(349) Ultimately, Berlant concluded, the limitations of Radway's study end up perpetuating sexism, despite the strengths of the project. Denying the ' typical ' and the ' real, ' Berlant wrote, he notion that feminists might harness the dissatisfaction encoded in these texts for the transformation of women's 'real' lives denies the obvious point that these texts are not direct expressions of women's dissatisfaction with their lot but rather are mediated responses to a particular corporate reading of the desire of a certain gender of a certain class whose consumption of these novels produces the need to reproduce the scene of consumption, which includes both buying and reading the romance text. This construction, for Berlant, was far too limited a view that, partly because Radway's subjects were from middle-class, nuclear households, did not do justice to the complex historical and cultural contexts of these acts of reading.

Writing in Modern Philology, Lauren Berlant critiqued Radway's construction of a typical, real female reader with real needs. These questions remain crucial for engaging popular culture theory. Reading the Romance is, perhaps, more important for the lasting questions it posed than its observations of the reading habits of the women of Smithton. These early discussions of the book are a fascinating, rigorous debate over the potential limits of empirical method, ethnography, and reader response for understanding women's relationships with popular literature. When the University of North Carolina Press first published it, Reading the Romance was instantly recognized as an important contribution to the study of women's literature and feminist theory, but it also posed questions that troubled some very keen feminist reviewers.

Reading the Romance is now foundational for studies of popular audience and the romance and has encouraged similar ethnographic work on popular forms.

The book is an ethnographic study of a small community of female romance readers in the pseudonymous ' Smithton ' that focused, for the first time, on the romance reader's interpretive strategies rather than the scholar's critical interpretation of texts she deemed unworthy of women's attention. N OW A CLASSIC IN POPULAR CULTURE STUDIES, JANICE RADWAY'S READING THE Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature turns thirty this year.

Janice radway reading the romance