Literature and Agency in English Fiction Reading
Subtitle: A Study of the Henry Williamson Society
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2011
Language: eng
Number of pages: 224
ISBN-13: 9780719084546
Subjects: Reading, research; Books and reading; Reading interests
Description: This book represents the first anthropological study of fiction reading and the first ethnography of British literary culture. It is the outcome of long-term engagement with a set of solitary readers who belong to a single literary society. These men and women celebrate the works of the now often forgotten twentieth century novelist & nature writer Henry Williamson (note: this is not a biography or critical study of the works of a single author). Attention falls on the outcomes of the event of reading, on the agencies that readers identify in the vicinity of literature and on the kinds of literary artefacts (books, land & pasts) these claims reveal. Williamson readers took my inquiries as an invitation to reflect upon the nature of persons and human communication, the form and ownership of mental states, history and the causes of conflict, memory, home, familial relations, the changing state of the British environment and the uses of creativity.