A Feeling for Books

Beskrivning

Titel: A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire
Författare: Janice A. Radway
ISBN: 0807823570
Förlag: Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press
Utgivningsår: 1997
Språk: Engelska
Bandtyp: Inbunden med skyddsomslag
Skick: Mycket gott skick – intryckt märke/fördjupning (ca 2 x 1 cm) på främre pärm vid övre kant. Skyddsomslag i gott skick – två små revor vid övre ryggände; liten reva vid framsidans nedre hörn: något nötta hörn och ryggändar; veck längs kanterna.

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.

Photographs, notes, list of sources, and index.