A Feeling for Books: The Book-Of-The-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire

by Janice A. Radway

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807848301
• ISBN13: 9780807848302
• Release Date: August 1999
• Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 1.42 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Brilliant and revealing, but neither tight no rigorous

An erudite yet bold and powerfully immediate report on the BOMC's origin and development over six decades, A Feeling for Books is also an intimate document, poignantly tracing the author's relationship to the Club from her adolescence to her maturity. Because Radway is a fine researcher, a skillful reader, and a seasoned introspective, each aspect of her project succeeds on its own terms. But juxtaposed or, more problematically, superimposed, the yields of her various ends, ideas, and methods are neither commensurable nor mutually supportive. Recurrent "lumping" and intermittent incoherencies threaten to defeat Radway's purposes, inviting at least partial scepticism about her hard-won evidence and beautifully teased-out arguments. The reader and the author would have been better served by a division of this work into two books, one a disciplined cultural inquiry into the essence of persistent, unresolved conflicts in the publishing industry, the other a memoir devoted to the discovery and synthesis of the author's own values in a world of flux.