Perceptions of Romance Readers : An Analysis of Missouri Librarians

Abstract

The romance novel is a form of literature geared toward women, which presents a love story with a central female character and a focus on that character's emotional state. Feminist scholarship and library-related literature from the 1980s and 1990s suggests a bias against romance novels on the part of librarians. Some of the reasons for this opinion include the marketing of romance novels as commodities rather than literature, the presence of sexuality in those novels, and the suggestion that romance novels undercut the goals of feminism by maintaining that the key to women's happiness lies in male domination.PresentationIncludes bibliographical references