These romance readers resent not only the limited choices in their own lives but the patronizing atitude that men especially express toward their reading tastes. That such characters often find themselves to be victims of male aggression and almost always resign themselves to accepting conventional roles in life has less to do, Radway argues, with the women readers' fantasies and choices than with their need to deal with a fear of masculine dominance.

The heroines admired by Radway's group defy the expected stereotypes they are strong, independent, and intelligent. In romances the women find not only escape from the demanding and often tiresome routines of their lives but also a hero who supplies the tenderness and admiring attention that they have learned not to expect. Indeed, Radway found that while the women she studied devote themselves to nurturing their families, these wives and mothers receive insufficient devotion or nurturance in return. ''We read books so we won't cry'' is the poignant explanation one woman offers for her reading habit. Evans defends her customers' choice of entertainment reading romances, she tells Radway, is no more harmful than watching sports on television.

Asking readers themselves to explore their reading motives, habits, and rewards, she conducted interviews in a midwestern town with forty-two romance readers whom she met through Dorothy Evans, a chain bookstore employee who has earned a reputation as an expert on romantic fiction. Radway's provocative approach combines reader-response criticism with anthropology and feminist psychology. Radway questions such claims, arguing that critical attention ''must shift from the text itself, taken in isolation, to the complex social event of reading.'' She examines that event, from the complicated business of publishing and distribution to the individual reader's engagement with the text. They claim that romances enforce the woman reader's dependence on men and acceptance of the repressive ideology purveyed by popular culture. Among those who have disparaged romance reading are feminists, literary critics, and theorists of mass culture. Originally published in 1984, Reading the Romance challenges popular (and often demeaning) myths about why romantic fiction, one of publishing's most lucrative categories, captivates millions of women readers.

Janice a radway