Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature [Paperback]

Janice A. Radway (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 306 pages
• Publisher: University of North Carolina Press; 2nd edition (November 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807843490
• ISBN-13: 978-0807843499
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #221,017 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect for the feminist who LIKES happily ever after, March 23, 1999

By 

Wendy Lee ([e-mail]) (Joliet, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Paperback)

Janice Radway does a terrific job of crossing and blurrign the lines of academic critical writing. Never before have I read a book that looks critically at a literary reality but manages to do it in a personable, friendly way. By the end of the novel, I felt as if Janice, Dot, and the other ladies of the reading group were my personal friends. As a graduate student in literature whose focus is feminist literary studies, I have often found my choice in studies at odds with my passion for reading romance novels. What a pleasure (and relief) to see someone who has taken the desire and need to read popular literature seriously. Often, studies on popular lit, particularly romance novels, are often critical of the preferences of non-academic individuals. What they tend to forget is that the purpose of reading is most frequently for the purpose of pleasure. I recommend this book to both "academics," potential writers of romance novels (a great way to learn what your audience is really thinking) and to those of us who just need a little ammunition against those who critique our choice in reading!

16 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Conflict of Interest Makes it Interesting, July 18, 2002

By 

Christopher Weaver "weaverc" (Wayne, NJ) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Paperback)

An interesting book and a pretty good read. With the exception of the first chapter, which is an enlightening but pretty dry history of book publishing, the author writes with an enganging and personable style that's highly unusual for an "academic" book. I picked it up thinking that I'd browse through it and found myself reading it cover to cover. There's a bit of the usual feminist/critical studies rhetoric but it's neither bombastic enough nor pervasive enough to dampen the book's accessibility nor its credibility.

What keeps the book interesting is the author's ongoing engagement with a smallish group of midwestern romance readers. The group makes up the core of her study and she cites interviews with these readers as well as statistical results from a questionnaire. An undercurrent which runs through this book but which Radway doesn't directly address is her conflicted relationship with this group. On the one hand, she is seems to respect them a great deal and doesn't want to dismiss them the way many romance readers have been dismissed as mindless and passive women. Indeed, part of her analysis is that the romance novel is a complex response to power relations between men and women and that it does not simply reinforce the status quo. On the other hand, she seems to suggest that the readers she's interviewed aren't entirely aware of this agenda--that they simply read to escape.

Radway refers over and over again to the idea that the women she's interviewed read romances in order to experience vicariously what they are missing in their lives. She makes a pretty interesting case, but it's significant, I think, that she never asks the women about whether or not they think they are missing anything in their lives. Thus, though interesting, the book takes a sort of, "I know what you really need and why you really read these books even if you don't" mentality. She cares about and respects these women and she listens closely to their experiences and opinions. But she still thinks she knows their motivations better than the readers themselves. I'm not sure it's really so much condescending as conflicted.

It would have been interesting to have Radway actually address this issue with the readers she interviewed or at least in an afterword to the book. I wonder if the women she interviewed read the book and what they thought about it if they did.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A major contribution to the field of cultural studies, March 7, 2001

By 

Matthew Thorn "Matt Thorn" (Kyoto, Kyoto Japan) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Paperback)

I was disappointed to see that an earlier reviewer found the book condescending. I think it is true that when the book was written, for a largely academic audience, back in 1984, she probably felt she had to bend over backwards to have her work taken seriously by academics, so she couldn't have written "as a fan." But condescending? I really didn't think so. This book was inspirational to me when I was trying to find a way to approach the material I study (and personally enjoy), Japanese girls' and women's comics. I don't know if Janice (whom I know and admire) is a fan of romance novels, but I know she has always enjoyed popular literature, and that she really tried, in this book, to see romances as their readers see them, and to convey that point of view to academics and feminists who have always looked on romance with contempt. But think about it: if she had written the book from a "fannish," "gee-aren't-romance-novels-great" point of view, it would have ended up as a book by and for romance readers, and wouldn't have contributed to helping non romance-readers understand the genre. I would recommend this book to A) anyone who has always considered "genre fiction" to be pap, B) feminists who want to break out of the "feminists vs. non-feminist women" paradigm, and C) romance readers who would like some ammunition in defending the genre to others.