Janice A. Radway | Scholars@Duke

Janice A. Radway
Professor Emeritus of Literature

(Ph.D. in English and American Studies, Michigan State University, 1977). Before coming to Duke, she taught in the American Civilization Department at the University of Pennsylvania, where she also served as editor of the American Quarterly. She is the author of Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature, and A Feeling for Books: The Book- of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle Class Desire. Her current research interests are in the history of literacy and reading in the United States, particularly as they bear on the lives of women. She is currently working on the history of the book in the United States in the twentieth century (with Carl Kaestle) as part of the American Antiquarian Society's collaborative project on the history of the book. Radway is also working on an anthology of new work in American Studies. She is past president of the American Studies Association.

Current Appointments & Affiliations

Professor Emeritus of Literature, Literature, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences 2008
Bass Fellow, Literature, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences 2004

Contact Information

109 Art Museum, Buchanan and Trinity, Durham, NC 27701
Box 90670, Durham, NC 27708-0670
jradway@duke.edu (919) 684-3436

Background
Education, Training, & Certifications
- Ph.D., Michigan State University 1977
- M.A., State University of New York at Stony Brook 1972
- B.A., Michigan State University 1971
Duke Appointment History
- Professor with Tenure, Literature, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences 1988 - 2008
- Professor of History, History, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences 2003 - 2008
- Director, Literature, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences 2004 - 2007
Publications & Artistic Works
Selected Publications
- Books
  - Radway, J. A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, 2009.
  - Radway, J. A., Kevin Gaines, Barry Shank, and Penny Von Eschen. American Studies: An Anthology. Blackwell Publishers, 2008.
  - Radway, J. A., and Carl Kaestle. A History of the Book in America, Vol. IV. University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
  - Radway, J. A. A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste and Middle Class Desire. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
  - Radway, J. A. A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste and Middle Class Desire. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
  - Radway, J. A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
  - Radway, J. A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. London: Verso Press, 1987.
- Academic Articles
  - Radway, J. A. “What’s the Matter with Reception Study?: Some Thoughts on the Disciplinary Origins, Conceptual Constraints and Persistent Viability of a Paradigm.” Edited by James Machor and Phillip Goldstein, 2008.
  - Radway, J. A. “Learned and Literary Print Cultures in an Age of Professionalization and Diversification,” 2008.
  - Radway, J. A. “Little Magazines, Underground Publications and Zine Culture.” Pmla, 2008.
  - Radway, J. A. “Bridget Jones, Girls' Zines and the Problem of the Future: Gender, Narrative, and Subjectivity in the Nineties.” Narrative, 2008.
  - Radway, J. A. “The Library as Place, Collection, or Service: Promoting Book Circulation in Durham, NC and at the Book-of-the-Month Club.” Edited by Thomas Augst and Kenneth Carpenter, 2007, 231–63.
  - Radway, J. A. “Pisanje Cintanja romance.” Edited by Dean Duda, 2007, 247–66.
  - Radway, J. A. “Richard Ohmann's Voice.” Works and Days 45/46, no. 1/2 (2006): 1–9.
  - Radway, J. A., and Jeffrey Williams. “The Culture of Books: An Interview with Janice A. Radway.” Edited by Jeffrey Williams. The Minnesota Review 65–66 (2006): 133–48.
  - Radway, J. A. “Research Universities, Periodical Publication and the Circulation of Professional Expertise: On the Significance of Middlebrow Authority.” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 1 (October 2004): 203–28.
  - Radway, J. A. “What’s In a Name?” Edited by Donald Pease and Robyn Wiegman, 2003, 45–75.
  - Radway, J. A. “Girls, Reading, and Narrative Gleaning: Crafting Repertoires for Self-Fashioning Within Everyday Life.” Edited by Timothy Brock, Melanie Green, and Jeffrey Strange, 2002, 176–208.
  - Radway, J. A. “What's In a Name?: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association.” American Quarterly 51 (March 1999): 1–32.
  - Radway, J. A. “Books and Reading in the Age of Mass Production: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Middlebrow Culture and the Transformation of the Literary Field in the U.S., 1926-1940,” 1996.
  - Radway, J. A. “Beyond Mary Bailey and Old Maid Librarians: Reimagining Readers and Thinking Reading.” Journal of Education for Library and Information Science 35 (October 1994): 1–21.
  - Radway, J. A. “On the Gender of the Middlebrow Consumer and the Threat of the Culturally Fraudulant Female.” South Atlantic Quarterly, October 1994, 871–93.
  - Radway, J. A. “Dialogue About Instituting Cultural Studies: Gerald Graff, Janice Radway, Gita Rajan, and Robert Con Davis.” Edited by Isaiah Smithson and Alvin Sullivan, 1993.
  - Radway, J. A. “Romance and the Work of Fantasy: Struggling with Female Subjectivity and Sexuality at Century’s End.” Edited by Jon Cruz and Justin Lewis, 1993.
  - Radway, J. A. “Mail Order Culture and Its Critics: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Commodification, Consumption and the Problem of Cultural Authority.” Edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paul Treichler, 1992, 512–31.
  - Radway, J. A. “Ethnography Among Elites: Comparing Discourses of Power.” Journal of Communication Inquiry, October 1990.
  - Radway, J. A. “The Scandal of the Middlebrow: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Class Fracture and Cultural Authority.” South Atlantic Quarterly 89 (October 1990): 703–36.
  - Radway, J. A. “Maps and the Construction of Boundaries: A Response to Michael Dennings.” International Labor and Working Class History 37 (March 1990): 19–26.
  - Radway, J. A. “The Book-of-the-Month Club and the General Reader.” Edited by Cathy N. Davidson, 1989, 259–84.
  - Radway, J. A. “Reception Study: Ethnography and the Problems of Dispersed Audiences and Nomadic Subjects.” Cultural Studies 2 (October 1988): 359–76.
  - Radway, J. A. “The Book-of-the-Month Club and the General Readers: On the Uses of Serious Fiction.” Critical Inquiry 14 (March 1988): 516–38.
  - Radway, J. A. “Reading is not eating: Mass-produced literature and the theoretical, methodological, and political consequences of a metaphor.” Book Research Quarterly 2, no. 3 (September 1, 1986): 7–29. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02684575.
    Full Text
  - RADWAY, J. A. “IDENTIFYING IDEOLOGICAL SEAMS - MASS-CULTURE, ANALYTICAL METHOD, AND POLITICAL PRACTICE.” Communication 9, no. 1 (January 1, 1986): 93–123.
    Link to Item
  - Radway, J. A. “American Studies, Reader Theory, and the Literary Text: From the Study of Material Objects to the Study of Social Processes.” Edited by David Nye and Christen Kold Thomsen, 1985.
  - Radway, J. A. “Interpretive Communities and Variable Literacies: The Functions of Romance Reading.” Daedalus 113 (July 1984): 49–73.
  - Radway, Janice A. “Women Read the Romance: The Interaction of Text and Context.” Feminist Studies 9, no. 1 (1983): 53–53. https://doi.org/10.2307/3177683.
    Full Text
  - Radway, J. A. “The Aesthetic in Mass Culture: Reading and the ’Popular’ Literary Text.” Edited by Peter Steiner and Ronald Vroon, 1982, 397–429.
  - Radway, J. A. “The Utopian Impluse in Popular Literature: Gothic Romances and 'Feminist' Protest.” American Quarterly 33 (July 1981): 140–62.
  - Radway, J. A. “Popular Culture as Play.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 22 (July 1980): 138–53.
  - Radway, J. A. “Popular Verse and Poetry.” Edited by Thomas Inge, 1980, 345–63.
  - Radway, J. A. “Phenomenology, Linguistics, and Popular Literature.” The Journal of Popular Culture 12, no. 1 (January 1, 1978): 88–98. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0022-3840.1978.00088.x.
    Full Text
- Other Articles
  - Radway, J. A. “Preface to Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination.” University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
  - Radway, J. A. “Girls, Zines, and Their Afterlives: Sex, Gender, Capitalism, and Everyday Life in the Nineties and Beyond,” 2007.
  - Radway, J. A. “Richard Ohmann’s Voice.” Wesleyan University Press, 2003.

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Education, Training, & Certifications

Duke Appointment History

Selected Publications

Books

Academic Articles

Other Articles