In Janice Radway’s classic Reading the Romance of 1984, she referred to the romance-purchasing customers of a small-town bookstore as a “female community … mediated by the distances of modern mass publishing. Despite the distance, the Smithton women feel personally connected to their favorite authors because they are convinced that these writers know how to make them happy” (Radway 1991, 97).
Reading the Romance is an important work because it gave attention to an otherwise dismissed genre and conceived of the readership as a community, even if only vaguely. Radway partly improved on this in her 1991 edition, admitting her theorization of community was “somewhat anemic in that it fails to specify precisely how membership in the romance-reading community is constituted.” Radway conceded the concept of an “interpretative community” (previously used to refer to critics and scholars of literature) might help, but “it cannot do complete justice to the nature of the connection between social location and the complex process of interpretation” (Radway 1991, 8).
This notion of “interpretive community” was coined in the seven years between her first and second editions. And, as she noted, it wasn’t a great fit. An “interpretive community” is a “collectivity of people who share strategies for interpreting, using, and engaging in communication about a media text or technology” (Lindlof 1988, 2002). Radway’s subjects shared little of this.
Rather, Radway was speaking of parasocial relationships between the readers and the author where mass media permit an “illusion of a face-to-face relationship with the performer” (Horton and Wohl 1956, 215)—the authors, in Radway’s case.
It’s interesting that while the concept of parasociality had existed for decades, Radway overlooked it and instead reached for the wrong one: interpretive communities.
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