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

by Radway, Janice A.

• ISBN13: 9780807848302
• ISBN10: 0807848301
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-08-01
• Publisher: UNIV OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

In the Service of the General Reader

A Certain Book Club Culture

A Business with a Mission

The Intelligent Generalist and the Uses of Reading

On the History of the Middlebrow

The Struggle over the Book, 1870-1920

A Modern Selling Machine for Books: Harry Scherman and the Origins of the Book-of-the-Month Club

Automated Book Distribution and the Negative Option: Agency and Choice in a Standardized World

The Scandal of the Middlebrow: The Professional-Managerial Class and the Exercise of Authority in the Literary Field

Reading for a New Class: The Judges, the Practical Logic of Book Selection, and the Question of Middlebrow Style

Books for Professionals

A Library of Books for the Aspiring Professional: Some Effects of Middlebrow

Reading Afterword

Notes Sources

Cited Index

A section of illustrations follows

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.