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Literary and Linguistic Computing 1999 14(1):89-101; doi:10.1093/llc/14.1.89
© 1999 by Association for Literary & Linguistic Computing
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The magic carpet ride: reader involvement in romantic fiction

LL OpasZ and F Tweedie

University of Glasgow, UK Z Corresponding author at: Department of Foreign Languages, University of Joensuu, 80101 Joensuu, Finland. E-mail: opas@cc.joensuu.fi

Boy meets girl, they fall in love, they live happily ever after. This is one of the most successful plots in history. Mythological epics, Greek plays, and medieval texts all have love stories in them, and romantic fiction traces its origins back to the beginning of the novel as a literary form. It has developed much since Samuel Richardson's Pamela, the first romance novel, and has now turned into an international multi-million dollar business. Readers of romantic fiction are swept away on a magic carpet into another world and an intense emotional experience. This paper examines some of the linguistic devices that help pull the female reader into that world, to involve her in the lives and loves of the heroines with whom she identifies.


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