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The study investigates how unplanned pregnancy is presented and discussed in seven contemporary romance novels. Three main themes were identified: contraception, abortion, and the function of a pregnancy narrative. Within these subjects, we listed several examples with the support of interdisciplinary theories from gender studies, film theory, literary studies, medicine, sociology, and psychology. The topic is an outlier in the genre, but it still addresses many issues important to young women reading contemporary romance, e.g., the consequences of casual sex, contraception, abortion, responsibility, and motherhood. Now more than ever, the representation of young women experiencing unplanned pregnancies is a highly relevant theme of romance fiction. We observed that romance fiction responds to female fears and desires surrounding pregnancy and motherhood. Pregnancy in these stories is not simply a marketing trope for readers, but a vital part of the narrative, which induces the issues and complications that are presented in this study and relays particular aspects of women’s lives.

This article is a study of contemporary audio fiction for children in Sweden, what is sometimes also called audio originals or born-audio books. Audio fiction is defined in the article as literature written to be recorded for audio and consumed through listening. It is a genre related to, and overlapping with, audiobooks, radio, and podcasts but obviously also with literature in printed books. While audio fiction has risen in production and popularity it is not a new phenomenon as such, but rather a kind of literature that has developed over time. The article gives historical examples of children’s audio fiction and situates the contemporary production in a larger context of a changing media world and the book market for children’s literature. The main examples used to understand the phenomenon are IJustWantToBeCool’s Sommarjobbarna (The Summer Workers, 2020­–2022) and Camilla Brinck’s series on the mice Musse & Helium (2017–). These are the most popular audiobooks for children in the last years and both series as well as authors are linked to other media such as Youtube, podcast, print, and music. The theoretical conjectures derive from book history and sociology of literature, arguing that changing media for literature has direct implications for literary form, function, and dissemination. Methodologically the article is a genre study using Alastair Fowler’s concept of genre as aggregated features. Thus, a comparison is made between the two examples and other formats such as children’s print books, audiobooks, and radio drama as well as literary genres such as adventure fiction, melodrama, and slapstick. Furthermore, narrative aspects of the two audio literature examples are analyzed in terms of metafiction, voice, and sound effects.

Streaming services are creating significant shifts in Scandinavia, with audiobooksdistributed through subscription-based services accounting for about a quarter ofsales in the Swedish and Norwegian book markets. In this study we ask: What arethe common and diverging themes of trade talk on audiobooks and streaming ser-vices in Sweden and Norway? Our findings indicate that trade talk in the two coun-tries differs distinctively. The differences suggest that discussions over audiobooksand streaming form two quite distinct discourses: A business and innovation dis-course which is dominant in Sweden and a cultural policy discourse which is domi-nant in Norway.