Content area
Abstract
The growth in the number of adult reading groups has been phenomenal in the last decade. Dr. Elizabeth Long, a professor of sociology at Rice University, has studied reading groups for more than ten years, and her studies have led her to conclude that reading groups have achieved a status far more important than that granted a leisure activity. Although I utilize many of the ideas from Long's research on reading groups, I also rely upon the findings of Radway (1984) in her study of romance readers. In my study, I combined Long's ideas about reading groups with the work of Radway on romance readers because Radway did not consider the social construction of the reading group in her research, and Long has not studied a reading group devoted specifically to reading romances. Such a combination may expand our understanding of the sustaining popularity of romance novels, a top selling genre, and help explain the growing popularity of reading groups.
Although the growth in the number of reading groups has been significant, reading group members, as consumers of mass-marketed literature, are quite distanced from literary critics, or what I term the determinants of cultural authority. This distance between those who determine cultural authority and those who consume the products of the culture may produce ill consequences for our culture (Long, 1987). My study represented an attempt to: (1) describe the social conditions that may have given rise to the growth in reading groups; (2) discern the ways women readers use romance novels to construct meaning in their lives; and (3) understand the dichotomous relationship between those who represent cultural authority and those who consume mass-marketed literature. For this research, I used a critical ethnographic method because both Radway and Long relied upon an ethnographic approach. Also, I was interested in observing the reading group as they discussed the novels they read because my concern in this research was not merely to describe what readers do but explain why they act as they do.
