A Feeling for Books - The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Paperback, New edition)

A virtual self-parody of obfuscation and solipsism in cultural studies. Radway (Literature/Duke Univ.) writes that she has spent much of her career mulling "the distance I had travelled between a small tract house in suburban New Jersey . . . and a lectern in front of a literature class." Radway takes this self-indulgent vision of scholarship as her license to inflate a sentimental interest in the Book-of-the-Month Club into a needlessly mystified "ethnography" of it. Her history of the club's creation of a middle-brow reading appetite is relatively informative if, like everything else here, overlong. But because her contemporary "fieldwork" approaches the club as an arcane text or exotic tribe, rather than a perfectly intelligible business enterprise, she endlessly worries the relationship between its literary and commercial goals into equivocal blather, such as, "Decisions about books at the club were always pegged to a highly elaborated conception of book buying and book reading." That is to say, "multiple planes of the literary field . . . were structured according to . . . a planar logic that foregrounded the discreteness and particularity of domains and forms of expertise." It will be clear to anyone but Radway that the club is just a marketing scheme with a pretty simple taste-mongering shtick, run, to judge even by her flattering portrayal, by people who sell books, not literature. But Radway is lost in breathless close readings of editorial memos, and cut-and-paste applications of cultural theory - not to mention her affection for the staff and misty memories of young book-loving. More intriguing than any book club's mail-order stratagems is the question of how books like this get sold - to Ivy League departments in the form of dissertations, grant-makers (the Guggenheim in this case), and university presses. (Kirkus Reviews)

Deftly melding ethnography, cultural history, literary criticism, and autobiographical reflection, A Feeling for Books is at once an engaging study of the Book-of-the-Month Club's influential role as a cultural institution and a profoundly personal meditation about the experience of reading. Janice Radway traces the history of the famous mail-order book club from its controversial founding in 1926 through its evolution into an enterprise uniquely successful in blending commerce and culture. Framing her historical narrative with writing of a more personal sort, Radway reflects on the contemporary role of the Book-of-the-Month Club in American cultural history and in her own life. Her detailed account of the standards and practices employed by the club's in-house editors is also an absorbing story of her interactions with those editors. Examining her experiences as a fourteen-year-old reader of the club's selections and, later, as a professor of literature, she offers a series of rigorously analytical yet deeply personal readings of such beloved novels as Marjorie Morningstar and To Kill a Mockingbird . Rich and rewarding, this book will captivate and delight anyone who is interested in the history of books and in the personal and transformative experience of reading. |For anyone who is interested in the history of books and in the personal and transformative experience of reading. Radway offers both an engaging look at the Book-of the-Month Club's role as a cultural institution and a profound meditation on the love of books.

General

Imprint:	The University of North Carolina Press
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	August 1999
First published:	August 1999
Authors:	Janice A. Radway
Dimensions:	235 x 156 x 34mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback
Pages:	448
Edition:	New edition
ISBN-13:	978-0-8078-4830-2
Categories:	Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > General Books > Humanities > History > History of specific subjects > Social & cultural history Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Anthropology > General Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social groups & communities > Associations, clubs, societies > General Books > History > History of specific subjects > Social & cultural history
LSN:	0-8078-4830-1
Barcode:	9780807848302

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