By Taylor Simmons -

For the Critical Response Research Paper, I have decided to write about romance and romantic relationships in Young Adult Literature. My essential research question is: Does romance in YA literature have a psychological effect on adolescents? As we know, there are tons of YA books related to romance, and the cliché, happy love story that just seems to be “oh so perfect”. Majority of the romantic relationships in YA novels go something like this: 1. they meet, 2. they fall in love, 3. there’s some sort of conflict and they decide they can’t be together, 4. they don’t talk for a while but think about each other alllll the time, 5. they finally get back together and its happily ever after. In my opinion, this type of story plot leads to unrealistic hopes of romance and relationships for YA readers because they expect for their romantic lives to be just like the characters in the books they are reading, and life just does not work out that way at all. My focus questions for this topic are:

1.      Why is romance such a popular topic in YA literature?

2.      What are the implications of how romance and sex is portrayed in YA novels?

3.      Does sex in YA literature influence teens to have sex?

4.      Is their diversity in YA romantic relationships?

5.      Do authors make their YA characters depictions of real adolescents?

6.      Does romance and sex in YA literature promote or lead to sexual violence?

I have selected this topic to research because growing up, I loved reading the YA novels that featured romance and the perfect love story. I so often thought that I would find my true love in high school and I would be happy and in love like my favorite YA characters but that was not the case at all. I also chose this topic to research how romantic YA literature may or may not psychologically effect adolescents because of the effect it had on me growing up. I wanted so badly to have a boyfriend and go on dates just because of the novels that I read. I think with my research I may run into the problem of finding articles or journal about the psychological effects on adolescents and how romance in these novels may or may not promote sexual violence and false hopes because I’m not sure if there have been actual studies done on those topics because of how popular romantic YA novels are.

               Some romantic YA novels I have read in the past or have heard about include The Twilight Series by Stephenie Meyer, A Walk to Remember by Nicholas Sparks, Just Listen and The Truth About Forever by Sarah Dessen. There are tons of YA novels about romance, but those are just a few that I have read myself. For this research paper, I plan to use sources from the school’s library database such as journals or articles that discuss the research questions I have. I am also hoping to find sources that include data from studies that have been conducted to back up the claim that I have which is that romantic YA novels do have some sort of physiological effect on YA adolescent readers.

Comments

  1. UnknownNovember 27, 2017 at 8:12 AM

    Hi Taylor! I really like this topic proposal. This is a topic I'm curious about too. Sometimes I wonder if the representation of relationships in the media becomes a sort of "self-fulfilling prophecy." Part of me thinks that the way teens interact with each other stems from what they see in the media. They try to dress like and talk like characters they read about or see on TV. They think certain things are "cool" because of the media while others are "dorky." I think the media plays a big role in perpetuating stereotypes among adolescents. I think that with your topic it would be interesting to examine how books influence teens' expectations of real life relationships.

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  2. Victoria VanceNovember 27, 2017 at 8:15 AM

    I really like how you took the topic of romance in YA and extended it to emphasize the psychological effects that it has on adolescents. I think it will be a very interesting argument to see why adolescents project YA Lit. romance to apply in their own lives because sometimes the love story in the book is not something that would ever happen in real life lol. So, why do adolescents take that depiction of love and perfect outline and apply it to real life. I'm really interested in how your paper is going to turn out here. It is a very intriguing topic with a multitude of directions you could go in; and I think that the questions that you have are really solid. As some of them are questions that we don't often think about as we are reading the text.

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