endorsing her situation, but examining an all-too-common state of affairs in order to display possible strategies for coping with it,” The love story of a romance novel does not constitute the entirety of the novel. Instead the heroine's journey from losing her social identity to gaining her identity through her ability to nurture the hero is the real focus of the successful romance novel. Language and Narrative Discourse Radway also analyzes the romance genre, yet instead of listing her own preferences or specific works, she examines the genre by examining the language of the romance novel and how that language affects the readers. The style, Radway points out, is relatively simplistic. She describes it as “The contemporary romance’s prose is dominated by cliché, simple vocabulary, standard syntax, and the most common techniques associated with the nineteenth-century realist novel.” While these methods allow romance novels to be easily read, it is not just a sacrifice of artistic ability. The successful, fulfilling romance novel exists when the author herself has provided meaning for her story through the words she has written. Radway explains this further with this excerpt: This sort of interpretation keeps romance novel readers from having to guess the interpretation of a text. They link signifiers with signifieds not by historical significance and that specific word choice, but to meanings that resonate personally with them. Radway elaborates on this idea by stating “[Romance novel readers] rely on standard cultural codes correlating signifiers and signifieds that they accept as definitive. It has simply never occurred to them that those codes might be historically or culturally relative.” This type of criticism, unlike the New Critics, is focused solely on readers’ interpretation and the ability of the author to write in such a way that their words will resonate with each one personally. Therefore, the use of clichés, uncomplicated syntax, and signifiers which utilize familiar cultural elements assists the Romance genre. Yet while there seems to be a lack of quality, this structure is not comprised due to laziness. The romance genre is precisely that: a genre, and one that serves not as an artistic tool but one that, for a little while, assures its readers of their own self-worth and ability to affect a patriarchic world, so by the end of the novel the female readers, often mothers, feel invigorated and ready to take on the day-to-day tasks of managing the home