Romance Fandom in 21st-Century Pakistan

Romance Fandom in 21st-century Pakistan offers the first major study of English-speaking romance fandom in South Asia, providing a new reader-centric model that engages with romance readers as genre experts.

Javaria Farooqui inspects the popular Anglophone romance reading community in Pakistan and develops a model for analysing genre romance novels through the lens of the readers’ perspective and preferences. Using focus-group interviews and close textual analysis, Romance Fandom in 21st-century Pakistan explores where and how readers access books of their choice, and explains why the detailed descriptions of dresses, food and spaces in historical romance novels of the Regency era exemplify good taste for this distinctive readership. Sitting at the intersection of literary studies, genre studies, and fan studies, this book considers the reception of Anglophone romance fiction by reading communities of colour.

Javaria Farooqui's Romance Fandom in 21st-Century Pakistan is certain to become a vital text for scholars of both romance and readers in years to come. Drawing together fan studies and popular romance, it is a lively, rigorous and compelling discussion of the practices of Pakistani readers of Regency romance, examining the complex ways people approach and negotiate these texts. Its core strength is in the way it seeks to take these readers seriously, allowing them to be the experts on their own experiences and situating that in broader critical contexts. Jodi McAlister, Senior Lecturer in Writing, Literature and Culture, Deakin University, Australia
How and why do Pakistani women read English-language historical romance novels? In this concise and carefully researched book, Javaria Farooqui invites us to pull up a chair and share in the complex pleasures readers find in the pages of Regency historical romances. Extensive fieldwork draws a picture of a unique fan community, who draw fascinating parallels between their reading of historical romantic fiction set in Regency England and contemporary Pakistani society. The book is an important contribution to a new wave of romance scholarship that moves beyond the text to think deeply about readers, their tastes, and contexts. Amy Burge, Associate Professor of Popular Fiction, University of Birmingham, UK
Using a mixed methodology that reveals patterns of reader preferences, Farooqui provides an illuminating snapshot of the attitudes and practices of an elite group of urban Pakistani Anglophone fans of English-language historical romance novels. She then grounds those preferences in theories of spatiality, material culture, and post-colonial sensibility to develop an innovative model for close-reading romance fiction. Lively in tone and written from a comparative perspective, the study also offers insightful glimpses of the transnational circulation of Western mass-market romance fiction and of ideas of literary taste rooted in contemporary Pakistani society. Jayashree Kamblé, Professor of English, LaGuardia Community College, USA

Javaria Farooqui is Assistant Professor of English and Literary Studies at COMSATS University Islamabad, Lahore Campus, Pakistan. Dr. Farooqui’s research interests fall across multiple disciplines and topic areas in the humanities and social sciences, including fan studies, book history, women’s writing and histories, digital humanities, language acquisition, popular romance studies, and reader response studies. She is engaged in research projects that explore the reception and materiality of texts, the ramifications of colonization and its aftermath on a nation’s literary culture, gender-based violence, and the problematic reception of Anglophone movies in Pakistan.

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