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Stereotypes A
- "most generalizations made about romance, both good and bad, draw conclusions based on a too-small sample size. Not all romances feature abysmal writing, or rely upon plot contrivance—but then, not all romances portray empowered women or equality between the sexes, either."
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Guilty Pleasure B
- "These novels force us, whether we know it or not, to take joy seriously. Literary fiction often asks us to consider the pain and angst and ennui of human existence. Romance asks us to consider the pleasures."
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Feminism and Empowerment C
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Anti-Romance Bias D
- "The critical space between what one reads and likes and what one actually does is something that critics of the genre must remember, especially because their own policing of women's desires is the product of the patriarchal system they are trying to criticize."
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Male Readers E
- While guys reading "girls books" confounds our gender expectations and may lead to an extra element of surprise and snark, it seems that attitude often just comes with the genre -- no matter who is reading it.
- It's worth noting that most romance novels are written in the third person, giving the reader to get into the head of both the heroine and the hero. It all begs the question: if women's fantasy includes men who feel deeply and communicate about it, how and why are real life men conditioned otherwise?
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Conventional Literature and Women F
- Romance novels are attractive not just because they are a gratifying escape but also because they sometimes feel like a respite from from the significant hostility that a lot of literature shows women.
- Romance novels are a tonic, a form of reassurance that someone is interested in ordinary women’s inner lives and is rooting for us to resolve our conflicts about work, love and what we deserve from our relationships.
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Woman-Focused G
- Romance novels are feminist documents. They’re written almost exclusively by women, for women, and are concerned with women: their relations in family, love and marriage, their place in society and the world, and their dreams for the future.
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Appeal of Romance Narrative H
- romance novels are so popular partly because they do deep and complicated work for the (mostly) women who read them—work that derives from the mythic or religious nature of the romance narrative that serves to engage readers in a “reparation fantasy” of healing in regards to male-female relations. Romance novels help women readers... deal with their essentially paradoxical relationship toward men within a culture still marked by patriarchy and its component threat of violence toward women
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Contemporary Vampire Romance I
- vampire stories reflect contemporary women’s lowered sense of danger concerning sexuality as such, yet heightened sense of danger in terms of the boundaries of self. Targeted at young adult audiences, Twilight thus ends as a fairytale in which the man makes every effort to talk the woman into sex and marriage by convincing her that the horror stories girls hear about men are not always true.
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Reader as Heroine J
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makes a woman’s secret life public, valid, as more and less real as everything else. Recognizing the problems and the conventions of a woman-centered novel, the reader feels part of a community and a tradition of women who talk well about their lives and link them, by language, to larger subjects.
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“the conventions of a woman-centered novel” (24) and connect their reading experience to their experience as wives, mothers, and friends
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