In August 2024, the Degrees of Love research collective at Flinders University hosted a one-day academic symposium attached to the Romance Writers Australia (RWA) conference in Tarntanya/Adelaide. Supported by Assemblage Centre for Creative Arts and held at the Stamford Grand at Glenelg, the symposium gathered experts in popular romance scholarship to think through RWA’s conference theme of romance tropes.
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We asked scholars to consider RWA’s “Trope Actually” theme in the context of romance fiction’s fascination with tropes and the ways tropes might unlock lines of enquiry. Papers covered reparation fantasies, diasporic romance, Indigenous representation, masculinities, queer romance and “bad” romance, featuring abuse. This special issue of TEXT extends the conversations held in that room. When taken together, every article considers the under-explored value of examining tropes in romance fiction and the socio-cultural insights this can offer. Tropes are a commonly understood staple of romance fiction, discussed openly on BookTok and Bookstagram (book lovers’ names for book-focused TikTok and Instagram reels and posts) and used to market books by publishers and authors. Tropes in romance can be character-based (cinnamon roll heroes, cowboys, billionaires, grumpy/sunshine, bad boy) or story-based (second chance, enemies-to-lovers, one bed, forced proximity) or they can involve the setting (small town, college, office), season (Christmas, vacation), sub-genre (romantasy, cosy mystery, sports) or time period (Regency, Old West). Naming and categorising tropes has become a way for readers to find exactly what they’re looking for in a romance novel every single time. In the past, this attention to the hyper-specificity of narrative structures has been a feature of academic scholarship, but now everyday romance readers are driving the mainstreaming of trope identification.
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