Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Feminist Desire and Female Pleasure: On Janice Radway's Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1984)

Feminist Desire and Female Pleasure: On Janice Radway's Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy... Janice Radway's Reading the Romance does not exactly read like a romance. In contrast to the typical reading experience of the romance novel, it is difficult to go through Reading the Romance at one stretch. The text contains too many fragments which compel its reader to stop, to reread, to put the book aside in order to gauge and digest the assertions madein short, to adopt an analytical position vis-a-vis the text. Contrary to what happens, as Radway sees it, in the case of romance novels, the value and pleasure of this reading experience does not primarily lie in its creation of a general sense of emotional well-being and visceral contentment (p. 70). Rather, Reading the Romance has left me, as one of its enthusiastic readers, with a feeling of tension that forces me to problematize its project, to ask questions about the kind of intervention Radway has tried to make in writing the book. Such questions generally do not present themselves to romance readers when they have just finished a particularly satisfying version of the romance genre. Radway has argued convincingly that it is precisely a release of tension that makes romance reading a particularly pleasurable activity http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Camera Obscura Duke University Press

Feminist Desire and Female Pleasure: On Janice Radway's Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1984)

Camera Obscura , Volume 6 (1 16) – Jan 1, 1988

Loading next page...
 
/lp/duke-university-press/feminist-desire-and-female-pleasure-on-janice-radway-s-reading-the-oUXYU618f4

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 1988 by Camera Obscura
ISSN
1529-1510
eISSN
1529-1510
DOI
10.1215/02705346-6-1_16-179
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Janice Radway's Reading the Romance does not exactly read like a romance. In contrast to the typical reading experience of the romance novel, it is difficult to go through Reading the Romance at one stretch. The text contains too many fragments which compel its reader to stop, to reread, to put the book aside in order to gauge and digest the assertions madein short, to adopt an analytical position vis-a-vis the text. Contrary to what happens, as Radway sees it, in the case of romance novels, the value and pleasure of this reading experience does not primarily lie in its creation of a general sense of emotional well-being and visceral contentment (p. 70). Rather, Reading the Romance has left me, as one of its enthusiastic readers, with a feeling of tension that forces me to problematize its project, to ask questions about the kind of intervention Radway has tried to make in writing the book. Such questions generally do not present themselves to romance readers when they have just finished a particularly satisfying version of the romance genre. Radway has argued convincingly that it is precisely a release of tension that makes romance reading a particularly pleasurable activity

Journal

Camera ObscuraDuke University Press

Published: Jan 1, 1988

There are no references for this article.