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happydork gave me her copy of Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature on the strict condition that I love and cherish it, which I promised earnestly to do!

While I'm not sure I'm ready to propose marriage - it was already a grown-up, published book before I was born, after all, and sadly sometimes that generation gap does make challenges for a committed relationship - I have definitely come away from our time together with a very earnest respect for what it's trying to do and will be keeping it by me in the spirit of friendship!

Reading the Romance is basically an academic work of reader-response criticism on the subject of romance novels that turned itself, sort of by accident, into a feminist discussion of the romance novel industry and the role of romances in the lives of her interviewees, a group of extremely avid suburban readers. The author, Janice Radway, is clearly sort of dubious about the creation and marketing of romance novels - and to be fair, the methods of many romance novel publishers really are sort of shady - but she is trying really hard to be respectful to the women she interviews, to allow them their own voices, and not to suggest that they're stupid or ignorant for finding their joy in romance novel reading.

Which is good, because really it's the voices of the women themselves that make this a text still worth reading. (Well, that and the history of the romance novel publishing industry, which is fascinating! Uh, if you are interested in publishing, at least.) Like I said, Radway's 1984 analysis comes and goes in terms of continued relevancy - I am really sorry, but I cannot take Freudian literary theory seriously anymore in any way at all, and once we got to the bit about how romance novels compensate for the lost mother I had to bury my face in my hands a bit - and her overall analysis for Why People Read Romances (basically, "it allows for a vicarious sense of being emotionally nurtured that women just don't get in our culture where they're supposed to nurture everybody!") cannot be said, even if you accept it, to be necessarily relevant to any romance readers other than the one group she visited in 1984. The community of romance readers is much, much more diverse than that -- and also, thanks to the Internet, much more of a community than it was in 1984 as well, which changes the relationship of romance readers to their romances quite a lot. I loved learning about those women, though, and every single one of their stories was interesting, so I'm grateful to Janice Radway for bringing me that.

But then, as you guys know, I haven't read all that many pure romances myself, and when I do, it's usually the wacky kind and because I'm looking for some light screwball comedy. For those of you who do read romances regularly - have you read this book? What are your thoughts? Even if you haven't, actually, I would like to know your thoughts, although obviously I'm condensing the argument quite a lot!