Love in a Cold Climate? Teaching Popular Romance at a Swedish University

Abstract

This article describes and discusses experiences of teaching popular romance in Sweden, a country where the genre has been more or less invisible until recent years. Starting with an overview of the status and visibility of popular romance in Sweden, our experiences of designing and revising a course on romance is presented. Our projects providing textbooks for students are presented and we share both pitfalls and rewards we have experienced giving this course.

Keywords

• chick lit
• critical analysis
• scandinavian chick lit
• simona ahrnstedt
• swedish romance
• teaching romance