Reading The Romance - The Publishing Industry and Smithton Readers

The Publishing Industry and Smithton Readers

Radway begins Reading the Romance with a look at the publishing industry for romance novels. She insists that “ are, rather, the end products of a much-mediated, highly complex, material and social process that involves writers, literary agents, publishing officials, and editors, as well as hundreds of other people who participate in the manufacture, distribution, and selling of books,” It is also asserted that the reader plays a significant part in the publishing industry, as romance novels were often purchased by mail order in the 1980s, the reader could order subscriptions to certain publishing houses in advance, as they could come to expect the quality of the authors whose titles were included in the subscription.

Radway’s next sections of Reading the Romance are her reports from her various interviews of Smithton readers. Multiple polls are featured throughout this section, displaying favorite archetypes of heroines and heroes, as well as what comprises a “good” and “bad” romance novel. Yet Radway stresses the most important component to a “good” title to be the word of mouth recommendation, as the women interviewed trusted a bookstore owner, Dot’s, judgment pertaining to titles not only because it correlated with theirs, but because of her vast knowledge of different novels.

Throughout this section, the conventions of romance novels are discussed. Radway emphasizes the idea of a happy, satisfying ending as well as the struggle of the heroine, who often, if not always, lives in a state of weakness in a patriarchal society. While this might seem demeaning to women, Radway explains that “By picturing the heroine in relative positions of weakness, romances are not necessarily endorsing her situation, but examining an all-too-common state of affairs in order to display possible strategies for coping with it,” The love story of a romance novel does not constitute the entirety of the novel. Instead the heroine’s journey from losing her social identity to gaining her identity through her ability to nurture the hero is the real focus of the successful romance novel.