2. WHO’S JANICE RADWAY?
Janice Radway born January 29 1949 as an
American literary and cultural studies scholar.
Radway holds a BA from Michigan State
University, 1971, an MA, State University of New
York, Stony Brook, 1972 and the PhD, Michigan State
University, 1977. She taught in the American
Civilization Department at the University of
Pennsylvania and in the Literature Program (which
she also chaired) at Duke University. She served as
an editor of American Quarterly, and, in 1998-99, as
president of the American Studies Association. In
2008, she became Walter Dill Scott Professor of
Communication Studies at North-western
University. Radway is also professor emerita of
Literature and History at Duke University.

3. READING ROMANCE
Janice Radway wrote a book called “Reading Romance” is an
important work in the ethnographic study of popular culture and
more specifically the romance novel genre and its audience.
Traditionally popular culture genres such as news, sports and the
action film are gendered as masculine and genres such as soap
operas, romance novels and melodrama are gendered as
feminine. Radway, as ethnographers often do, sought to go
around critiques of popular culture that project all sorts of
assumptions onto the audiences that consume popular media
texts. This alone is an important contribution of Radway's work;
her investigation of a particular genre, the romance novel, and the
social contexts of the genre in the lives of the fans of the
genre. Radway studied the rules and strategies this “interpretive
community” used to make meaning from the genre, and the
distinctions this audience made to judge a particular work of the
genre as “good” or “bad”.