You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
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 distrib...
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...
American Studies is a vigorous, bold account of the changes in the field of American Studies over the last thirty-five years. Through this set of carefully selected key essays by an editorial board of expert scholars, the book demonstrates how changes in the field have produced new genealogies that tell different histories of both America and the study of America. Charts the evolution of American Studies from the end of World War II to the present day by showcasing the best scholarship in this field An introductory essay by the distinguished editorial board highlights developments in the field and places each essay in its historical and theoretical context Explores topics such as American politics, history, culture, race, gender and working life Shows how changing perspectives have enabled older concepts to emerge in a different context
'Avery Gordon's stunningly original and provocatively imaginative book explores the connections linking horror, history, and haunting. She shows how fiction writing can sometimes function as a social force, as a repository of memories that are too brutal, to debilitating, and too horrifying to register through direct historical or social science narratives...'--George Lipsitz, University of California, San Diego
An international journal committed to exploring the relationships between cultural practices and everyday life, economic relations, the material world, the State, and historical forces and contexts. It seeks to foster more open analytic, critical and political conversations by encouraging people to push the dialogue into fresh, uncharted territory. It also aims to intervene in the process by which the existing techniques, institutions and structures of power are reproduced, resisted and transformed.
Sophie Dempsey wants to help her sister film a video and then get out of Temptation, Ohio. Mayor Phin Tucker wants to play pool with the police chief and keep things peaceful. But when Sophie and Phin meet, they both get more than they want. Gossip, blackmail, adultery, murder, vehicular abuse of a corpse, and slightly perverse but excellent sex: all hell breaks loose in Temptation as Sophie and Phin fall deeper and deeper in trouble... and in love.
First published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Key writings exploring questions of reception, interpretation and interactivity. The fan audience, the active audience, gender and audience, nation and ethnicity, internet audiences.
Tracing the evolution of the library as a modern institution from the late eighteenth century to the digital era, this book explores the diverse practices by which Americans have shared reading matter for instruction, edification, and pleasure. Writing from a rich variety of perspectives, the contributors raise important questions about the material forms and social shapes of American culture. What is a library? How have libraries fostered communities of readers and influenced the practice of reading in particular communities? How did the development of modern libraries alter the boundaries of individual and social experience, and define new kinds of public culture? To what extent have libraries served as commercial enterprises, as centers of power, and as places of empowerment for African Americans, women, and ...
Ranging from cultural history to literary criticism to personal reflection, the author examines the Book-of-the-Month Club's role in forming the literary taste and the desires of the middle class, as well as her own. UP.