Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature

Publisher
University of North Carolina Press
Location
Chapel Hill
Publication year
1984
Comment

A chapter in Classics in Media Theory (2024) describes this book as follows:

Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance (RTR) is a book that was published at the University of Pennsylvania, United States, in 1984 and soon after republished as a second edition (1987). RTR combines a text analysis with a reception study and an ethnographic study of mass-produced romance literature. The book revolves around a circle of female romance readers in a small American town and the bookseller who merchandises, recommends, and discusses the literature with the readers. The books themselves are also discussed as texts. Radway conducts narrative analyses and a psychoanalytic interpretation of the texts, uses questionnaires, and interviews readers, producers, and distributors. The book is considered a classic within Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Feminist Studies, and Comparative Literature.

An updated version of Reading the Romance,  with a new introduction, was published in 1991.

Since this has been an extremely influential text, it has given rise to many responses/critiques. See, among others:

and

At the annual meeting of the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association (April 16-18, 2014, Chicago), scholars of English, cultural studies, fandom, religious studies, and other disciplines gathered to mark the thirtieth anniversary of Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature.

This is from Eric Selinger's Reading the Romance: A Thirtieth Anniversary Roundtable, Editor’s Introduction

The papers published in that section of issue 4.2 of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies were:

To My Mentor, Jan Radway, With Love by Deborah Chappel Traylor

The Politics of Popular Romance Studies by Lynn S. Neal

Radway Roundtable Remarks by Katherine Larsen

Studying the Romance Reader, Then and Now: Rereading Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance by Jessica Matthews

Love’s Laborers Lost: Radway, Romance Writers, and Recuperating Our Past by Heather Schell

From Reading the Romance to Grappling with Genre by Stephanie Moody

Rattling the Toolkit: Methods for Reading Romance, Gender, and Culture by Katherine Morrissey

We’ve Come a Long Way, Baby: Reflecting Thirty Years after Reading the Romance by Mallory Jagodzinski

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