Abstract
According to Nicholas Clee, former editor of the Bookseller (the UK’s leading publishing trade magazine), ‘the rise of book clubs has coarsened literary debate’.1 Reflecting on how opinion makers in publishing are now largely dominated by television personalities, Clee’s article considers how book groups work and suggests that the empathy often evoked in readers of book club books is not always compatible with the experience of reading ‘great literature’. Despite his attempted deflection of anticipated criticism in the opening line of his New Statesman article — ‘to criticise book clubs and reading groups is an act of a snob’ — Clee’s subsequent musings evidence such a tendency. The piece functions as a reiteration of the type of ‘difficult’ critical reception that book groups/clubs, and in particular television book clubs, have garnered from the literary establishment (see references to literary critics McCrum and Cusk later in this chapter), with an inherent devaluation of such forms of gendered cultural consumption.
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Notes
1. Nicholas Clee, ‘The Book Business’, New Statesman, 21 March 2005, http://www.newstatesman.com/200503210047 (accessed 5 December 2009).
2. Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (New York: Penguin, 1996), 117. See also Jenny Hartley, Reading Groups (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
4. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (1979; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
5. Traditionally (and enduringly), women are more likely to work part-time and act as the primary care-giver for their children. Indeed, as Sue Thornham explains, it is the ‘family structure which assigns the nurturing role to women … male subjectivity is constructed through separation and difference, whilst female subjectivity is constructed always as a “self-in-relation”’. Thornham, Feminist Theory and Cultural Studies: Stories of Unsettled Relations (London: Arnold, 2000), 107.
6. Jane Missner Barstow, ‘Reading in Groups: Women’s Clubs and College Literature Classes’, Publishing Research Quarterly 18 (2003): 15.
7. Ibid. See also Temma Berg, ‘“What do you Know?”; or, the Question of Reading in Groups and Academic Authority’, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 19, 2 (2008): 123–54.
8. Thornham, Feminist Theory and Cultural Studies, 109–10. See also Christine Geraghty, Women and Soap Opera: a Study of Prime Time Soaps (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991); Verina Glaessner, ‘Gendered Fictions’, in Understanding Television, ed. A Goodwin and G. Whannel (London and New York: Routledge, 1990). Ien Ang’s ‘Feminist Desire and Female Pleasure: on Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance’, in Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World (London: Routledge, 1996) offers a useful further discussion.
9. Donald Lazere, cited in Kathleen Rooney, Reading with Oprah: the Book Club that Changed America (Arkansas: University of Arkansas Press, 2005), 11; and Donald Lazere, ‘Literacy and Mass Media: the Political Implications’, New Literary History 18, 2 (1987): 289.
16. James Curran, ‘Literary Editors, Social Networks and Cultural Tradition’, in Media Organizations in Society, ed. James Curran (London: Arnold, 2000).
24. Wright, ‘Watching the Big Read with Pierre Bourdieu’, 10; citing James F. English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Literary Value (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 3.
26. Chris Lehmann, ‘Oprah’s Book Fatigue: How Fiction’s Best Friend Ran out of Stuff to Read’, 2002, http://www.slate.com/id/2064224/ (accessed 10 April 2002).
27. Katie Allen, ‘Ross Confident of Book Club Future’, thebookseller.com, 2009 at http://www.thebookseller.com/news/ross-confident-book-club-future.html (accessed 4 April 2011).
28. Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Boston: Little Brown, 2000), 173.
30. Robert McCrum, Don’t Judge a Book-Reading Group by its Cover, 24 July 2005, available from http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1534954,00.html (accessed 5 August 2006).
32. Chris Lehmann, ‘Literati: the Oprah Wars’, American Prospect Online, 12 March 2001, available from http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=literati_the_oprah_wars (accessed 4 April 2011).
35. Hilary Radner cited in Clare Hanson, Hysterical Fictions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000); Hilary Radner, ‘Extra-Curricular Activities: Women Writers and the Readerly Text’, in Women’s Writing in Exile, ed. Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 254.
36. Janice Radway, A Feeling for Books: the Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 3–4.
37. Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Culture (1984; Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
41. Rachel Cusk, The Outsider, Guardian, 20 August 2005, available from http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1551867,00.html (accessed 6 October 2006).
42. Mary Ellen Brown, Soap Opera and Women’s Talk (London: Sage, 1994).
43. Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran (London: Fourth Estate, 2004), 315. For a critical account of the marketing of, and the guide to, Nafisi’s memoir, see Catherine Burwell, ‘Reading Lolita in Times of War: Women’s Book Clubs and the Politics of Reception’, Intercultural Education 18, 4 (October, 2007): 286–7; 290–4.
48. See David Smith, ‘Women Are Still a Closed Book to Men: Research Shows Men Mainly Read Works by Other Men’, Observer, 29 May 2005, available from http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1495060,00.html (accessed 29 May 2005). Smith noted that ‘The research [on gender and reading] was carried out by academics Lisa Jardine and Annie Watkins of Queen Mary College, London, to mark the tenth year of the Orange Prize for Fiction, a literary honour whose women-only rule provoked righteous indignation when the competition was founded. They asked 100 academics, critics and writers and found virtually all now supported the prize. But a gender gap remains in what people choose to read, at least among the cultural elite. Four out of five men said the last novel they read was by a man, whereas women were almost as likely to have read a book by a male author as a female.’
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© 2011 Anna Kiernan
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Kiernan, A. (2011). The Growth of Reading Groups as a Feminine Leisure Pursuit: Cultural Democracy or Dumbing Down?. In: Sedo, D.R. (eds) Reading Communities from Salons to Cyberspace. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230308848_7
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