Abstract
Literary festivals are complex and widespread, and attract huge numbers of audience members every year. They are used by publishers as marketing exercises, funded by education- or tourism-conscious governments, and consumed as cultural products in their own rights. This chapter defines and provides a brief contextual history of contemporary literary festivals. It provides a brief introduction to configuring forces, developed and analysed in full later in the volume, that shape the ways these festivals function, including personal meaningfulness, digital disruption, political involvement, and social exclusion.
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Notes
- 1.
A recording of this event is available on the website of the Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference, which organised this and a number of other sessions at literary festivals around the world in 2012–2013. The event recording is here: http://www.edinburghworldwritersconference.org/should-literature-be-political/lohrey-diaz-should-literature-be-political/ and the transcript of Lohrey’s keynote address is here: http://www.edinburghworldwritersconference.org/should-literature-be-political/lohrey-in-australia-keynote-on-should-literature-be-political/
- 2.
The case studies chosen are all anglophone literary festivals. The key factor guiding this limitation is practicality: both my ability to travel to other festival locations and my ability to interview in languages other than English were very limited. The choice of case studies and other methodological choices are discussed in detail in Chap. 2.
- 3.
The later growth of literary festivals in the United States is arguably due to the popularity of trade fairs and industry and fan conventions, such as BookExpo America (http://www.bookexpoamerica.com/) and BookCon (http://www.thebookcon.com/).
- 4.
The terms ‘centripetal’ and ‘centrifugal’ were initially used in this context by Simone Murray in the paper ‘Live and Local: Digital Networks and Literary Festivals’, presented at the 2015 Australian Literary Studies Convention at University of Wollongong.
- 5.
- 6.
This is discussed in greater detail in the following chapter.
- 7.
Driscoll’s work, published in 2015, pre-dates the extension of the Twitter character limit to 280 characters in late 2017.
- 8.
Detail and justification for each of these methodological choices are provided in the next chapter.
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Weber, M. (2018). Introduction. In: Literary Festivals and Contemporary Book Culture. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71510-0_1
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