Primary and Secondary sources of the project "Romance for Change: Diversity, Intersectionality and Affective Reparation in Contemporary Romantic Narratives". The data includes the primary texts studied in the project as well as the secondary sources we used as our theoretical framework. The project focused on a corpus of post-millennial romantic novels produced by Anglophone female authors writing from marginalised or minoritised positions. In contrast to hegemonic romantic narratives, mostly featuring western and middle-class white women, these novels portray alternative and diverse romantic experiences of Indigenous or migrant women, of romantic heroines who are marginalised due to their sexuality, ethnicity, religious beliefs or cultural identity. The novels revise the hegemonic romantic discourses which have historically determined which relationships are acceptable, which subjects are represented as desirable, or who is endowed with the agency to love and to be loved. The novels rethink romantic relationships outside an exclusively white western and heteronormative framework, prompting reflections on the affective and intimate rights of these women. The corpus opens up the scope traditionally associated with the romantic novels dominating the contemporary global marketplace, and puts the romantic formula to political uses by connecting personal narratives to complex social realities. The novels were analysed from an intersectional perspective to show how these works expand the affective quest central to conventional romantic narratives to wider social issues, proposing more inclusive and egalitarian relational models and imagining narrative formulae conductive to collective forms of affective reparation and social change.

Project website: https://blocs.uib.cat/romanceforchange/