This essay is a study of one emotion, romantic love, in a single literary genre, the romance novel. More specifically, it is a study of changes in late-twentieth-century cultural understandings of romantic love as inscribed in the fictional romance. Transformations in representations of romantic heroes in popular romantic fiction over the course of the late twentieth century, arguably in response to the demands of a largely female readership, provide important clues to shifts in how women relate — or fail to relate — to potential and real romantic partners in their everyday lives, and why. The changing grammar, as it were, of a man’s love for a woman discernible in the series of texts analyzed below allows glimpses into the figured worlds of Japanese romantic love. (359)
This essay is a study of one emotion, romantic love, in a single literary genre, the romance novel. More specifically, it is a study of changes in late-twentieth-century cultural understandings of romantic love as inscribed in the fictional romance. Transformations in representations of romantic heroes in popular romantic fiction over the course of the late twentieth century, arguably in response to the demands of a largely female readership, provide important clues to shifts in how women relate — or fail to relate — to potential and real romantic partners in their everyday lives, and why. The changing grammar, as it were, of a man’s love for a woman discernible in the series of texts analyzed below allows glimpses into the figured worlds of Japanese romantic love. (359)