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Janice A. Radway
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Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature Paperback – November 30, 1991

by Janice A. Radway (Author)
4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 42 ratings
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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 distribution to the individual reader's engagement with the text.

Radway's provocative approach combines reader-response criticism with anthropology and feminist psychology. Asking readers themselves to explore their reading motives, habits, and rewards, she conducted interviews in a midwestern town with forty-two romance readers whom she met through Dorothy Evans, a chain bookstore employee who has earned a reputation as an expert on romantic fiction. Evans defends her customers' choice of entertainment; reading romances, she tells Radway, is no more harmful than watching sports on television.

"We read books so we won't cry" is the poignant explanation one woman offers for her reading habit. Indeed, Radway found that while the women she studied devote themselves to nurturing their families, these wives and mothers receive insufficient devotion or nurturance in return. In romances the women find not only escape from the demanding and often tiresome routines of their lives but also a hero who supplies the tenderness and admiring attention that they have learned not to expect.

The heroines admired by Radway's group defy the expected stereotypes; they are strong, independent, and intelligent. That such characters often find themselves to be victims of male aggression and almost always resign themselves to accepting conventional roles in life has less to do, Radway argues, with the women readers' fantasies and choices than with their need to deal with a fear of masculine dominance.

These romance readers resent not only the limited choices in their own lives but the patronizing atitude that men especially express toward their reading tastes. In fact, women read romances both to protest and to escape temporarily the narrowly defined role prescribed for them by a patriarchal culture. Paradoxically, the books that they read make conventional roles for women seem desirable. It is this complex relationship between culture, text, and woman reader that Radway urges feminists to address. Romance readers, she argues, should be encouraged to deliver their protests in the arena of actual social relations rather than to act them out in the solitude of the imagination.

In a new introduction, Janice Radway places the book within the context of current scholarship and offers both an explanation and critique of the study's limitations.
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Previous page
  1. Print length
    288 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    The University of North Carolina Press
  4. Publication date
    November 30, 1991
  5. Dimensions
    6 x 0.65 x 9 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0807843490
  7. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

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[Reading the Romance] is in a class by itself. It set[s] a standard for cultural studies, scarcely ever matched in subsequent work, of testing theories about the effects of mass culture with close study of the people presumably under its influence.--Journal of American History



A consistently absorbing and often brilliant analysis of [romance novels] and their eager consumers.--Sandra M. Gilbert, New York Times Book Review



A superb analysis of a contemporary phenomenon and an intelligent and moving depiction of how the women who consume these novels see their lives.--Journal of Communication



Explores not only the conventions of the romance novel but also the ways in which both these novels and their readers defy certain stereotypes, usually proliferated by people who don't read the books themselves. Radway's study is a fascinating and controversial bit of sociological literary criticism.--MetroMagazine

From the Back Cover

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. In a new introduction, Janice Radway places the book within the context of current scholarship and offers both an explanation and critique of the study's limitations.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ The University of North Carolina Press; Revised edition (November 30, 1991)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0807843490
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.3 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.65 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 42 ratings

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Janice A. Radway

Janice A. Radway

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Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5
42 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Steven Reynolds
5.0 out of 5 stars Enlightening
Reviewed in the United States on April 2, 2002
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Despite the growing popularity of cultural studies, it's still surprising to find a literary academic who embraces popular culture. More surprising still is that Janice Radway managed to head down this path almost twenty years ago. Recognizing that a theorist who refuses to engage with popular fiction is ignoring perhaps 90% of what people actually read, Radway does not dismiss romantic fiction as beneath her attention. Rather, she sets out to conduct an empirical study into the genre. In doing so, she addresses some important questions: Why do women read romance? What social and psychological needs does it meet? If there is an "ideal" romance, what are its components and why? How does the unique language of romance do its work? In answering these, Radway not only manages to define an entire genre. She also draws out some rather chilling and not so obvious conclusions about the role of romantic fiction in preventing the feminist agenda from taking hold. And unlike many criticisms of romance, Radway's is based on observation, experience and facts. Her preference for foregrounding the evidence rather than her own views is mightily refreshing. My only reservation is the ease with which she extrapolates the reading experiences of a small group of women into conclusions about American culture in general. However, her excellent introduction to the second edition recognizes this, positions her study in relation to the emerging discipline of cultural studies, and suggests ways in which her study's insights might be further explored and tested. I strongly recommend this to anyone interested in the romance genre, or in academic approaches to popular fiction in general. Readers, writers, students and critics will all find something to learn here.
16 people found this helpful
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Weaver
4.0 out of 5 stars Conflict of Interest Makes it Interesting
Reviewed in the United States on July 18, 2002
An interesting book and a pretty good read. With the exception of the first chapter, which is an enlightening but pretty dry history of book publishing, the author writes with an enganging and personable style that's highly unusual for an "academic" book. I picked it up thinking that I'd browse through it and found myself reading it cover to cover. There's a bit of the usual feminist/critical studies rhetoric but it's neither bombastic enough nor pervasive enough to dampen the book's accessibility nor its credibility.
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.
23 people found this helpful
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jessica
5.0 out of 5 stars Should be mandatory reading
Reviewed in the United States on March 9, 2015
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hugely influential work of scholarship. Should be mandatory reading for any contemporary lit class.
5 people found this helpful
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The Teach
3.0 out of 5 stars So-so
Reviewed in the United States on October 24, 2015
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Shoddy ethnography, but that's what could be expected at the time. There are some hidden gems in the subtext, though the author doesn't seem to have realized it. Her thinly veiled contempt for her subjects and topic make this hard to swallow. If you hate romance, why write about it?
One person found this helpful
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Matthew Thorn
5.0 out of 5 stars A major contribution to the field of cultural studies
Reviewed in the United States on March 8, 2001
I was disappointed to see that an earlier reviewer found the book condescending. I think it is true that when the book was written, for a largely academic audience, back in 1984, she probably felt she had to bend over backwards to have her work taken seriously by academics, so she couldn't have written "as a fan." But condescending? I really didn't think so. This book was inspirational to me when I was trying to find a way to approach the material I study (and personally enjoy), Japanese girls' and women's comics. I don't know if Janice (whom I know and admire) is a fan of romance novels, but I know she has always enjoyed popular literature, and that she really tried, in this book, to see romances as their readers see them, and to convey that point of view to academics and feminists who have always looked on romance with contempt. But think about it: if she had written the book from a "fannish," "gee-aren't-romance-novels-great" point of view, it would have ended up as a book by and for romance readers, and wouldn't have contributed to helping non romance-readers understand the genre. I would recommend this book to A) anyone who has always considered "genre fiction" to be pap, B) feminists who want to break out of the "feminists vs. non-feminist women" paradigm, and C) romance readers who would like some ammunition in defending the genre to others.
16 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

WeAreWhatWeRead
3.0 out of 5 stars Good, but also limited and now outdated
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 27, 2015
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'Reading the Romance' is still highly regarded by academics and used for all manner of teaching endeavours today; but I suspect the reason for this long-lasting respect is simply that no other academic text exists on the subject, which is probably because no other serious researcher or writer would want to bother - to spend the time and effort to study in earnest this subject, and to attempt an answer to the question: why the hell are women reading romance novels, when even the readers themselves admit, at a push, that the whole genre is nothing but a pile of crap?

Which was, of course, not how Radway asked her question, back in the early 1980s ... nevertheless, that was the sentiment. This question is still valid, and still unanswered, today. The answers Radway offered are, today, terribly outdated, mostly because she focused too much of her efforts onto concocting a psychoanalytical explanation. Yes, she used the theories of feminist Nancy Chodorow rather than those of the old fart, women-hating Freud, and at the time this constituted no less than a revolutionary approach. It makes no difference, though; we have, thankfully, moved on a huge deal and today nobody would take those explanations seriously; not in Britain, anyway. Furthermore, even when the book originally came out, its psychoanalysis-informed answers were far-fetched and remained largely unconvincing. If we were to properly analyze the ''Smithton'' women's responses and reasons in 2015, we would probably not come up with such flattering results as Radway did, but with far more incisive, and closer to the truth, answers.

There are some incipient gems in 'Reading the Romance', but you have to look hard: considerable social constructionist talk, and even discursive psychology can be found in this book. But overall, while this work is OK, it is also very much of its time. Another major problem is that Radway did not answer satisfactorily some fundamental questions such as: why all the rape in romance novels - why do women write, and read so voraciously, plot-less, character-less, formulaic books littered with rape scenes??? And we're also still left asking: what of the hundreds of millions of other romance readers - all the women who are NOT middle-aged, middle-class, middle-educated, married-with-children Americans like the ''Smithton'' readers researched here? Why do all those other women also read awfully written, ostensibly patriarchal romances, and have been doing so incessantly for a good century now?

If this sort of research was carried out today, it would be vastly different. Not only because the methodology and the theoretical framework would have to be brought up to date, but also because it would have to take into consideration issues such as the Nora Roberts phenomenon, and the chick lit phenomenon, and the added complications of the genre's present-day feminist claims... to name but a few. So I would recommend 'Reading the Romance' more as history than as a text relevant today.
3 people found this helpful
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Amazon Customer
4.0 out of 5 stars Ethnography & Methods!
Reviewed in Canada on March 28, 2013
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For those of you who are skeptical about Radway's methodology and claim making process, I suggest you look into what exactly ethnographic work is. This is in no way a quantitative or qualitative approach to understanding the sociology of literature. In fact, ethnography is completely different from these two types of methodology. Is the book perfect? No, but it is still an interesting read and you can still acquire a different perspective about reading romance novels. I think it would be interesting for her to write a similar book on contemporary romance novels.
One person found this helpful
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