Introduction

Abstract

This is a book about how readers beyond the academy talk about, use and make sense of a literature that publishers and bookstores, the press and professional critics have variously labelled ‘multicultural’, ‘international’, ‘diasporic’, ‘cosmopolitan’, ‘global’, ‘postcolonial’, ‘Third World’ or, more recently, ‘World’. What does this loosely defined genre of writing, which below encompasses work from Chinua Achebe’s early classic Things Fall Apart (1958) to contemporary bestsellers like Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), come to look like when it is no longer reserved for the particular purposes of specialised interpretation and classification? How is meaning production extended by other kinds of reader and other genres of reading? Where is reading to be located if not in seminar rooms, journal articles and books? In the broad spirit of Janice Radway’s (1984) classic account of the everyday readers of romance fiction, what follows is an attempt to understand how reading groups and regular readers decode, denounce and delight in a body of fictional texts that have been largely detached from their daily scenes of general consumption.