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A Feeling for Books
A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire | Janice A. Radway
2 posts | 1 reading | 10 to read
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.
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Rebnhill
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@24in48 is the best! I finished 3 books and started 2 that I didn't finish. Still gonna read those last 30 pages of Val Macdermid

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merelybookish
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Radway is an English scholar who legitimized reading practices as an important area of study. (Her work on why women read romance was groundbreaking.) In this book, she charts the history of Book-of-the-Month club and how it shaped literary taste in the US. #whatafeeling #augustgrrrrl @Cinfhen

Cinfhen Well played😊👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻and bonus points for #BOTM ❤️ 7y
Jess_Read_This Fascinating! I haven't heard of her before and can't wait to read her work. 7y
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