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Like all other commercial commodities in our industrial culture, literary texts are the result of a complicated and lengthy process of production that is itself controlled by a host of material and social factors. Read the first page
Concordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Reading the Romance presents the results of Radway's study of a group of female "popular romance" readers. From her discussions with them, and their responses to questionnaires, she pieces together their likes, dislikes, and motivations, presenting a surprisingly interesting insight into why "popular romance" is so popular. She also offers a characterisation of what constitutes the ideal romance, and the failed romance, and goes on to examine the effect continuous romance reading might have.
This is an ideal starting point for anyone researching contemporary romantic fiction. Radway doesn't start with a bias either for or against the genre, so this is likely as impartial a study as one could hope to find. It might also appeal to readers of romance themselves, who are interested in discovering why this form appeals to others, or who are looking for some recommended reading.
Genuinely interesting, genuinely readable -- a fantastic study, from a fantastic critic.
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.
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