Literature and Agency in English Fiction Reading: A Study of the Henry Williamson Society

Literature and Agency in English Fiction Reading opens up an exciting new area for research at the intersection of literature and anthropology. The first ethnographic study of fiction reading by an anthropologist, it explores a unique literary society celebrating largely forgotten twentieth-century writer Henry Williamson (1895–1977).

Adam Reed explores topics including the extent to which readers' beliefs and practices affect their attitudes toward the material culture of reading and the ways in which books are imbued with greater significance than other objects found in readers' homes. Reed highlights the connections between the pleasures of the individual experience of reading and the development of a sense of responsibility to a reading community. Expanding the disciplinary boundaries of book history and reception studies, Literature and Agency in English Fiction Reading introduces an innovative new methodology for studying reading communities.