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CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY
The Cultural
Sociology of
Reading
The Meanings of Reading and
Books Across the World
Edited by
María Angélica Thumala Olave
Cultural Sociology
Series Editors
Jeffrey C. Alexander
Center for Cultural Sociology
Yale University
New Haven, CT, USA
Ron Eyerman
Center for Cultural Sociology
Yale University
New Haven, CT, USA
David Inglis
Department of Sociology
University of Helsinki
Helsinki, Finland
Philip Smith
Center for Cultural Sociology
Yale University
New Haven, CT, USA
Cultural sociology is widely acknowledged as one of the most vibrant areas
of inquiry in the social sciences across the world today. The Palgrave
Macmillan Series in Cultural Sociology is dedicated to the proposition that
deep meanings make a profound difference in social life. Culture is not
simply the glue that holds society together, a crutch for the weak, or a
mystifying ideology that conceals power. Nor is it just practical knowl-
edge, dry schemas, or know how. The series demonstrates how shared and
circulating patterns of meaning actively and inescapably penetrate the
social. Through codes and myths, narratives and icons, rituals and repre-
sentations, these culture structures drive human action, inspire social
movements, direct and build institutions, and so come to shape history.
The series takes its lead from the cultural turn in the humanities, but insists
on rigorous social science methods and aims at empirical explanations.
Contributions engage in thick interpretations but also account for behav-
ioral outcomes. They develop cultural theory but also deploy middle-
range tools to challenge reductionist understandings of how the world
actually works. In so doing, the books in this series embody the spirit of
cultural sociology as an intellectual enterprise.
María Angélica Thumala Olave
Editor
The Cultural
Sociology of Reading
The Meanings of Reading and Books Across
the World
Editor
María Angélica Thumala Olave
School of Social and Political Science
University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh, UK
Cultural Sociology
ISBN 978-3-031-13226-1 ISBN 978-3-031-13227-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13227-8
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2022
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
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known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgments
v
About This Book
vii
Praise for The Cultural Sociology of Reading
“Reading is the interplay between embodied texts and human beings. It takes
place in landscapes of politics, economics, emotions, memories, and hierarchies of
both social power and cultural prestige. The essays in The Cultural Sociology of
Reading untangle this rather mysterious practice. More, they exemplify what the
best sociology can do: They situate readers within specific local and global con-
texts, among unevenly distributed material and intellectual affordances, and then
explore and illuminate what happens.”
—Wendy Griswold, Professor of Sociology and Bergen Evans
Professor in the Humanities, Northwestern University, USA
“The book edited by María Angélica Thumala Olave is a major contribution to the
study of the book and its multiple appropriations, a particularly dynamic and fertile
sector of cultural sociology. Thanks to the quality of the chapters, it succeeds in the
tour de force of making us understand, in relation to varied national contexts,
periods and types of texts, the meaning and functions, from the most political to
the most intimate, of an object as central in the history of humanity as the book.”
—Bernard Lahire, Professor of Sociology, École
Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France
“Why does reading matter? What are the individual and social uses, practices and
values of reading? This book answers these questions on a global scale. The case
studies and genres covered-- novels, zines, erotic literature, religious booklets,
popular media narratives— from around the world offer a richly heterogeneous
panorama of reading from the nineteenth century to the present. Bringing together
sociology and cultural studies, the authors illuminate the spaces, politics, ethics,
materiality, affect, and embodiment of reading.”
—Marcy Schwartz, Professor and Chair of the Department of Spanish and
Portuguese, Rutgers University, USA
1 Introduction 1
María Angélica Thumala Olave
2 Reading
Matters: Toward a Cultural Sociology of Reading 19
María Angélica Thumala Olave
3 Why
Do People Read Zines? Meaning, Materiality and
Cultures of Reading 65
Ash Watson and Andy Bennett
4 Between
Self and Other: Anaïs Nin’s Transformative
Erotics 91
Jessica Widner
5 The
Sociological Truth of Fiction: The Aesthetic
Structure of a Novel and the Iconic Experience of Reading111
Jan Váňa
xi
xii Contents
6 Book
Love: Attachment to Books in the United Kingdom141
María Angélica Thumala Olave
7 Easy
to Handle and Travel with: Swahili Booklets and
Transoceanic Reading Experiences in the Indian Ocean
Littoral169
Annachiara Raia
8 Spatial
Reading: Evaluative Frameworks and the Making
of Literary Authority211
Günter Leypoldt
9 Editor’s
Love: Matching, Reading, and the Editorial
Self-concept249
Joshua B. Silver and Claudio E. Benzecry
10 Reviewing
Strategies and the Normalization of Uncertain
Texts275
Álvaro Santana-Acuña
11 Customer
Reviews of “highbrow” Literature: A
Comparative Reception Study of The Inheritance of Loss
and The White Tiger309
Daniel Allington
12 A
Self Enlarged by Fiction343
Cristina Vischer Bruns
13 Reading,
Novels and the Ethics of Sociability: Taking
Simmel to an Independent English Bookshop361
Daniel R. Smith
Contents xiii
14 The
Value of Books and Reading as Social Practices in
Nineteenth-Century Chile: The Perspectives of
Government and Citizens385
Juan Poblete
15 Between
Avant-Garde and Kitsch: Intellectual Bookstores
and Post-Mao China’s Reading Culture413
Eve Yi Lin
16 The
Politics of Happily-Ever-After: Romance Genre
Fiction as Aesthetic Public Sphere453
Anna Michelson
17 Clandestine
Reading Practice in the Chinese Cultural
Revolution497
Eddy U
18 The
Decline of Literary Reading and the Rise of the
Literal Mind525
Omid Azadibougar
19 The
Functions of Reading in Chinese Literature and
Society551
Lena Henningsen
Index577
Notes on Contributors
xv
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
of the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology, an adjunct of the Institute for
Sociology at the University of Porto, an international research fellow of
the Finnish Youth Research Network, a founding member of the
Consortium for Youth, Generations and Culture, and a founding member
of the Regional Music Research Group. He is the co-founder and co-
convenor of the biennial KISMIF (Keep it Simple, Make it Fast) conference.
Claudio E. Benzecry is Associate Professor of Communication Studies
and Sociology (courtesy) at Northwestern University, USA. He is a soci-
ologist interested in culture, arts, knowledge, and globalization. He is the
author of The Opera Fanatic: Ethnography of an Obsession (2011); editor
of three volumes on theory, culture, and knowledge, including Social
Theory Now (with Monika Krause and Isaac Reed, 2017); and has written
articles on sociological theory, sociology of culture, and the arts in venues
such as Sociological Theory, Theory, Culture & Society, British Journal of
Sociology, and Theory & Society. His latest book is The Perfect Fit: Creative
Work in the Global Shoe Industry (2022).
Cristina Vischer Bruns is Associate Professor of English at LaGuardia
Community College, City University of New York, USA. Her scholarship
focuses on the experience of reading fiction and its effects, and on peda-
gogy. She is the author of Why Literature? The Value of Literary Reading
and What It Means for Teaching and articles in Narrative and the Journal
of Aesthetic Education.
Lena Henningsen is a junior professor at the University of Freiburg,
Germany, where she currently leads the ERC-funded interdisciplinary
project “The Politics of Reading in the People’s Republic of China”
(https://readchina.github.io). From 2013 to 2018, she was an elected
member of the German Young Academy. In her research, Henningsen
approaches Chinese literary culture from a multitude of angles, including
practices of reading and writing. Her work has been published widely
across peer-reviewed journals (including Modern Chinese Literature and
Culture [MCLC]), edited volumes, handbooks (Routledge Handbook of
Modern Chinese Literature), and open-access resources (MCLC Resource
Center, ReadAct Database). Her first monograph (2010) tackles ques-
tions of creativity and authenticity on the early 2000s bestseller market
and her second book (Cultural Revolution Manuscripts: Unofficial
Entertainment Fiction from 1970s China, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)
focuses on underground entertainment literature from the 1970s. She is
the editor of the Practices and Politics of Reading in China book series.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xvii
Fig. 3.1 A collection of zines, sourced from the 2019 National Young
Writers Festival zine fair in Newcastle, Australia 66
Fig. 3.2 A page from the zine I <3 Succulents volume 1 by Rae White 73
Fig. 3.3 A page from Honeyed Talcum Stems by Ella Barrowclough
(and Jacob Dawson-Daley) 76
Fig. 3.4 A page from Hands by Lily Cameron 78
Fig. 3.5 The zine Soft drink in New Zealand: A highly subjective guide 83
Fig. 5.1 Social knowledge mediated by the iconic experience of reading 121
Fig. 5.2 The aesthetic structure of the text 122
Fig. 7.1 a–b. Front and back cover of a very small booklet, showing
ads for the bookshops Hebrahim Kitabwalla and Sidik
Mubarak. (Leiden Special Collections, ISIMUB 8453 D 1319;
photos by the author) 177
Fig. 7.2 a–b. Front and back cover plus closing page of Mtume wa
Muhammad katika vitabu vitakatifu (“The Prophet
Muhammad in Christian Books”), by Sheikh Al-Amin Mazrui.
Mombasa: East African Muslim Welfare Society, printed by
The Platinum Printers Ltd., 1962. 17 pp.; 19 cm (height).
(The booklet is in Swahili, but the society list and message are
in English. The numbers in the right column are the book
prices, ranging from 0.60 to max. 2.50 KES (about 0.41 to
1.70 GBP). (Leiden Special Collections, ISIMUB 8453 D 19;
photos by the author)) 179
Fig. 7.3 a–b. Swahili title on cover: Dua za kupata Baraka: duniani na
akhera (“Prayers to Obtain Blessings: in this world and
hearafter”) 1984. 23 pp.; 20 cm (length). Bottom page:
Collector [of the prayers] and translator Sheikh Saidi Musa.
xxi
xxii List of Figures
Fig. 11.4 Mean rating by calendar year, IoL and WT 324
Fig. 11.5 Mean centred rating for top 25 positive and negative
keywords, IoL and WT 328
Fig. 15.1 “Inside of All-Sages Books” 428
Fig. 15.2 “Inside of Libraire Avant-Garde” 436
Fig. 15.3 “Volumes of Bob Dylan’s Poetry Designed like Bags of Crisps” 441
Fig. 15.4 “Box of Desserts Designed like a Book” 442
Fig. 15.5 “Room Decorations Described by Tagore’s Poetry” 442
Fig. 15.6 “Packages of ‘Blind Choice’ Books” 443
List of Tables
xxv
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
This edited collection showcases recent work about reading and books
across the globe by scholars in sociology, literature and area studies. From
different theoretical standpoints and using a range of methodologies, the
18 chapters engage with the broad perspective of the cultural sociology of
reading. The cultural sociology of reading studies reading as a social prac-
tice and places meaning, emotions and materiality at the centre of the
analysis. It examines the valuations, attractions and influence of texts and
books in a way that incorporates their sacred status, social history and
transformative power without reducing their import to the conditions of
texts’ production and consumption or seeing them as simple signs of the
Parts of the presentation of the six chapters originally published in the American
Journal of Cultural Sociology’s Special issue on The Cultural Sociology of Reading
draw from my editorial introduction to the issue (Exploring the Sacrality of
Reading as a Social Practice). Those parts are reproduced with permission from
Springer Nature.
text or the reader’s social position (Thumala Olave 2018, 2020, 2021;
Alexander and Smith 2003). The approach focuses on the existential, ethi-
cal and political consequences of the aesthetic encounter between reader
and textual object in particular locations and historical moments.
The works included in the book cover the Anglophone area of the
United States, the United Kingdom and Australia; the transnational, mul-
tilingual space constituted by the readership of Colombian author Gabriel
García Márquez; nineteenth-century Chile; twentieth-century Czech
Republic; Swahili readers in East Africa in the twentieth century; contem-
porary Iran, and China during the Cultural Revolution and the post-Mao
period. The authors examine a range of reading practices and modes of
reading (e.g. leisure, professional, political, normative, clandestine);
genres (e.g. literary, science fiction, romance, religious literature); textual
objects (e.g. books, manuscripts, zines, letters, religious booklets, penny
leaflets, narratives in videogames and films) and reading spaces (e.g.
homes, bookstores, publishers’ offices, detention centres).
The chapters contribute to debates about the valuation of literature and
the role of cultural intermediaries; the iconic properties of textual objects
and of the practice of reading itself; how reading supports personal, social
and political reflection, emotional connection and self-fashioning; book-
stores as spaces for sociability, individuality and the interplay of high and
popular cultures; the political uses of reading for nation-building, propa-
ganda and subject formation; and the dangers and gratifications of reading
under state systems of surveillance and repression. Across the book, there
is no essentialist stance about reading as an unproblematic vehicle for
development or a carrier of modernisation. Neither is the juxtaposition of
studies meant to establish comparisons between more or less literate soci-
eties or cultures in order to give a global panorama of the evolution of
‘reading’ as a homogenous practice from the nineteenth century to the
present moment. Instead, each author pays careful attention to the specific
circumstances under which varieties of reading and interactions with texts
take place in their chosen cases and to the different individual and collec-
tive meanings emerging from those encounters. If there is one shared
assumption running across the book it is that readers are selves with an
interiority, and that the embodied aesthetic events of handling, reading,
remembering and talking about texts shape these selves in both willed and
unexpected forms through the meanings produced in these interactions.
The meanings of the encounters between readers and textual objects,
and between readers and other readers and institutions are organised in
1 INTRODUCTION 3
five parts. Part I outlines the project of the cultural sociology of reading.
In Chap. 2, entitled “Reading Matters. Towards a Cultural Sociology of
Reading”, I offer a critical review of the best and most influential existing
sociological work on reading, including work in the tradition of cultural
studies, the research by scholars who follow Pierre Bourdieu and field
analysis, and the research about the institutional bases of reading and
books’ circulation, with which this project shares a concern with meaning-
making. That third type of scholarship has been especially influenced by
Wendy Griswold’s seminal studies of reading and literature. This book also
owes a great deal to her work, in particular the attention to reading prac-
tices, reading infrastructures and reading cultures beyond the “global
north”. The cultural sociology of reading builds on the work by Griswold
and other sociologists and scholars in the humanities and seeks to bring to
the fore more forcefully the affective, ethical and existential dimensions of
reading and the interaction with textual objects (Thumala Olave 2021). In
Chap. 2 the theoretical proposal for a novel cultural sociology of reading
springs from and seeks to interpret the accounts of avid female readers of
fiction in the United Kingdom for whom reading is a support for life
rather than a debilitating or alienating, simply escapist pursuit.
Part II is about the experiences of books as iconic objects and of the
practice of reading itself as iconic of social life. The contributions in this
section demonstrate the centrality of the material surfaces of books and
textual objects and how the sensorial intermingles and fuses with
communication.
In Chap. 3 (“Why Do People Read Zines? Meaning, Materiality and
Cultures of Reading”) Ash Watson and Andy Bennett advance one of the
central concerns of the cultural sociology of reading, the study of how
materiality matters in the relationship between readers and textual objects.
Watson and Bennett study the practice of reading zines in Australia as a
material/discursive, affective experience that is shaped by the iconic prop-
erties of these DIY objects. Reverberating through the zines’ content
(mundane observations about plants, fruits or soda cans, the everyday
experience of cancer) and surface form (simple objects that require low
levels of skill or material resources) are the deep meanings of the punk and
feminist history of zines, the value of participatory politics and the counter-
cultural resignification of production and consumption as active, intimate
and intense. As material objects, zines represent a DIY ethos and aesthetic
and an anti-mainstream positioning, the commitment to these values
among makers, readers and collectors. But as I argue for books (see Chap.
4 M. A. THUMALA OLAVE
Handke “difficult”) and the amoral, formal criteria of the “state of the
art” which justify the prize.
One notable instantiation of the professional ethos outlined by Leypoldt
is arguably Douglas, “Doug”, Mitchell (1943–2019), acquisitions editor
in sociology at the University of Chicago Press for 41 years. In Chap. 9,
“Editor’s Love: Matching, Reading, and the Editorial Self-Concept”,
Joshua B. Silver and Claudio E. Benzecry explore Mitchell’s influential
role as a gatekeeper and intellectual companion, who supported authors in
the publication of over one thousand books. Their argument is that
Mitchell’s distinctive and much-loved editorial style was consistent over
time, in spite of various contextual changes in the publishing field, and
that this style was grounded in Mitchell’s self-concept as a philosophical
pluralist in the pragmatist tradition. The reading in this case is less an indi-
vidual act by the editor than an extended network of readers that form a
community in the image of Mitchell’s self-concept as someone committed
to the creative power of rhetoric and friendship for the communication
between philosophical traditions. Because of the numbers involved, acqui-
sitions editors cannot read each manuscript themselves. Instead, a group
of “worthy” readers report on the dozens of manuscripts the editor is
simultaneously shepherding towards publication. Mitchell’s work ethic
and personality are theorised in the chapter as the intellectual and emo-
tional force behind the collective construction of a scientific field.
According to Michell himself his role was akin to that of the drummer in
a jazz band, which he actually was when he played every Sunday in
Chicago, “holding down the rhythm and pace”. One of the contributions
of this chapter to the cultural sociology of reading lies in its attention to
the affective dimension of the process of match-making between editor
and author as distinct from role performance or instrumental behaviour,
in particular how Mitchell’s sense of self shaped his attachment to authors
and intellectual projects.
In Chap. 10, “Reviewing Strategies and the Normalization of Uncertain
Texts” Álvaro Santana–Acuña examines the role of cultural intermediaries
in the classification and valuation of literature. He asks how reviewers
reduce complexity in the face of uncertainty and how the reconciliation of
heterogeneous interpretations of texts occurs transnationally. Santana–
Acuña uses the case of Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez’s 1967
novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien Años de Soledad) to analyse
how the first professional reviewers in various countries handled the uncer-
tainty posed by the novel, which was written by a little-known author,
8 M. A. THUMALA OLAVE
Chinese intellectual elites about culture’s autonomy, on the one hand, and
what they see as the market’s co-optation of culture in the service of a
mass consumer society, on the other. According to Lin, this opposition is
represented by the avant-garde and the kitsch, respectively, as are the ethos
and style of the two bookshops in her ethnography. In the chapter the
term avant-garde refers to the intellectual activity of the 1980s, including
the “reading fever” and interest in Western high modernism and existen-
tialist philosophy ushered in by the end of the Cultural Revolution. The
kitsch refers to the consumer culture that emerged during the 1990s. Lin
shows how the two bookshops perform their commitment to intellectual
life differently through their catalogue, layout and feel and how they are
conceptualized and evaluated by their owners and customers. This reveals
how interdependent the two ethos are, and how porous the boundaries
between them. The now rare intellectual bookstore with its high culture
ideals was possible because of the same social and economic transforma-
tion that paved the way for the more numerous commercial bookshops.
Lin’s argument is that the reading cultures that bookshops sustain are
shifting as the meanings of the avant-garde, as a non-conformist and criti-
cal intellectual movement and aesthetic style, are hollowed out and become
mere signifiers.
Part V is concerned with modes of reading, the state and the public
sphere. A long-standing theme in the study of reading and the history of
the book has been the political significance of books and the attempts by
governments and political parties to control what people read through
propaganda, censorship and repression. Reading also plays a crucial role in
the formation and development of public spheres. The chapters in this
final section present cultural sociological evidence of readers’ creativity
and attachment to particular texts and to textually inspired dialogue.
Anna Michelson’s contribution is entitled “The Politics of Happily-
Ever-After: Romance Genre Fiction as Aesthetic Public Sphere” (Chap.
16). Michelson explores the meanings of romance novels for readers in the
United States. These readers are drawn to the genre for similar reasons to
those documented in previous research on romance reading—the desire
to explore and learn about relationships and sex, the allure of getting lost
in a gripping story as a way to escape the grudge of domestic or work life,
and the reassurance and hope contained in the happy ending that is the
defining feature of the genre. Michelson’s analysis, however, goes further
than confirming the prevalence of these motives among her readers. She
examines how readers understand the genre in relation to socio-political
12 M. A. THUMALA OLAVE
issues and the normative debates about whether romance should incorpo-
rate political and social themes or be about entertainment alone. Michelson
extends the concept of the aesthetic public sphere (Jacobs 2012) to the
case of romance readers and writers. She argues that the experience of
reading popular romance fiction creates a space for political discourse both
within the pages of the novels and within the community of romance read-
ers and writers, even when the expectations set by the formal features of
the genre require a central love story and a happy ending. In line with the
cultural sociology of reading, the chapter shirks the opposition between
domination and resistance and posits that “entertainment, as a temporary
retreat, can complement engagement” (p. 30) with socio-political issues.
Michelson’s piece speaks to another central concern of the cultural
sociology of reading. The role of pleasure as a key feature of and justifica-
tion for reading. I have argued that the overall positive affective states that
reading affords together with books’ content equip readers with devices to
fashion and refigure their subjectivity while caring for themselves and
relating to others (Thumala Olave Chap. 2 in this volume). In Michelson’s
study, reading romance is explicitly valued as a way to “escape” to alterna-
tive, fictional scenarios. What is notable is that the reasons why these read-
ers want to go into the imaginary worlds in the novels that they most
appreciate are anything but mindless or banal. As Leypoldt shows in Chap.
8, readers’ stance shifts between modes of strong and weak evaluation.
Here one of the most devalued genres (which from the perspective of lit-
erary institutions would be apt for a regime of weak evaluation akin to the
unjustifiable preference for one flavour of ice cream over another) is in fact
the object of strong evaluation. The content of these readers’ aspirations,
the things they most care about and about which (or with which) they are
passionate (Gomart and Hennion 1999) include the establishment of a
meaningful romantic relationship, personal development and the continu-
ance of hope. Michelson’s chapter demonstrates that the quintessentially
escapist and regressive genre of romance fiction can generate a space, both
personal and institutional, for the examination and debate of serious polit-
ical and social issues: the threats to democracy, racism and oppressive gen-
der norms.
In Chap. 18 “The Decline of Literary Reading and the Rise of the
Literal Mind”, Omid Azadibougar adopts a very different stance to that of
Michelson’s (Chap. 16) towards romance reading and other popular
genres in Iran. His concern is with the dangers of uncritical, immersive
engagement with texts which may support the state’s ideological
1 INTRODUCTION 13
poetry, letters and notes. His answer is that these reading practices lead to
sustained healing, safety and romantic love. These three sacred goods,
while not obtained without a personal cost for them or their loved ones,
trumped the fear of reprisals and gave meaning to these writers’ lives. The
strategies deployed by these readers in order to conceal, remove, pass on
or destroy texts and the existential and emotional impact of being able to
read, re-read, discuss and remember are excellent illustrations of aesthetic
immersion in textual objects which are apprehended in a dual process of
subjectification (making the object our own) and objectification (submit-
ting to the object’s affordances and losing oneself in it) (Alexander 2008,
Thumala Olave Chap. 6 in this volume). A letter is kept hidden under the
clothes for days until it becomes part of the body, the emotional force of
its content reignites a bond with a loved one that seemed fragile in the face
of others’ betrayal.
In the final chapter (Chap. 19), Lena Henningsen discusses the “The
Functions of Reading in Chinese Literature and Society”. Henningsen
focuses on the modes of normative reading in which the population was
educated at the behest of both early twentieth-century reformers and
communist revolutionaries of the twenty-first century. The chapter traces
the impact of key Maoist literary dogmas on the ways in which literature
was produced and consumed. Her argument is that while normative read-
ing spread as a result of the literary policies of the Chinese Communist
Party, the very literary forms used to instruct readers contained the seeds
for its critique. The socialist realist heroes who subordinated their needs to
the revolution were to be adopted by readers as models for their own lives.
The authors of these works were expected to incorporate in their fictional
narratives reading acts by these model heroes, often of canonical texts.
This device placed these model actors within the Chinese tradition of ven-
eration for the written text and in a network of intertextuality. According
to Henningsen, this intertextuality facilitated the critical examination,
interpretation and resignification of these stories and of the role of reading
itself. The chapter speaks to the cultural sociology of reading by consider-
ing the interplay between cognition and emotion, between the literary
techniques in the textual object and the situated responses to it. It also
foregrounds the capacity of readers to challenge official interpretations of
texts and, like Eddy U’s writers (Chap. 17), to seek out forbidden materi-
als because of their intellectual, ethical and aesthetic appeal.
1 INTRODUCTION 15
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PART I
1 Introduction
What are the uses and consequences of reading fiction among women?
Why does their reading matter to them? The practice of reading fiction
among women readers in the UK shows that reading is a pleasurable activ-
ity which enables self-understanding, ethical reflection, and self-care.
Reading is “equipment for living” (Burke 1998) that helps people make
sense of themselves and the world around them as well as care for them-
selves. The effects of reading result from the act of reading itself and from
the content of what is read.
Because fiction is the preferred genre among women, the accounts by
participants in this research tend to focus on novels and other forms of
2 The Research
Research has shown that women read more and read more fiction
(Griswold et al. 2005; Bennett et al. 2010; NEA 2015; DCMS
2016/2017). Yet there is little sociological work about the subjective and
existential meanings of the experience of reading. What is the impact of
reading fiction intensively? Does reading for entertainment provide
women readers with anything other than momentary pleasure?
Intensity refers to the number of books reported as read and the quali-
tative strength of the identification with the label of reader. The analysis is
based on three data sources, summarized in Table 2.1, below. One is a set
of in-depth interviews with 13 women readers conducted in Edinburgh
during June and July of 2015 and January and February of 2016. The
interview participants were recruited through Meetup reading groups,
Edinburgh City Council, and Edinburgh Central Library. A follow-up set
of questions was sent via email to all interviewees, six of whom responded.
The second set of data was obtained from participation in three meet-
ings with two women’s groups during the same period as the interviews.
Participation in the women’s groups (which are not reading groups but
who agreed to discuss books for the research) took place at a community
center in Edinburgh.
To secure a variety of socio-economic backgrounds interview and group
participants were screened and selected on the basis of a combination of
22 M. A. THUMALA OLAVE
A full list of questions and codes for analysis is available from the author
a
1
Permission to use the Mass Observation material has been granted by the Trustees of the
Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex.
2
For an analysis of the methodological issues in researching M-O material, see Bloome
et al. (1993). For a digital archive with responses to reading materials in Britain between
1450 and 1945, see the Reading Experience Database, RED, managed by the Open
University, http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/UK/index.php.
2 READING MATTERS: TOWARD A CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY OF READING 23
collected from The Keep, the Archive of the M-O project at the University
of Sussex, England, where they were scanned for later conversion into
text-readable files for analysis.3
The M-O responses are valuable because they give access to rich descrip-
tions of everyday life in the UK as seen by correspondents from a variety
of backgrounds. The responses are rather brief (between one paragraph
and one full page) and can be quite schematic. Written responses do not
answer further questions nor do they give access to the body language and
clues available to researchers in in-depth interviews, which would permit
further exploration of the “emotional landscape” where reading is situated
(Pugh 2013).4 Nonetheless, the M-O material provides an excellent com-
plement to the interview and group material when exploring the personal
and social role of reading and books in Britain across a variety of social
categories and geographical locations.
The numbers of books read by participants ranges between two and 26
over the past six months in the case of the groups and between two per
month and over 100 a year in the M-O and interview data. Within fiction
as the preferred genre, participants report reading, in particular, romance,
historical romance, crime, horror, classical and contemporary literary fic-
tion, fantasy, and science fiction. These imaginative stories are read for
entertainment and pleasure as distinct from reading for work or education.
The category of fiction follows the readers’ common understanding of
it as an imaginative or “made up” story that follows certain conventions
around plot, character presentation, narrative structure of beginning, mid-
dle, and end, and that for the most part does not relate “real” events. The
categories of fiction/nonfiction, in turn, are usually based on commercial
labeling of genres rather than on the distinctions and debates within liter-
ary theory. While the preferred and most discussed genre is fiction,
enchantment can be produced by all kinds of stories, so the analysis does
not exclude accounts by readers about the impact of other forms, such as
memoirs, for example, although these are less prominent.
Some of the intensive readers whose accounts are examined in this
research can be seen as belonging to what Wendy Griswold has called “the
3
Interviews and group meetings were audio-recorded and professionally transcribed. All
material was coded and analyzed as one single data set using Nvivo. Questions and codes are
available upon request.
4
Street (1984) and his collaborators carried out interviews with M-O respondents but the
focus was on writing practices. See, for example, Bloome et al. (1997).
24 M. A. THUMALA OLAVE
reading class” (Griswold 2000; Griswold et al. 2005). The reading class is
a minority of people who read books for pleasure on a regular basis. In
addition to being highly educated, the members of the reading class tend
to be affluent, white, women, and urban. The notion of the reading class
reflects the division between “reading as a matter-of-fact practice of just
about everyone and the reading of literature, serious nonfiction, and the
quality press as an esteemed, cultivated, supported practice of an educated
elite” (Griswold et al. 2005: 139).
The data shows that reading matters beyond “the reading class,” among
individuals with high and low levels of education and who read all sorts of
books, not just serious literature (Table 2.2, below, presents the character-
istics of the readers). However, even if every reader fell into the category
of the reading class the existing conceptual apparatus available for study-
ing reading would fail to give a proper account of the impact of reading
for them. The significance of reading for life is not dependent on tastes or
levels of education or income and its impact is visible regardless of the
social position of the reader. Reading can make any reader leave their situ-
ation, both literally and imaginatively. Why then focus on the social cate-
gory of gender and on women in particular?
The focus on women’s reading practices in this chapter is justified for
two principal reasons. The first, already noted, is the higher frequency of
reading for leisure and reading fiction in particular among women. It
makes sense to begin an exploration of why reading fiction matters by
concentrating on the most avid consumers of the genre. The second
reason is that women’s reading has historically taken place within a set of
shifting normative constraints and regulations around piety, domesticity,
community life, education, or sexuality, to name just a few (e.g. Pearson
1999; Flint 1993; Rose 2001; Long 2003). Women’s reading has been
cast in ways that range from helpless vulnerability to frivolous escapism to
sensual self-indulgence (Flint 1993, 2006). These portrayals and the cul-
tural codes that they mobilize make reading for pleasure arguably more
problematic than for men. What women do with their reading, in the
context of long-lasting constraints within both their cultures and them-
selves about what is desirable and good, reveals much about their agency
in contemporary British society.
5
The classification of a variety of different studies into two broad categories inevitably
glosses over important theoretical and methodological differences between them. These vari-
ous works share a stance or a way of looking at the cultural practice of reading that justifies
this categorization. Some of the works discussed are not by sociologists but by literary schol-
ars interested in sociological questions. And while the Bourdieusian approach could be seen
as a variant of the “social practice” approach, it is considered separately because there is a
group of studies that seek specifically to apply and expand Bourdieu’s conceptual apparatus
to the practice of reading.
26 M. A. THUMALA OLAVE
6
See Graff (1979) for the classic critique of this idea and a revised version in Graff (2010).
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