The educational potential of romantic fiction.

This thesis explores the contribution of literary study to the development of critical consciousness. It considers literature's potential to act as a catalyst for enhancing individuals' abilities to understand and critique their sociocultural environments. It also considers its capacity for expanding - through increased sensitivity to the role of language in the making of meaning - individuals' belief about knowledge and its construction.

The investigation uses a case-study. It focuses on two groups of women Access to Higher Education students. As part of their programme of study they scrutinised popular romantic fiction and more traditional texts with a romantic component. Romantic fiction was chosen as the focus for the case-study because of its capacity to stimulate women readers to make connections between their reading and their lives. Popular romances foreground issues which have particular implications for women's personal, social and economic situations. The case-study includes detailed textual analyses which illustrate the potential for using the romance as a vehicle for exploring such issues. The research is interdisciplinary, combining feminist, philosophical, psychological and sociological approaches to adult education with literary and cultural studies theory and also with literary criticism. This interdisciplinarity, which has a strong tradition within feminist research and within adult education, made it possible to develop a range of interlinking perspectives on the phenomenon under scrutiny - women studying the romance.

The research findings demonstrate the contradictory nature of romantic fiction and its capacity to highlight, through discussion, beliefs and practices which help to construct women's subjectivities. They show that, under certain conditions, the study of literature can be transformative, enabling students to contextualise and re-evaluate their own experiences and to expand their beliefs about knowledge and meaning.