The Birth And Development Of European Popular Romance Novels In The Light Of Pamela

Using the 18th-century English novel Pamela as the jumping-off place,this essay examines the cultural context in which the romantic novel was born and the social psychology behind its long-standing popularity,the route it took in later generations,and the reasons for its lack of category in ancient Chinese literature.Romantic fiction can be seen as essentially a masochist’s daydream,a distillation of the unspeakable longings of women and the pain that feeds those longings.Because this longing and pain has never really dissipated,there is still a market for romance novels that satisfy women’s need to be loved.This essay takes the first mature romantic novel,Pamela,as a base for analysing the manifestations of these needs and the reasons behind them,and draws on Austen’s novels,the later flourishing romantic novels and the novels of talented men and women in traditional Chinese literature to explain the social significance of the emergence of the romantic novel.Behind its emergence was the rise of the monogamous nuclear family and the rise of emotional individualism,the unexpressed love and lust of the woman portrayed as an object.The romance represented by Pamela nourished subsequent generations of women writers,providing a narrative from the female perspective that may have both inspired women writers to produce serious literature and fostered a popular female creative and reading community,thus incubating a new industry that could give women a voice and awaken a sense of female subjectivity through illusion.The comparison shows that China did not spontaneously nurture this literary genre because of the lag in modernisation,and further proves that the romantic novel,a female consumer product,was one of the products of social modernisation.The essay is divided into three chapters,the first of which,‘Combination of Male Rules and Female Fantasy’,focuses on the authorial motives and the context in which Pamela was born.Richardson’s revolutionary adoption of the female perspective in narrative literature suggests the advantages of the female perspective in self-exploration,while expressing an awareness of the plight of women beyond the limits of his own thinking.The second chapter,‘Reading Daydreams on Demand’,examines the real needs of women beneath the illusion of the romantic novel,examining what stories glorify and even internalise rape and violence,and what plots and details are used to express the appeals to love and desire and the hollowness of the audience’s heart.In the third chapter,‘The Development of Romantic Daydream’,the development of the romantic novel from a classic literary perspective is explored,as well as the subsequent significance of the romantic novel from the perspective of the publishing industry.The ways in which women writers have critically inherited the romance novel are discussed,using Jane Austen as an example.The excellence of romantic fiction in publishing provided women with not only a low-barrier path to the awakening of their sense of subjectivity,but also a possible way to earn an economic income.In short,this essay uses Pamela as an anchor for an attempt at a feminist-oriented study of popular culture,involving socio-economic analysis,socio-cultural research and psychological analysis.