A01=Janice A. Radway
Author_Janice A. Radway
Category=DSB
Category=JBSY
Category=JHM
Category=NHTB
culture
editors
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
history of books
literary criticism
middlebrow
popular culture
publishing
reading
Product details
- ISBN 9780807848302
- Weight: 659g
- Dimensions: 154 x 233mm
- Publication Date: 30 Aug 1999
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
Janice A. Radway is Walter Dill Scott Professor of Communication and professor of American studies and gender studies at Northwestern University and author of Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature.
