Browsing by Subject "Hanna Meretoja"

This thesis examines two contemporary romances novels through the framework of hermeneutic narrative ethics. Danielle Steel’s Happiness (2023) and Emily Henry’s Happy Place (2023) are both recent contemporary romance novels by popular authors. They are genre-typical and provide heteronormative and relatively uncomplicated romance narratives targeted to the masses. Hanna Meretoja’s framework of hermeneutic narrative ethics (2018) allows for the examination and comparison of the ethical aspects of the two narratives. The model identifies six aspects of storytelling that both enable and diminish the sense of the possible. Hermeneutic narrative ethics’ focus on the interpretative structure of narratives and experiences facilitates the examination of how cultural narrative webs and our own prior experiences influence the new and how the new also has the ability to alter what is already known. It is possible, then, to analyze what effect (literary) narratives can have by placing them on a continuum from narratives that perpetuate harmful stereotypes to those that provide alternative perspectives. To examine the sense of the possible opened and diminished in contemporary romance novels, this thesis utilizes Pamela Regis’ eight essential narrative elements of romance novels. By focusing on different themes found in these narrative elements, this thesis examines whether Steel’s and Henry’s novels encourage ethical exploration or perpetuate society’s harmful master-narratives. This thesis shows that the two novels contain narratives that both enable and diminish the sense of the possible. I argue that while these novels contain both diminishing and enabling features throughout, counter-narratives are offered more often before the conflict that keeps the couple apart begins to unravel. After this point, the narratives turn to perpetuate harmful master-narratives more often. By utilizing Meretoja’s model, this thesis examines these ethically challenging narratives, reveals underlying mechanisms of power, and adds to the growing feminist research done on the romance novel genre.