Reader relations and cultural diversity: An academic and creative exploration of diversity in the contemporary romance fiction industry

Publishing houses face increasing criticism from the media and their readers for their lack of culturally diverse writers and characters (Beckett, 2019). However, this can only be remedied if accepted submissions by diverse authors rapidly increase (Cole, 2016). This interdisciplinary PhD, based in the Department of English Literature with co-supervision by the Department of Film and Creative Writing, will investigate this and explore the reader and writer's perspectives of diversity within the UK's romance fiction industry. I will conduct an analysis of reader research and present select chapters of a romance novel that directly interrogate issues highlighted by the empirical data and which are written in response to collaborative workshops with a reader panel.

Despite the influence of Janice Radway's Reading the Romance (1982), academic scholarship on romantic fiction is a relatively recent field. Within this, Pamela Regis' A Natural History of the Romance Novel (2003), influenced an understanding of romantic fiction genre tropes. This thesis will combine these approaches, in dialogue with the current debate over diverse representation in the romance genre, as highlighted by a range of contemporary writers, including Alyssa Cole and Alisha Rai (see Romance and the Resistance, Cole and Rai, 2017). This PhD will provide a contemporary revision of Radway's reader study, within a British context. Thobaiti argues that the reader's role as co-producer of the genre remains unrecognised. My thesis is thus significant in presenting a case study of a romance novel that is written in response to and in co-production with the feedback of a reader panel.