The Quality of Women's Reading of Popular Romance Novels

The present paper is focusing on the quality of reading of popular romance novels by women. The popular romance novels are today the best seller's part of narrative literature in Iran and their authors, readers and motifs are mainly female. The prevailing literature in the sociology of literature has not paid attention to this literary genre and this type has been hallmarked as a narcotizing genre and a rather false knowledge. However, the broadness of this type of novel and their main impacts on female readers make it necessary to study them closely. The studies of this paper which have been conducted based on a research made by Janice Radway in the UK on female readers of romance novels investigates the method of familiarity of women with these types of novels and their quality of reading. Also efforts have been made to study the quality of reading by the type of reader's employment and age. The purchasers of romance novels in Book City were brought in to conduct the research, applying “interview” as the method of data collection.