|
Showing 1 - 3 of
3 matches in All Departments
In a period characterized by expanding markets, national
consolidation, and social upheaval, print culture picked up
momentum as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth.
Books, magazines, and newspapers were produced more quickly and
more cheaply, reaching ever-increasing numbers of readers. Volume 4
of A History of the Book in America traces the complex, even
contradictory consequences of these changes in the production,
circulation, and use of print. Contributors to this volume explain
that although mass production encouraged consolidation and
standardization, readers increasingly adapted print to serve their
own purposes, allowing for increased diversity in the midst of
concentration and integration. Considering the book in larger
social and cultural networks, essays address the rise of consumer
culture, the extension of literacy and reading through schooling,
the expansion of secondary and postsecondary education and the
growth of the textbook industry, the growing influence of the
professions and their dependence on print culture, and the history
of relevant technology. As the essays here attest, the expansion of
print culture between 1880 and 1940 enabled it to become part of
Americans' everyday business, social, political, and religious
lives. Contributors: Megan Benton, Pacific Lutheran University Paul
S. Boyer, University of Wisconsin-Madison Una M. Cadegan,
University of Dayton Phyllis Dain, Columbia University James P.
Danky, University of Wisconsin-Madison Ellen Gruber Garvey, New
Jersey City University Peter Jaszi, American University Carl F.
Kaestle, Brown University Nicolas Kanellos, University of Houston
Richard L. Kaplan, ABC-Clio Publishing Marcel Chotkowski
LaFollette, Washington, D.C. Elizabeth Long, Rice University
Elizabeth McHenry, New York University Sally M. Miller, University
of the Pacific Richard Ohmann, Wesleyan University Janice A.
Radway, Duke University Joan Shelley Rubin, University of Rochester
Jonathan D. Sarna, Brandeis University Charles A. Seavey,
University of Missouri, Columbia Michael Schudson, University of
California, San Diego William Vance Trollinger Jr., University of
Dayton Richard L. Venezky (1938-2004) James L. W. West III,
Pennsylvania State University Wayne A. Wiegand, Florida State
University Michael Winship, University of Texas at Austin Martha
Woodmansee, Case Western Reserve University
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.
Originally published in 1984, "Reading the Romance" challenges
popular (and often demeaning) myths about why romantic fiction, one
of publishing's most lucrative categories, captivates millions of
women readers. Among those who have disparaged romance reading are
feminists, literary critics, and theorists of mass culture. They
claim that romances enforce the woman reader's dependence on men
and acceptance of the repressive ideology purveyed by popular
culture. Radway questions such claims, arguing that critical
attention "must shift from the text itself, taken in isolation, to
the complex social event of reading." She examines that event, from
the complicated business of publishing and distribution to the
individual reader's engagement with the text.
Radway's provocative approach combines reader-response criticism
with anthropology and feminist psychology. Asking readers
themselves to explore their reading motives, habits, and rewards,
she conducted interviews in a midwestern town with forty-two
romance readers whom she met through Dorothy Evans, a chain
bookstore employee who has earned a reputation as an expert on
romantic fiction. Evans defends her customers' choice of
entertainment; reading romances, she tells Radway, is no more
harmful than watching sports on television.
"We read books so we won't cry" is the poignant explanation one
woman offers for her reading habit. Indeed, Radway found that while
the women she studied devote themselves to nurturing their
families, these wives and mothers receive insufficient devotion or
nurturance in return. In romances the women find not only escape
from the demanding and often tiresome routines of their lives but
also a hero who supplies the tenderness and admiring attention that
they have learned not to expect.
The heroines admired by Radway's group defy the expected
stereotypes; they are strong, independent, and intelligent. That
such characters often find themselves to be victims of male
aggression and almost always resign themselves to accepting
conventional roles in life has less to do, Radway argues, with the
women readers' fantasies and choices than with their need to deal
with a fear of masculine dominance.
These romance readers resent not only the limited choices in their
own lives but the patronizing atitude that men especially express
toward their reading tastes. In fact, women read romances both to
protest and to escape temporarily the narrowly defined role
prescribed for them by a patriarchal culture. Paradoxically, the
books that they read make conventional roles for women seem
desirable. It is this complex relationship between culture, text,
and woman reader that Radway urges feminists to address. Romance
readers, she argues, should be encouraged to deliver their protests
in the arena of actual social relations rather than to act them out
in the solitude of the imagination.
In a new introduction, Janice Radway places the book within the
context of current scholarship and offers both an explanation and
critique of the study's limitations.
|
|