Reading the Romance is a book by Janice Radway that analyzes the Romance novel genre using reader-response criticism. It was first published in 1984 and had a reprint in 1991. The 1984 edition of the book is composed of an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion, structured partly around Radway’s investigation of romance readers in Smithton (a pseudonym) and partly around Radway’s own criticism. Radway herself expresses preference for reader-response criticism throughout the course of the book, as opposed to the popular new criticism during the 1980s.
The book continues to sell at much the same rate it did in its first year of publication, having been adopted as a critical text in the fields of anthropology, sociology, history, and library studies, as well as in literary criticism.
Read more about Reading The Romance: The Publishing Industry and Smithton Readers, Language and Narrative Discourse
Famous quotes containing the words reading the, reading and/or romance:
“The unlucky hand dealt to clear and precise writers is that people assume they are superficial and so do not go to any trouble in reading them: and the lucky hand dealt to unclear ones is that the reader does go to some trouble and then attributes the pleasure he experiences in his own zeal to them.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“My mother ... believed fiction gave one an unrealistic view of the world. Once she caught me reading a novel and chastised me: “Never let me catch you doing that again, remember what happened to Emma Bovary.””
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“Twenty years of romance makes a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage makes her look like a public building.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)