larger and much more modular, much busier internally, than any other major genre of fiction: mystery, fantasy, thriller, historical fiction, young adult, classics. Only the fiction and nonfiction groups, in their entirety, present such a combination of large size and elaborately subdivided internal structure.
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