Janice A. Radway

Janice A. Radway (Duke faculty page) is an influential cultural studies scholar who specifically looks at popular culture works, such as romance novels.

Selected works

• "Popular Culture as Play." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 22 (Summer, 1980): 138-53.
• "The Utopian Impulse in Popular Literature: Gothic Romances and “Feminist” Protest", American Quarterly, 33.2: 140-162 (Summer 1981).
• "Women Read the Romance: The Interaction of Text and Context" Feminist Studies 9 (Spring, 1983), pp. 53-78.
• "Interpretive Communities and Variable Literacies: The Functions of Romance Reading" Daedalus 113 (Summer 1984), pp. 49-73.
• "The Readers and Their Romances" (1984) (major article on romance novel)
• Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Culture (1984; rev. 1991)
• "Reading Is Not Eating: Mass-Produced Literature and the Theoretical, Methodological, and Political Consequences of a Metaphor" Book Research Quarterly 2 (Fall 1986) pp. 7-29.
• "The Book-of-the-Month Club and the General Readers: On the Uses of Serious Fiction." Critical Inquiry 14 (Spring, 1988): pp. 516-538.
• "Reception Study: Ethnography and the Problems of Dispersed Audiences and Nomadic Studies" Cultural Studies 2 (Oct. 1988) pp. 359-376.
• "The Scandal of the Middlebrow: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Class Fracture, and Cultural Authority", South Atlantic Quarterly v. 89, n. 4 (Fall 1990) pp.703-736 (assessing backlash and critiques of blurring of high and low culture)
• "Romance and the Work of Fantasy: Struggling with Female Subjectivity and Sexuality at Century's End." in Viewing, Reading, Listening: Reconceptualizing Audiences, ed. by Jon Cruz and Justin Lewis (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1993).
• "Dialogue About Instituting Cultural Studies: Gerald Graff, Janice Radway, Gita Rajan, and Robert Con Davis," in English Studies/Cultural Studies: Institutionalizing Change, ed. by Isaiah Smithson and Alvin Sullivan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993).
• "On the Gender of the Middlebrow Consumer and the Threat of the Culturally Fraudulent Female," South Atlantic Quarterly Fall 1994 v93 n4 p871(23)
• "Beyond Mary Bailey and Old Maid Librarians: Reimagining Readers and Thinking Reading." Journal of Education for Library and Information Science 35 (Fall, 1994): 1-21.
• "Girls, Reading, and Narrative Gleaning: Crafting Repertoires for Self-Fashioning Within Everyday Life", in Narrative Impact: Social and Cognitive Foundations, ed. by Timothy Brock, Melanie Green, and Jeffrey Strange (LEA Press, 2002), pp. 176-208.