A Feeling for Books: Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste and Middle-class Desire (Paperback)
$26.95 - Free shipping worldwide (to United States and
all these other countries) Usually dispatched within 48 hours | |Short Description for A Feeling for Books 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 19...
Full description- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Published: 31 August 1999
- Format: Paperback 448 pages
- See: Full bibliographic data
- Categories: Literary Studies: General | Social Groups: Clubs & Societies | Anthropology | History Of The Americas | Social & Cultural History
- ISBN 13: 9780807848302 ISBN 10: 0807848301
- Sales rank: 657,226
Full description for A Feeling for Books
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.
