The Production And Characterization Of Romance Genre In The New Century

Since the new century,with the rapid development of network technology and mobile media,driven by the media capital,mainly rely on the network media production,dissemination and consumption of the rapid rise of genre fiction,romance genre as one of the main genres also ushered in the development of its peak.This paper makes a comprehensive and in-depth study of the new century romance genre,and tries to reveal the symptoms and gender appeal expressed by this literary and cultural phenomenon,and figure out the possibility of new literature in this new form of popular literature.The introduction of the paper briefly presents the development of network literature since 1990 s,and how network literature has completed the paradigm shift to genre fiction.Theoretical resource of western genre theory,genre film theory,and capital resources of Shanda Group,together contributed to this transformation of network literature.Over the past five years,the participation of mobile terminals has changed the creative ecology of genre fiction.Genre fiction has completed the transformation from free to paid,from a variety of genres to the main form of fiction.The first chapter studies the romance genre in the context of literary history,briefly tracing the history of the development of romance in China: from Ming and Qing dynasties Caizijiaren stories,late Qing courtesan novel,to the beginning of the last century,"Revolution + Love" and Shanghai Romance,and so on to the eighties,the practice of feminist literature and Qiong Yao as the representative of Hong Kong and Taiwan romance novels,and the nineties’ network literature,have all profoundly affected the creation of new century romance genre.The second chapter diagnoses the text structure features of new century romance genre,which is shaped by the co-influence of capital,media and the existing literature tradition.Obviously,the text of romance genre shows a characteristic of categorization in the vast amounts of work of the new century,this is reflected in space-time form,plot,the setting of character and discourse style etc.There is no doubt that the text structure is,to a large extent,correspond to young readers’ emotional structure,and also represents the changes of relation of the form of power among political,economic and gender.Through close reading and genre analysis,the third chapter intends to reveal how individuals conceive themselves and cognize the reality,which is expressed in the discourse of romance genre.Most of the creators and readers of new century romance genre are women.The fourth chapter focuses mainly on the resistance of sex/gender exposed by genre fiction.Resistances of sex/gender based on love myth are always ambiguous.The dissemblance of love myth can barely hide the respect for and surrender to patriarchy.In other words,romance genre,created by female writers,ambush a large number of male-centered perspective.This phenomenon is related to the existing literature tradition,and also an ingratiation to current social mainstream value.As a kind of literature produced mainly by media capital,new century romance genre is clearly an example of symptomatic reading.But even so,we can not ignore the possible resistance to the existing power structure especially sex/gender power mechanism,in this discourse space.Truly,this resistance seems to be so weak,but it still appears in discourse parody,deconstruction of the classic,and reader’s productive participation in the new media context.The fifth chapter of this article has a more detailed discussion of this issue.