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ssess what kinds of messages about men’s role in romantic love women — and men,too, of course, but recall that the readership of popular romance fiction is predominantly female — may potentially encounter in a given period of time. A textual analysis of this sort allows us to see what romantic messages are, as it were, available to Japanese women in their everyday lives and provides a vantage point from which to consider the styles of love that they may respond to in those lives.

The Data

I draw my data from a corpus of Japanese romance novels published between 1970 and 2000. My analysis in this essay includes samples from two of the three major subcategories of Japanese romance fiction: 1) hyperserious novels, ending in hiren (blighted love) and 2) novels lighter in overall tone with a happii-endo (happy ending).10 I examine the verbal expressions of romance heroes drawn from the sample texts and the various behaviors attendant upon their being in love. These expressions are analyzed for their fit with a comparison model of true love in American English, with particular attention given to four specific elements: 1) whether true love indeed immediately reaches and exceeds a limit point on a scale of intensity, as in the American English model, or whether it can/should be contained; 2) whether true love guarantees the stability of relationships, again, as in the American English model, or whether circumstantial stability guarantees true love; 3) the physiological reactions that index true love; and 4) the verbal and visual behaviors that mark true love.11 The physiological effects listed in the American English model are increase in body heat, increase in heart rate, and blushing. These are often lexicalized in terms of melting, burning, or exploding. The verbal behaviors include defining one’s attitude toward the object of love in terms of liking, sexual desire, respect, affection, longing, and interest. I will also examine men’s declarations of love in terms of two words for love: koi and ai. I have previously reviewed the different connotations of these two words, which together in their Sino-Japanese pronunciations make up today’s most common appellation for love, ren’ai.

notes

1. See Dorothy Holland, “Figured Worlds,” in Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds, ed.Dorothy Holland et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 49 – 65. And these are literally “figured worlds”; the category romance fiction that I deal with does not,indeed, deal with complex moral agents, women and men as more complexly gendered. But this is one of the properties of category romance fiction. I offer this glimpse into Japanese romantic models in the spirit of offering an analysis of one of the sets of models that circulate widely to those complex moral agents who are real Japanese women (and some men).

Category romances sell, and they are consumed, but it is important to keep in mind that the men I write about are not at all real men. The social and cultural forces that have an impact on these fictional men seem, from my reading at least, to be very much in line with the dominant discourses of the eras covered (the periodization does not, of course, represent absolute cutoff points for one type of romantic hero versus another), so these texts end up being something like implicit conduct books. The essay, then, is in line with cultural studies’interest in such media p本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。