Evans defends her customers' choice of entertainment reading romances, she tells Radway, is no more harmful than watching sports on television.'e We read books so we won't cry'e is the poignant explanation one woman offers for her reading habit. 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. Radway questions such claims, arguing that critical attention 'e must shift from the text itself, taken in isolation, to the complex social event of reading.'e 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. They claim that romances enforce the woman reader's dependence on men and acceptance of the repressive ideology purveyed by popular culture. Among those who have disparaged romance reading are feminists, literary critics, and theorists of mass culture.

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.

Reading the romance janice radway