The Visual Cultures of YA Romance: Seeing Desire, Reading Relationships
The Visual Cultures of YA Romance: Seeing Desire, Reading Relationships - The International Journal of Young Adult Literature 8/2027
Guest editors:
Dalila Forni (Università dell’Aquila - IT)
Alessandra Mazzini (Università di Bergamo - IT)
Valentina Baeli (Università di Catania - IT)
Romance is among the oldest strands of young adult publishing, yet its visual dimension has remained comparatively under-examined. Over the past decade this asymmetry has particularly widened: the genre is experiencing a marked commercial upsurge — fuelled by BookTok, illustrated special editions and highly visual reading cultures — that has not been accompanied by a commensurate body of scholarship. This call for papers proposes to investigate the genre at the intersection of textual and visual culture, asking how images mediate and at times rework the main tropes of YA romance. The section’s guiding lens is the idea of a recent "pictorial turn" (Mitchell 1994): the claim that contemporary culture has shifted from a linguistic to a visual paradigm in which images demand to be read as bearers of cultural meaning, not merely as illustration or supplement to the word. This shift is particularly visible in the case of romance, where the visual has become central at every stage of the genre's life: from BookTok aesthetics to cover-forward displays in bookshops and libraries, from illustrated interiors to graphic novels and screen narratives, the visual now operates as a primary arena in which the genre’s market and reception are negotiated. This visual upsurge is also a global phenomenon, and this special section is particularly committed to situating the study of YA romance’s visual cultures within an international, comparative frame engaging with non-Anglophone traditions of production, translation and reception.
Scholarship on YA romance builds on two overlapping strands: popular romance studies (Radway 1991; Roach 2016; Davis 2013) and works that explore how adolescent literature negotiates desire, love and relationships (Trites 2000; Day 2013; Cart 2016; Allen 2021). For instance, Trites (2000) supplies the foundational framework for reading power and repression across adolescent literature, within which romantic plots figure as one specific site of negotiation; Allen (2021) traces the historical codification of YA romance as a genre and publishing category, and Cart (2016) situates its persistence within the wider evolution of YA fiction. Day (2013), in turn, develops the notion of “narrative intimacy” to describe how first-person narration draws adolescent readers into an imagined relationship of disclosure with the narrator — a dynamic increasingly renegotiated by the visual apparatus surrounding the text, from cover design to graphic-novel adaptation (Kachorsky & Reid 2020).
Building on Christian-Smith’s (1990) foundational reading of the teen romance as a site of gendered socialisation, more recent scholarship has broadened the analytical horizon: Pattee (2011) rereads the codification of teen romance series through the lens of book history and reading practice; Younger (2009) foregrounds the negotiation of desire, sexuality and the body in YA fiction; and Coats (2018) situates YA romance within the affective and developmental architectures of adolescent literature.
Read alongside Davis’ (2013) account of romance's global and political intimacies in contemporary literary and visual culture, this body of work has illuminated how young readers identify with and inhabit fictional intimacy, but has rarely asked how that identification is itself shaped visually, or how it travels across linguistic and cultural contexts.
YA romance’s visual dimension operates across at least three distinct registers, which this call seeks to explore in their specificity and interrelation. The first is diegetic: images internal to the narrative itself, co-authoring the story alongside or in place of prose, such as comics, graphic novels, visual adaptations, and in-text illustrations. The second is paratextual: images that frame the text without narrating it, for instance covers, endpapers, special-edition illustrations (Filbrun 2026). The third is platform-native and extra-diegetic: short visual narratives created outside the book and circulating around it, constructing their own autonomous narrative economy, such as BookTok edits, fan-made visual narratives, and mood boards (Jenkins 2006). The longer tradition of image–text scholarship in children’s or YA literature (Nodelman 1988; Wolf 2015) offers analytical tools this special section proposes to extend to a genre whose visual grammar has, until now, escaped sustained critical attention. Addressing this gap is particularly urgent today, as contemporary publishing practices (from flat-design illustrated covers and sprayed edges to algorithmic short-form video cultures) are fundamentally redefining how romance is produced, marketed, and consumed through visual means.
Therefore, this special section puts popular romance and YA studies into sustained dialogue with the fields historically associated with each of these three registers — visual narratives studies; paratextual and book-historical research; platform and fan studies, treating the images not as decorative supplement but as constitutive of how romance narrates desire, identity and relationality.
Thematically, gender studies and queer theorisations of desire (Abate & Kidd, 2011) bring a further, necessary axis to this visual apparatus: for instance, whose bodies are rendered visible as desiring or desirable across these registers, through what visual conventions (pose, framing, palette, proportion), and with what continuities or ruptures in relation to adult romance imagery. The same apparatus also visualises the genre's evolving ethical vocabulary of relationships: topics such as consent and violence are increasingly explored not only through plot but through visual cueing that invites readers to recognise a partner as a "green flag" or a "red flag". In addition, illustrated interiors and cover art have long encoded normative scripts of gender and heterosexual courtship; BookTok's visual grammar, by contrast, has also become a space where queer and non-normative pairings circulate with a visibility historically not afforded them in print illustration or cover design. Reading these registers together allows this special section to ask not only whether anti-canonical desire is made visible, but where — narratively, paratextually, or in participatory circulation — it is allowed to be.
This special section aims to address a series of questions related to visual romance for YA audiences. How do illustrations narrate desire or conflict through specifically visual means? How do graphic novels’ visual codes construct intimacy and love? How are bodies, non-normative relationships, sexuality and gender dynamics visually rendered? What does a cover's visual grammar assume about its target audience? How do fan communities re-shape romantic tropes through visual strategies? In pursuing these and related questions, this special section builds a shared analytical vocabulary for a genre whose visual dimension has so far been read only in fragmentary ways.
The call for abstracts welcomes contributions engaging with romance publishing and reading cultures beyond the Anglophone context, and encourages comparative, international and interdisciplinary approaches through both contemporary and historical perspectives. While centered on young adult literature, this special section also encompasses its increasingly fluid boundaries with new adult and crossover romance publishing, where visual strategies are particularly prominent.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Romance in comics, graphic novels and visual narratives;
- Visual constructions of gender, body, and desire in YA romance imagery;
- Visual strategies across romance subgenres (Romantasy, Dark Romance, Contemporary YA/NA);
- Queer and non-normative visualities in YA romance;
- Historical perspectives on illustrated romance publishing;
- Visual adaptations of YA romance;
- Cover design, paratext, and the visual marketing of YA romance;
- Short-form visual narratives: BookTok edits, mood boards, and fan-based storytelling;
- Visual romance and shared cultural imaginaries: symbolic structures, iconographies, identity formation and literary representations of relationality across YA reading cultures.
Submission Requirements
Submissions must include:
- A 400-word abstract, including an outline of the proposed theoretical framework, the significance of the work, and its alignment with the aims of the special section and the YA focus of the journal;
- A 100-word biographical note of the author(s).
Submissions should be made via email no later than 30 September 2026 to be considered. Please send abstracts and bios to the following email addresses:
If selected, full manuscripts should be 7,000-9,000 words in length and will be due 31 January 2027. Full details of the journal's requirements and submission policy are available at https://www.ijyal.ac.uk/about/submissions/