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Abstract It has been six decades since the development of Taiwanese romance novels in the 1950s. The beginning to the maturity of the novels is closely related to the rise of cultural industry. However, the global financial crisis in 2008 inflicted severe damage to the industry of romance novels and caused the gradual decline of the novels. The study first probed into the development history of romance novels in the west, China and Taiwan. Next, it explained how romance novels seized the opportunity to develop in Taiwan with the theory of cultural industry proposed by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School. Different from previous researches, the author engaged in the mechanism of cultural production as a cultural producer of romance novels in addition to being a reader and researcher to view how the three roles influenced and interacted with one another to unfold the development peak of Taiwanese romance novels by analyzing narrative modes preferred by readers and their feedback. Furthermore, to further extend from the rise background of romance novels, this study explored the influence of cultural producers and consumers on the cultural production and marketing model to enrich the research of this field. Last but not the least, the study also probed into the external and internal causes of the decline of Taiwanese romance novels. External causes including the shakeout of novel rental stores triggered by the global financial crisis, being accompanied by uproarious online piracy and no active protection for copyrights and internal causes including the fixed form of romance novels, the change of teenagers’ leisure habits, the decline of reading rate, the society’s depreciation of the genre and the short-term operation of publishing houses have aggravated the sluggishness of romance novels. In conclusion, the author proposed suggestions for the future prospects of romance novels in the hope that they can serve as contributions to the research field.
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