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deborahY'all have seen The Popular Romance Project, right?
I'm thrilled that I got the opportunity to participate. My post "Hero or Stalker?" addresses some of the questions I've been having watching students respond to the behavior of male love interest in young adult romance. I've been realizing as I teach how much the reading transaction is influenced by the reader's genre expectations, and how much of those themselves are influenced by genre in a given place and time. My post explores this by looking at Margaret Mahy's The Changeover and Stephenie Meyer's Twilight. If you are interested, come and contribute to the conversation!
Popular romance sells. And it reveals deep truths about people and cultures, fantasies and fears. The statistics are staggering: According to the Romance Writers of America, romance fiction generated $1.37 billion in sales in 2008, and romance was the top-performing category on the New York Times, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly best-seller lists.
The Popular Romance Project will explore the fascinating, often contradictory origins and influences of popular romance as told in novels, films, comics, advice books, songs, and internet fan fiction, taking a global perspective—while looking back across time as far as the ancient Greeks.
I'm thrilled that I got the opportunity to participate. My post "Hero or Stalker?" addresses some of the questions I've been having watching students respond to the behavior of male love interest in young adult romance. I've been realizing as I teach how much the reading transaction is influenced by the reader's genre expectations, and how much of those themselves are influenced by genre in a given place and time. My post explores this by looking at Margaret Mahy's The Changeover and Stephenie Meyer's Twilight. If you are interested, come and contribute to the conversation!
Re: This reflects a serious double-bind in real life too.
Date: 2013-02-19 03:14 pm (UTC)The reason I- and presumably Deborah- find your question invalid is that you're trying to reduce humanity to an artificial binary, rather than a collection of billions of people with vastly different tastes. That there isn't a single solution for all potential romantic partners is not "unfair" to you, or to anyone else; it's merely a function of humanity not being some type of collective hivemind. Romantic fiction is about the intersection of two particular individuals' tastes; you appear to be looking for some type of secret decoder ring that negates the role of the individual, and that isn't just problematic, it's offensive.