Dragons, magic, romance, and powerful heroines: Romantasy, a genre that blends fantasy fiction with romance, has become a major phenomenon in contemporary popular culture and literature. Finding its market during the pandemic and its fans on ‘bookish’ social media like Booktok and Booktube, the genre has quickly emerged as one of the most widely read today. Beyond its commercial success, however, the genre also raises intriguing questions for literary and cultural studies. Often dismissed as escapist fiction and associated primarily with female readership – and, consequently, often denigrated as trivial, cotton-candy literature -- Romantasy invites closer examination of how the genre, as well as the discourse surrounding it, negotiates gender, desire, power, and cultural expectations.
At the Centre for Cultural Studies, our pre-doctoral researcher Lisa Schattmann is exploring this rapidly evolving literary field, bringing a critical perspective to a genre whose cultural significance extends well beyond its popular image. Her expertise was recently featured in an interview with Swiss public broadcaster SRF, where she discusses Romantasy, its gendered reception, and the assumptions that continue to shape how popular literary genres are perceived and (de)valued.
Read the full SRF article (in German) here: Drachen, Sex und Feminismus: Romantasy ist kein Fantasy-Kitsch.
