'Silly' love songs spark romance

Barbara Streisand has forged a successful career from love songs

'Silly' loves songs perform a vital role in keeping the myth of romantic love alive, says an academic researching their impact on romance.

Dr Jeanice Brooks, from Southampton University, hopes to show what makes tearjerker tunes so "emotionally compelling".

The research, called Silly Love Songs: Gender, Performance and Romance, covers the 16th century to the 1970s.

Dr Brooks will investigate how love songs reflect fluctuating social views.

One-hit wonders

She plans to trace the different ways love songs interact with novels, including those of Jane Austen, and explore the role romance plays in women's lives "in order to understand love songs' appeal to female audiences past and present".

The research will focus on "the kind of songs we love, but that often make us cringe".

Dr Brooks also aims to study songs that occupy an "uneasy" place between classical and popular music, high art and short-lived one-hit-wonders.

Her findings are expected to form the basis of a book which looks at love songs in relation to books and films.