USA Today bestselling romance novelist and literature professor Alexandra Vasti is seeking abstract submissions for an edited collection of essays on New York Times bestselling romance novelist Laura Kinsale.

 

Over her thirty-year career as a RITA-award-winning writer of historical romance, Laura Kinsale produced twelve expansive and genre-defining novels. From the Medieval Hearts series with its extraordinary Middle English dialogue to the textual representation of receptive and expressive aphasia in Flowers from the Storm, Kinsale’s novels pushed at the edges of the romance genre both thematically and formally, challenging and upending its most familiar tropes for her devoted audience of millions of readers.

 

In this collection of essays, bestselling romance authors including Olivia Waite, Alexandra Vasti, and Freya Marske will reflect on Kinsale’s impact on the genre as a whole, as well as their own personal relationships with Kinsale’s work. From essays on metaphor, symbolism, and sentence construction to larger considerations of Kinsale’s immense global and chronological range, these authors will explore Kinsale’s work and contextualize her novels within the scope of romance currently being written and published.

 

In addition, scholars of romance are invited to consider Kinsale’s work from a critical lens. Her novels frequently include Orientalist stereotypes and villainous representations of queer men, even as she repeatedly challenges, undermines, and flips those tropes. Her complex portrayals of trauma and disability precede and precipitate conversations about those topics in the genre. And her own critical engagement with gender in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992) is frequently reiterated and challenged by authors and readers today.

 

These collected essays will invite renewed consideration of one of the defining authors of the genre, aimed at new and long-time romance readers, creative writing students, and teachers and scholars of romance. We anticipate that the collection will appeal to both academic and popular audiences.

 

Interested essayists are invited to contribute essays on single or multiple books within Kinsale’s oeuvre. Topics might include:

 

• Kinsale’s work in the context of 21st-century romance novels

• War and trauma

• Orientalism

• Gender and gender performance

• Sexuality, particularly representations of queer characters

• Sex, kink, and power

• Disability

• Language use, especially her use of vernaculars, accents, and Middle English

• Genre

 

At this stage, interested scholars are invited to submit a title, abstract, and brief bio for consideration. Once the book proposal is accepted, final dates for the essay submission (4000-8000 words) will be set. 

 

Please send materials to Alexandra Vasti at alex@alexandravasti.com by May 31, 2025.