Reading Online Romance Novels Is Related To Chinese Readers' View of Love

Abstract

Chinese online romance novels are novels aimed at female readers, which describe the love between women and men. Many young Chinese readers understand that novels have many conventions of plot, but they still engage with the perfect love between handsome men and beautiful women. This leads to a question: is reading romance novels related to Chinese people's concept of love? We cannot prove that there is a causal relationship between online romance novels and readers' view of love. Although many previous studies have been conducted on the influence of literary works on readers' values, some people read online romance novels as they agree with the views of love in the novels. In addition, we have not found research on the relationship between online romance novels and people's views of love. Our research hopes to make up for the lack of research on online romance novels as a genre. For our research, we collected 175 questionnaires. Using the method of frequency analysis, we analysed the specific characteristics of the participants in the study. After this, in accordance with the recommendations of reliability analysis and validity analysis, we used chi-square analysis and variance analysis to deal with the categorical and quantitative data, respectively. We found that people who read online romance novels look forward to marriage more than those who dislike the genre. People who often read online romance novels are more likely to value having common preferences with their partner when pursuing a romantic connection. People who read online romance novels are more worried that their partners may abandon them as a result of physical disability than those who have not read online romance novels. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that many women who read romance novels have immature views on love.