An ethnographic exploration of the actual practices of romance novel readers suggests not only the ways in which female readers interpret and use these texts for their own purposes; it also suggests common ground between ideological positions where feminist critics and female audiences may come together to transform the social and material relations that affect women’s lives. In discussing the work of Kenneth Burke in his recent book, Criticism and Social Change, Frank Lentricchia has argued that one of the principal lessons Burke has to teach us is that a real revolutionary rhetoric “must take pains not to rupture itself from the historico-rhetorical mainstream of American social and political values”. The ultimate conclusion one might draw from this review of the profoundly interpretive character of the ethnographic process is the observation that cultural knowledge is always produced contextually by an already situated analyst for particular purposes.
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