Reader relations and cultural diversity: An academic and creative exploration of diversity in the contemporary romance fiction industry

由于缺乏文化多样性的作家和人物，出版社面临着媒体和读者越来越多的批评（Beckett, 2019）。然而，只有在不同作者接受的投稿迅速增加的情况下，这一问题才能得到补救（Cole, 2016）。这个跨学科的博士，在英国文学系，与电影和创意写作系共同监督下，将研究这一点，并探索读者和作家对英国浪漫小说行业多样性的看法。我将对读者研究进行分析，并选出一部浪漫小说的章节，这些章节直接询问了实证数据所强调的问题，这些章节是根据与读者小组的合作研讨会而写的。尽管珍妮丝·拉德维的《浪漫阅读》（1982）对浪漫小说产生了影响，但浪漫小说的学术研究是一个相对较新的领域。其中，帕梅拉·里吉斯的《浪漫小说自然史》（2003）影响了人们对浪漫小说类型隐喻的理解。本文将结合这些方法，与当前关于浪漫主义流派中不同表现形式的辩论进行对话，正如一系列当代作家所强调的那样，包括阿丽莎·科尔和阿丽莎·拉伊（见浪漫与抵抗，科尔和拉伊，2017）。本博士课程将在英国背景下对Radway的读者研究进行当代修订。托拜提认为，读者作为这一类型的共同制作人的角色仍未得到认可。因此，我的论文在展示一部浪漫小说的案例研究方面具有重要意义，这部小说是根据读者小组的反馈而写的，并与读者小组的反馈共同制作的。

Publishing houses face increasing criticism from the media and their readers for their lack of culturally diverse writers and characters (Beckett, 2019). However, this can only be remedied if accepted submissions by diverse authors rapidly increase (Cole, 2016). This interdisciplinary PhD, based in the Department of English Literature with co-supervision by the Department of Film and Creative Writing, will investigate this and explore the reader and writer's perspectives of diversity within the UK's romance fiction industry. I will conduct an analysis of reader research and present select chapters of a romance novel that directly interrogate issues highlighted by the empirical data and which are written in response to collaborative workshops with a reader panel.Despite the influence of Janice Radway's Reading the Romance (1982), academic scholarship on romantic fiction is a relatively recent field. Within this, Pamela Regis' A Natural History of the Romance Novel (2003), influenced an understanding of romantic fiction genre tropes. This thesis will combine these approaches, in dialogue with the current debate over diverse representation in the romance genre, as highlighted by a range of contemporary writers, including Alyssa Cole and Alisha Rai (see Romance and the Resistance, Cole and Rai, 2017). This PhD will provide a contemporary revision of Radway's reader study, within a British context. Thobaiti argues that the reader's role as co-producer of the genre remains unrecognised. My thesis is thus significant in presenting a case study of a romance novel that is written in response to and in co-production with the feedback of a reader panel.