While graphic novels seem to have given comic books an acceptable patina in recent years, romance novels and soap operas seem to engender contempt, especially from those who don’t read them or watch them. Is it because their audiences are primarily female?

While graphic novels seem to have given comic books an acceptable patina in recent years, romance novels and soap operas seem to engender contempt, especially from those who don’t read them or watch them. Is it because their audiences are primarily female?

[George Otte]

It may be as much a matter of whom their written by as whom their written for — and the prejudice is long-standing. In the 18th Century, Addison and Steele were fond of deriding “lady novelists” in The Spectator and The Tatler, and George Eliot (who was of course a woman) wrote the infamous “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” in the mid 19th.

See

http://webscript.princeton.edu/~mnoble/eliot-texts/eliot-sillynovels.html

[Monica Berger (She/her/hers)]

This thread is ironic since American pop culture studies took a leap forward with Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance. http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Romance-Patriarchy-Popular-Literature/dp/0807843490. Radway’s student has become a classic of cultural and pop culture studies.

My 2cents: it’s more about social class than about gender. NASCAR anyone?