Een stille liefde. Over de lezeressen van romantische lectuur

Publication year
1995
Journal
Mens en maatschappij
Volume
70.2
Pages
120-137
Comment

I haven't been able to check this since I can't read Dutch but according to Franciska Billekens (2021), "this study is the only one conducted in the Netherlands that investigates the reader type for category romances" (18). Certainly the bibliography indicates that it engages with quite a few items of romance scholarship. Here's the summary in English:

Summary

A secret passion
About the readers of romantic fiction

Using a national representative data set on book readers in the Netherlands, this article examines the causes and correlates of romantic fiction reading. Despite overall declines in reading during the last decades, romantic fiction has remained quite popular among Dutch women. Romantic fiction reading is particularly common among lower educated women, confirming the 'popular culture' nature of this activity. We examine why women are attracted to romantic fiction and analyze to what extent this genre is embedded in the social networks of its readers. Multivariate analyses indicate that four factors play a key role in explaining who reads romantic fiction. First, women with traditional family values read romantic fiction more often than others. Second, women who emphasize the importance of reading and literature in society are less likely to read romantic novels. Third, taste for romantic fiction is transmitted from mothers to daughters. And fourth, cultural literacy has a negative effect on romantic fiction reading. Together, these four factors explain about 60% of the correlation between education and romantic fiction reading. Finally, we show that in comparison to literature reading, the reading of romantic fiction hardly functions as part of a lower class lifestyle. Whereas literature is heavily embedded in the social circles of higher status groups, romantic fiction readers keep their interests to themselves.