The Romance of Design PDF Download

Author: Janice A. Radway
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807898856
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
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. Among those who have disparaged romance reading are feminists, literary critics, and theorists of mass culture. They claim that romances enforce the woman reader's dependence on men and acceptance of the repressive ideology purveyed by popular culture. 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. Radway's provocative approach combines reader-response criticism with anthropology and feminist psychology. 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. Evans defends her customers' choice of entertainment; reading romances, she tells Radway, is no more harmful than watching sports on television. "We read books so we won't cry" is the poignant explanation one woman offers for her reading habit. 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. 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. The heroines admired by Radway's group defy the expected stereotypes; they are strong, independent, and intelligent. 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. 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. In fact, women read romances both to protest and to escape temporarily the narrowly defined role prescribed for them by a patriarchal culture. Paradoxically, the books that they read make conventional roles for women seem desirable. It is this complex relationship between culture, text, and woman reader that Radway urges feminists to address. Romance readers, she argues, should be encouraged to deliver their protests in the arena of actual social relations rather than to act them out in the solitude of the imagination. In a new introduction, Janice Radway places the book within the context of current scholarship and offers both an explanation and critique of the study's limitations.

Author: Ruby Barrett
Publisher: Harlequin
ISBN: 0369720156
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
A LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST "The feelings in this one are dialed up so high you almost can’t look at them directly: It would be like staring into the sun... Like Rosie Danan or Kate Clayborn, Barrett has a way of making palpable the full journey of a relationship" –New York Times “Simply put, The Romance Recipe is a treat.” –USA TODAY Amy Chambers: restaurant owner, micromanager, control freak. Amy will do anything to revive her ailing restaurant, including hiring a former reality-show finalist with good connections and a lot to prove. But her hopes that Sophie’s skills and celebrity status would bring her restaurant back from the brink of failure are beginning to wane… Sophie Brunet: grump in the kitchen/sunshine in the streets, took thirty years to figure out she was queer. Sophie just wants to cook. She doesn’t want to constantly post on social media for her dead-in-the-water reality TV career, she doesn’t want to deal with Amy’s take-charge personality and she doesn’t want to think about what her attraction to her boss might mean… Then, an opportunity: a new foodie TV show might provide the exposure they need. An uneasy truce is fine for starters, but making their dreams come true means making some personal and painful sacrifices and soon, there’s more than just the restaurant at stake. Carina Adores is home to romantic love stories where LGBTQ+ characters find their happily-ever-afters. Book 1: Hot Copy Book 2: The Romance Recipe

Author: Nina Silber
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 080786448X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
The reconciliation of North and South following the Civil War depended as much on cultural imagination as on the politics of Reconstruction. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Nina Silber documents the transformation from hostile sectionalism to sentimental reunion rhetoric. Northern culture created a notion of reconciliation that romanticized and feminized southern society. In tourist accounts, novels, minstrel shows, and popular magazines, northerners contributed to a mythic and nostalgic picture of the South that served to counter their anxieties regarding the breakdown of class and gender roles in Gilded Age America. Indeed, for many Yankees, the ultimate symbol of the reunion process, and one that served to reinforce Victorian values as well as northern hegemony, was the marriage of a northern man and a southern woman. Southern men also were represented as affirming traditional gender roles. As northern men wrestled with their nation's increasingly global and aggressive foreign policy, the military virtues extolled in Confederate legend became more admired than reviled. By the 1890s, concludes Silber, northern whites had accepted not only a newly resplendent image of Dixie but also a sentimentalized view of postwar reunion.

Author: Bobby Azarian
Publisher: BenBella Books
ISBN: 1637740441
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Why do we exist? For centuries, this question was the sole province of religion and philosophy. But now science is ready to take a seat at the table. According to the prevailing scientific paradigm, the universe tends toward randomness; it functions according to laws without purpose, and the emergence of life is an accident devoid of meaning. But this bleak interpretation of nature is currently being challenged by cutting-edge findings at the intersection of physics, biology, neuroscience, and information theory—generally referred to as “complexity science.” Thanks to a new understanding of evolution, as well as recent advances in our understanding of the phenomenon known as emergence, a new cosmic narrative is taking shape: Nature’s simplest “parts” come together to form ever-greater “wholes” in a process that has no end in sight. In The Romance of Reality, cognitive neuroscientist Bobby Azarian explains the science behind this new view of reality and explores what it means for all of us. In engaging, accessible prose, Azarian outlines the fundamental misunderstanding of thermodynamics at the heart of the old assumptions about the universe’s evolution, and shows us the evidence that suggests that the universe is a “self-organizing” system, one that is moving toward increasing complexity and awareness. Cosmologist and science communicator Carl Sagan once said of humanity that “we are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” The Romance of Reality shows that this poetic statement in fact rests on a scientific foundation and gives us a new way to know the cosmos, along with a riveting vision of life that imbues existence with meaning—nothing supernatural required.

Author: Catherine M. Roach
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253020522
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
"Find your one true love and live happily ever after." The trials of love and desire provide perennial story material, from the Biblical Song of Songs to Disney's princesses, but perhaps most provocatively in the romance novel, a genre known for tales of fantasy and desire, sex and pleasure. Hailed on the one hand for its women-centered stories that can be sexually liberating, and criticized on the other for its emphasis on male/female coupling and mythical happy endings, romance fiction is a multi-million dollar publishing phenomenon, creating national and international societies of enthusiasts, practitioners, and scholars. Catherine M. Roach, alongside her romance-writer alter-ego, Catherine LaRoche, guides the reader deep into Romancelandia where the smart and the witty combine with the sexy and seductive to explore why this genre has such a grip on readers and what we can learn from the romance novel about the nature of happiness, love, sex, and desire in American popular culture.

Author: Gwen Hayes
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781530838615
Category : Romance fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
What makes a romance novel a romance? How do you write a kissing book?Writing a well-structured romance isn't the same as writing any other genre-something the popular novel and screenwriting guides don't address. The romance arc is made up of its own story beats, and the external plot and theme need to be braided to the romance arc-not the other way around.Told in conversational (and often irreverent) prose, Romancing the Beat can be read like you are sitting down to coffee with romance editor and author Gwen Hayes while she explains story structure. The way she does with her clients. Some of whom are regular inhabitants of the New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists.Romancing the Beat is a recipe, not a rigid system. The beats don't care if you plot or outline before you write, or if you pants your way through the drafts and do a "beat check" when you're revising. Pantsers and plotters are both welcome. So sit down, grab a cuppa, and let's talk about kissing books.

Author: Garnet Warren
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Decoration and ornament
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Author: Gordon Home
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : London (England)
Languages : en
Pages : 98

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Author: Trisha Telep
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1849012571
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 652

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Time travel romance is not the same thing as sci-fi romance, though some stories may be set in an imagined future; it is romantic fiction set in various different eras, usually from around the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. A woman may fall asleep in Central Park in the present to wake up in the arms of a Scottish laird in the sixteenth century. The Mammoth Book of Time Travel Romance contains 25 stories of adventure and love; settings include medieval Scotland, sixteenth-century England, the nineteenth-century 'Wild West'. Some stories are set in the present and a few in the future. Stories include an Elizabethan nobleman whisked into the present day, a troubled young woman who lands in the sixteenth century able to break a curse of lost love. Includes stories from: Nina Bangs, Jude Deveraux, Sandra Hill, Linda Howard, Lynn Kurland, Karen Marie Moning, and many more.

Author: Ann Ward Radcliffe
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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