In Chapter 17, Kristin Ramsdell discusses the scholarship on the role played by libraries in disseminating the genre, with the three main foci being public libraries, university libraries, and K-12 libraries, mainly in the United States and Australia. She touches on the varied methodologies and objects of analysis (including readership) in these studies and summarizes their findings on the structural and ideological factors that affect romance collections development, particularly in academic libraries, as well as the potential impact of these factors on the study and long-term preservation of romance novels. The chapter also mentions some studies that reference libraries with relation to Gothic and romance-adjacent works in previous centuries. It ends with a list of several lines of inquiry that remain to be pursued and would broaden this sub-field of romance research. (16-17)
From the introduction to the volume:
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