| A Feeling for Books: The Book-Of-The-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire Revised Edition Contributor(s): Radway, Janice a. (Author) |
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ISBN: 0807848301 ISBN-13: 9780807848302 Publisher: University of North Carolina Press OUR PRICE: $42.75 Product Type: Paperback Published: August 1999 Annotation: 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 Clubs role as a cultural institution and a profound meditation on the love of books. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | Books & Reading - History | United States - 20th Century |
| Dewey: 028.909 |
| LCCN: 96052037 |
| Physical Information: 1.3" H x 6.1" W x 9.2" (1.45 lbs) 448 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 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. |
Contributor Bio(s): Radway, Janice a.: - 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. |