he research presented in this chapter examines the ways in which readerresponses are constructed in dialogue with cultural discourses. These pro-vide the context when students read romance novels. Readers enter theprocess with many negative evaluations of romance novels which conflictwith other prevalent discourses valuing romance for women. While muchprevious research emphasized the impact of textual structures and contentin the reader/text interaction, the study presented here shows how theknowledge of the reader plays a crucial role in constructing meaning.My initial work examined the evolution of responses of a reader overthe course of several readings of a single text. My research goal was to chartthe interaction between reader and text in the developing response to aliterary text. I was interested in the ways in which the reader’s own intel-lectual and personal history served as a lens through which she organized
textual elements. How did she both interpret the text in the manner of herintellectual community and respond out of the wellspring of her own accu-mulated life history? The theoretical underpinning of this work is derivedfrom the evolving systems approach developed by Gruber (1989) and es-pecially from three of his ideas. These are: the importance of viewing ideasin context; understanding the evolution of ideas and perspectives; andlooking at how elements in any situation interact. My concern in the workpresented here is with the ways context affects understanding

 THE STUDYIn this study, I develop ideas regarding context, focusing on the in-fluence of general cultural imperatives on the reader/text interaction. I amconcerned with the ways in which cultural constraints condition a reader’sexperience. This has necessitated a shift from a focus on the responses ofindividual readers to examination of larger numbers of readers. For severalyears, I have been interested in the cultural constraints surrounding the re-ception of romance novels. In order to understand the ways in which thereader and text interact, one also has to develop an understanding of whothat reader is as a result of the cultural and intellectual communities withwhich she has participated. In this research my goal is to define some of thecontextual constraints that govern the interaction with the text. Romancenovels are ideal material for this endeavor because they present an inter-section of several conflicting cultural discourses. They are highly popularand widely read at the same time that they are disparaged and shunned.I will describe the ways in which romance novels are embedded ina variety of prevalent social discourses and how these affect the recep-tion processes of readers. Because ideas regarding the status and merit ofromance novels are so widespread, they enter the consciousness even ofnon-readers. An analysis of these cultural discourses permits an investiga-tion into the ways readers construct meaning in accord with these existingideas. The cultural discourse provides perspectives on the novels them-selves, implications about the types of people who read them, ideas aboutthe status of romance in the lives of women.I use the term discourse here to represent a set of widely-held ideasthat have arisen through social constructions that function in the publicrealm. These ideas are sufficiently powerful to shape thought processes.The discourses situate the reader in relation to a text. They frame howreaders view romance novels, how they view the readers of these books,and how they believe they will be defined by others who know they arereaders. As readers proceed through the process, from anticipating and
VALUES AND THE ROMANCE NOVEL47purchasing, reading and responding, and reflecting and evaluating uponboth their experience and what these books mean in their culture, theyare measuring their ideas and reactions against the major discourses thatframe the experience. It is clear that readers are also weighing their indi-vidual impressions against these broad-based cultural assumptions. Thus,readers’ experiences are shaped by the cultural discourse as well as byidiosyncratic experiences.INTRODUCTIONHistorically, scholars were interested in how texts influence readers.The meaning was seen as residing in the text and it was the task of thereader to find it. More recently, researchers have attempted to bring thetext and reader together by matching reader response to textual features.This moves beyond simply looking at the text but ignores many aspects ofprior reader experience. In this study, the goal is to investigate how culturaldiscourses in which the reader is immersed, condition her construction ofthe text. Each reader approaches a text through the filter of both socialand intellectual knowledge, deriving from her cultural world and fromher own past. The challenge for researchers is to become aware of the par-ticular levels of experience that an individual reader is applying when sheresponds to a text and then to discern how these organize her experience.This task is complicated by several factors. Cultural discourses by theirvery nature are not readily transparent. Because they represent the pri-mary concerns within the culture, we accept many of the ideas as givens,as obvious, and are not conscious of them. We are often not aware of ourassumptions and therefore do not question them until someone from a dif-ferent perspective identifies them. For example, many of the readers in mystudy had numerous ideas about the content of romance novels withoutever having read one. They often had no sense of how they had developedthese ideas, stating that they had never consciously thought about them.Yet, they had absorbed them from prevailing opinions. It was only whenthey were confronted with reading a romance novel that they were calledupon to articulate these assumptions.Defining social discourses and how people participate in them is chal-lenging. Any individual is part of many overlapping and competing dis-courses. For example, many messages in the culture may emphasize thevalue of romance for women. At the same time, however, women arediscouraged from reading romance novels. Any reader may feel pulledin varied directions without clearly being able to define the influencesat work. External opinions may act in contradictory ways—for example