A Feeling for Books
The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire
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- $27.99
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- $27.99
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Anyone who bought the compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary as an introduction to the Book-of-the-Month Club will smile when Radway confesses to joining that all-American institution in 1975 to get those two massive tomes. In this study, which includes personal reminiscences, history, ethnography and literary criticism, Duke University English professor Radway explores the place of the BOMC in her own life and in American culture. From 1985 to 1988, Radway was a fly on the wall during BOMC editorial meetings, and she gives engaging accounts of how books are chosen as the Club's monthly selections or alternates. She also tells the story of how advertising copywriter and aspiring playwright Harry Scherman started BOMC in 1926 and within a few short years made it a household word. Club membership, as she sees it, satisfied middle-class aspirations to cultural mastery. Libraries of classics, along with chromolithographs, pianos and parlor organs, became obligatory furnishings in a middle-class home. The final chapters discuss various Book-of-the-Month Club titles that Radway enjoyed as a young reader--To Kill a Mockingbird, Marjorie Morningstar and Gods, Graves, & Scholars, among others. On personal topics, Radway's writing is charming; but passages of dense academic prose, especially in the historical chapters, will make readers wish that this ambivalent academic had allowed herself to be more middlebrow. FYI: North Carolina's 1992 title, The Making of Middlebrow Culture, by Joan Rubin, is a scholarly yet accessible account of BOMC, Great Books, newspaper book reviews, etc., that makes a fine supplement to A Feeling for Books.
