现代女性快言情小说背后的秘密_大学英语阅读

现代女性快言情小说背后的秘密

Then I realized that I have known many women who devour these romance novels—smart, attractive, successful, “liberated,” modern females who nonetheless find some kind of deep satisfaction and vicarious thrill from delving into hyper-romantic, contrived and extremely unrealistic tales of handsome, manly heroes falling in love with virginal women, enduring a series of adventures, then inexorably ending in a happy resolution.9

These “romance” stories are to literature what hot dogs are to cuisine—quickly made, tasty, filling, temporarily satisfying, but with no nutritional value whatsoever.10 Yet, the genre remains enormously popular.

Consider some of these sobering statistics from the good folks at the Romance Writers of America (RWA):11

*More than 9,000 romance titles were released in 2012, yielding sales of about $1.44 billion (more than triple the revenues generated by classic literary fiction), making it the biggest portion of the U.S. consumer market at 16.7 percent.12

*Some 75 million people in the country read at least one romance novel in 2008, but most are long-time dedicated consumers of the genre.

*More than 90 percent of the market are women (okay, that’s not at all surprising).

*Readers are typically women between the ages 30 and 54 who are themselves involved in a romantic relationship (betraying the stereotype that only lonely women long for these tales of love and adventure).13