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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
Yale University
New Haven, CT, USA
David Inglis
Department of Sociology
University of Helsinki
Helsinki, Finland
Philip Smith
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.
Editor
The Cultural
Sociology of Reading
The Meanings of Reading and Books Across
the World
Editor
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
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
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
I am grateful to the editors of the American Journal of Cultural Sociology,

Jeffrey Alexander, Ronald Jacobs, and Philip Smith, and to Jeffrey
Alexander in particular, for the invitation to guest-edit the special issue on
the cultural sociology of reading on which this book is based. My grati-
tude goes also to the editors of the Palgrave Macmillan Cultural Sociology
Series—Jeffrey Alexander, Philip Smith, David Inglis, and Ron Eyerman—
for the opportunity to extend the project of that special issue and turn it
into this edited collection, especially to Jeffrey Alexander for the idea and
encouragement. Elizabeth Graber, sociology commissioning editor at
Palgrave, and Chandralekha Mahamel Raja, book project coordinator for
Springer Nature, provided excellent editorial guidance and support. The
School of Social and Political Science at The University of Edinburgh
funded part of the research that led to my two chapters in this book. I have
benefited enormously from the comments and suggestions about my work
on reading received at conferences and personal exchanges, in particular
from Wendy Griswold, Charles Turner, Mary Holmes, Steve Kemp,
Jonathan Hearn, Nick Prior, Jeffrey Alexander, Rita Felski, Cristina Bruns,
Günter Leypoldt, Álvaro Santana-Acuña, and Thomas Franssen. Jan
Váňa’s critique of my research has helped me refine my arguments. Finally,
a special note of thanks to the contributors to this volume. They engaged
generously and patiently with the revisions and edits I requested while
they faced the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, illness, and pro-
fessional and personal challenges. I am indebted to all of them for stimu-
lating conversations and for sharing their research in this book.
v
About This Book
This edited volume is based on a special issue I guest-edited for the

American Journal of Cultural Sociology (AJCS) on the Cultural Sociology
of Reading (2021). The six articles in that peer-reviewed special issue
appear together with ten original contributions by sociologists and schol-
ars in the humanities from different parts of the world and at different
stages in their careers. Jan Váňa (Chap. 5) and Álvaro Santana-Acuña
(Chap. 10) revised and extended their special issue articles for this book.
Juan Poblete (Chap. 14) translated and extended a piece originally pub-
lished in Spanish. Also included are two articles by me, one published in
2018 in AJCS (“Reading Matters”) and one in Poetics in 2020
(“Book Love”).
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
“The Cultural Sociology of Reading presents compelling and often striking

encounters between the sociological and the literary. Ranging widely across peo-
ples, places, and times, the book is attentive as much to the subjective experience
of reading as it is to the social structures through which the activity is regulated
and ordered. Offering important new insights into how we read and why, the book
constitutes a major contribution to the academic study of the social and cultural
dimensions of reading.”
—Andrew Bennett, Professor of English, University of Bristol
“The eighteen methodologically rich essays in The Cultural Sociology of Reading

explore the ways the practice of reading recalibrates cultural value, subverts politi-
cal meaning, and constitutes the social and affective self in a range of sociological,
literary, and physical contexts. Extending Michel de Certeau’s assertion of the
creativity and unpredictability of the act of reading into various corners of the
globe, the authors engage a plethora of modes of reading (engaged, detached, col-
lective, and clandestine) on the part of diverse demographics of readers (acquisi-
tion editors, zine collectors, professional and lay reviewers) in a variety of
spaces—from bookstores to bedrooms, from well-lit libraries to the shadows of
repressive regimes. The essays occasionally talk past and even against one another
but remain in conversation through the interplay among the volume’s defly rein-
forced through lines: meaning, emotions, and materiality.”
—Joan Judge, 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, FRSC, York University
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Part I The Project of a Cultural Sociology of Reading 17
2 Reading
Matters: Toward a Cultural Sociology of Reading 19
Part II Reading, Books and Texts as Iconic Experience 63
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
7 Easy
to Handle and Travel with: Swahili Booklets and
Transoceanic Reading Experiences in the Indian Ocean
Littoral169
Annachiara Raia
Part III Literary Value and Cultural Intermediaries 209
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
Part IV Bookshops, Libraries, and the Interplay of “High”

and “Popular” Culture 359
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
Part V Modes of Reading, the State and the Public Sphere 451
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
Daniel Allington is Senior Lecturer in Social and Cultural Artificial

Intelligence at King’s College London, UK. With interests focusing on
the social and cultural uses of communications technologies, his works
include The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction (2019, co-authored
with David A. Brewer, Stephen Colclough, Siân Echard, and Zachary
Lesser) and Communicating in English: Talk, Text, Technology (2012, co-
edited with Barbara Mayor). He has written numerous articles using quali-
tative and quantitative methods to study consumer responses to cultural
artifacts such as books, movies, and online videos, and was a pioneer of the
use of discourse analysis to study booktalk (especially in reading groups or
book clubs). Much of his work now focuses on disinformation, hate, and
extremism, although his interest in cultural consumption and cultural
hierarchies is long-standing and predates his academic career.
Omid Azadibougar is Professor of Comparative Literature at Hunan
Normal University, China. He is the author of The Persian Novel: Ideology,
Fiction and Form in the Periphery (2014) and World Literature and
Hedayat’s Poetics of Modernity (Palgrave Macmillan 2020), and a co-editor
of Persian Literature as World Literature (2021).
Andy Bennett is Professor of Cultural Sociology in the School of
Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Griffith University, Australia,
and co-editor of the journal DIY, Alternative Cultures and Society (SAGE).
He has written and edited numerous books including Ageing and Youth
Cultures: Music, Style and Identity, British Progressive Pop 1970–1980, and
Music Scenes (co-edited with Richard A. Peterson). He is a faculty fellow
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
Günter Leypoldt is Professor of American Literature and Culture at

Heidelberg University, Germany, and speaker of the Graduiertenkolleg
Authority and Trust in American Culture and Society at the Heidelberg
Center for American Studies. He is the author of Cultural Authority in the
Age of Whitman: A Transatlantic Perspective (2009), editor of Intellectual
Authority and Literary Culture in the US, 1790–1900 (2013), and co-
editor of American Cultural Icons (2010) and Reading Practices (2015).
His essays appeared in journals such as American Literary History, Modern
Language Quarterly, New Literary History, American Journal of Cultural
Sociology, Critical Quarterly, Contemporary Literature, and Post45.
Eve Yi Lin is fellow researcher in the ERC-funded project “The Politics
of Reading in the People’s Republic of China.” She is also working on her
second Ph.D. at the Institute of Chinese Studies, University of Freiburg,
Germany. Her academic interests include cultural studies, sociology, and
literary criticism. In her current doctoral program, she studies reading
activities in contemporary China, with a special focus on the places of
reading in post-Mao China’s becoming of a consumer society. She also
holds a Ph.D. in English-Language Literature (2019, Nanjing). In
2016–2017 she was a visiting researcher at Duke University, USA.
Anna Michelson is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at Northwestern
University, USA. She studies genre and cultural categories, gender and
sexualities, and meaning-making in cultural professions. Her dissertation
explores community, classification, and cultural change in popular romance
fiction. Her work has been published in Sociological Forum and the
American Journal of Cultural Sociology.
Juan Poblete is Professor of Literature at the University of California,
Santa Cruz, USA. Poblete is the author of Hacia una historia de la lectura
y la pedagogía literaria en América Latina (2019), La Escritura de Pedro
Lemebel (2019), and Literatura chilena del siglo XIX (2003); editor of
New Approaches to Latin American Studies (2018) and Critical Latin
American and Latino Studies (2003); and co-editor of Precarity and
Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Non-citizenship (2021), Piracy and
Intellectual Property in Latin America (2020), Sports and Nationalism in
Latin America (2015), Humor in Latin American Cinema (2015),
Andrés Bello (2009), and Redrawing The Nation: National Identity in
Latin/o American Comics (2009).
xviii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Annachiara Raia, PhD is Assistant Professor of African Literature at the

Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) and African
Studies Centre Leiden (ASCL), the Netherlands. Her specialization is
Swahili Muslim literature, with interests in African intellectual traditions,
oral literature, and manuscript and print cultures in Islamic Africa. She is a
VENI laureate, with a research project on transoceanic Muslim histories in
the twentieth-century Indian Ocean, funded by the Dutch Research
Council (NWO). Interested in the topics of indigenous libraries and cul-
tural heritage, she is currently collaborating on the digitization of Ustadh
Mau’s Swahili Muslim library on Lamu Island, supported by University of
California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Library’s Modern Endangered Archives
Program (MEAP), with funding from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet
Rausing and Peter Baldwin.
Álvaro Santana-Acuña is Associate Professor of Sociology at Whitman
College, USA. He is the author of Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years
of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic (2020) and co-editor of
Sociology of the Arts in Action: New Perspectives on Creation, Production, and
Reception (forthcoming). His next book is entitled The Nation of Triangles.
Joshua B. Silver is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at the University of
Chicago, USA. He is originally from Houston, Texas. Joshua holds an
M.A. in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in
International Relations from Tufts University. He has researched the emer-
gence of peer reviewing at university presses in the early twentieth century
as well as contemporary reading practices in professional settings. Currently,
Joshua continues to research in the sociology of knowledge and culture, in
addition to new research projects in urban and economic sociology. He
serves on the Manuscript Acquisitions Board at the American Journal of
Sociology.
Daniel R. Smith is Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Social Sciences
at Cardiff University, UK. He is the author of Elites, Race & Nationhood:
The Branded Gentry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Comedy & Critique
(2018). His theoretical interests lie in a critique and application of the
moral philosophies in the sociological classics, Durkheim and Simmel, to
empirical settings in contemporary cultural life. This work can be found in
articles published in Theory, Culture & Society and the American Journal
of Cultural Sociology.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xix
María Angélica Thumala Olave is Lecturer in Global Sociology at the

School of Social and Political Science, The University of Edinburgh,
UK. Her work in cultural sociology examines practices of self-understanding
and justification in secular and religious contexts. Her current research is
about the personal and political meanings of books, reading and writing in
the UK and in Latin America’s southern cone. Her work has appeared in
the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Religion, Social Compass,
British Journal of Sociology, and Sociological Review. She is writing a mono-
graph entitled Book Love. Attachment to a Changing Cultural Object.
Eddy U is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis,
USA. His research focuses on society and governance under the Chinese
Communist Party. He is the author of Creating the Intellectual: Chinese
Communism and the Rise of a Classification (2019). The book received
the 2020 Barrington Moore Book Award from the American Sociological
Association.
Jan Váňa is a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow at the Yale Center for
Cultural Sociology and a junior visiting fellow at the Institute for Human
Sciences, Vienna. He was nominated for the SAGE Prize for Innovation/
Excellence for his article on theorizing the social through literary fiction.
His long-term interest is in transgressing the boundaries between social
sciences and literature, which he also pursues by publishing socially
engaged/sociological fiction. In 2022, he received a prestigious Czech
Literary Book Club Award for his novel Kr ̌ehkost (Fragility). The research
topics include the sociology of literature, literary sociology and sociologi-
cal fiction, and sociological theory.
Ash Watson is a sociologist of fiction and technology with the University
of New South Wales (UNSW Sydney) node of the Australian Research
Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and
Society. She researches the current and imagined impacts of emerging
technologies and is particularly interested in DIY community practices
that span the digital-material spectrum. She is the fiction editor of The
Sociological Review and author of the sociological novel Into the Sea
(2020). She makes and edits So Fi Zine (sofizine.com).
Jessica Widner is a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature at the University
of Edinburgh, UK. Her thesis, titled “Dream, Fantasy, and Illness:
Exploring the Carnal Imaginary,” considers carnal hermeneutics and phe-
nomenological approaches to modern and contemporary women’s writ-
ing. Her short fiction has appeared in Extra Teeth, Gutter Magazine, and
Mxogyny, and her first novel is forthcoming from The 87 Press.
List of Figures
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
Title of excerpt: Dua ya kupata kheri nyingi katika maisha

(“Prayer to Obtain Plenty of Happiness in Life”). (Leiden
Special Collections, ISIMUB 8457 F65; ISIMUB 8453 A60.
Photos by the author) 185
Fig. 7.4 a–b. Cover and excerpt from Dua za Waja Wema katika
Qur’an Tukufu (“Prayers for the Benefactors from the Noble
Qur’an”). 1995. 26 pp.; 15 cm (length).Title of excerpt: Dua
ya watu wa peponi (“Prayers for the People in Paradise”).
(Leiden Special Collections, ISIMUB 8457 E11; photos by
the author) 186
Fig. 7.5 a–b. Excerpts from Duas for Haj and Umrah (ca. 1992). 74
pp.; 16 cm (length). (Leiden Special Collections, ISIMUB
8453 D145; photos by the author) 187
Fig. 7.6 a. Text on cover: “Dua Ganjul Arsh: Swaheli Arabic script with
Transliteration. Copy Right Reserved by Sidik Mubarak &
Sons. P. O. Box—83355 Mombasa (Kenya).” (Leiden Special
Collections, ISIMUB 8453 D185. Photos by the author). b.
Text on frontispiece: “Dua Ganjul Arsh: Arabic Script with
English Transliteration. Printed by: Kutub Khana Ishayat-ul-
Islam, 3755, Churiwalan, Delhi-110006 (INDIA). Tel.:
3282740, 3274339 Fax: 91-11-3263567” (ca. 1999) 188
Fig. 7.7 Frontispieces of the Hadithi za mitume kwa watoto wadogo
(“Stories of the Prophets for Children”) with an added title in
Arabic, Qiṣaṣ al-Nabiyīn li al-aṭf āl bi al-luġa al-Swahiliyya.
(Leiden University Library Special Collection. Photo by the
author)194
Fig. 7.8 a. Mombasa: Adam Traders (ca. 1990). 19 pp.; 20 cm.
(Leiden Special Collections, ISIMUB 8453 E49; Photo by the
author). b. Mombasa: Adam Traders (ca. 1998). 53 pp.;
22 cm. (Leiden Special Collections, ISIMUB 8453 B66;
Photo by the author) 195
Fig. 7.9 Vignette addressed to the readers included in Saidi Musa’s
Dua za kupata baraka (1984) 201
Fig. 7.10 Imagined dialogue and pile of books recommended by the
publisher included on the back cover of Mwangaza wa Quran
[s.n.]. Mombasa: Adam Traders (ca. 1975). 23 pp.; 20 cm 203
Fig. 10.1 Frequency of the term magical realism in Spanish, English,
French, and German publications (1920–2008). (Source:
Santana-Acuña 2020, p. 207) 287
Fig. 11.1 Frequency of ratings, IoL and WT 322
Fig. 11.2 Mean review length (in words) by rating, IoL and WT 323
Fig. 11.3 Reviews per calendar year, IoL and WT 324
List of Figures xxiii
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
Table 2.1 Data sources by number and sample of themes covered 22

Table 2.2 Characteristics of the readers 24
Table 6.1 Interview and Mass Observation themes (selected) 148
Table 6.2 Characteristics of interview participants (N:43) 148
Table 6.3 Characteristics of mass correspondents (N: 60) 149
Table 10.1 Reading practices and text intersect among first reviewers
of One Hundred Years of Solitude288
Table 11.1 Reviews of IoL and WT, with mean ratings and lengths
(in words) 321
Table 11.2 Reviews of IoL and WT by rating, with mean lengths
(in words) 323
Table 11.3 Reviews for IoL and WT by year, with mean ratings 325
Table 11.4 Top 25 positive keywords in reviews of IoL and WT
by mean centred rating 326
Table 11.5 Top 25 negative keywords in reviews of IoL and WT by
mean centred rating 327
Table 16.1 Interview respondent demographics 491
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.
M. A. Thumala Olave (*)

School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
e-mail: Angelica.thumala@ed.ac.uk
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
M. A. Thumala Olave (ed.), The Cultural Sociology of Reading,
Cultural Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13227-8_1
2 M. A. THUMALA OLAVE
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.
6 in this volume), zines do not simply signify these commitments. The

pleasures brought about by zines’ analogue, idiosyncratic and fragile sur-
faces bring these commitments to life in the reading experience and gener-
ate care and love for the zines themselves and for each other among the
members of zine communities.
The sensorial and sensual dimensions of the reading process that Watson
and Bennett highlight regarding the surfaces of zines are examined by
Jessica Widner with a focus on touch in Chap. 4 (“Between Self & Other:
Anäis Nin’s Transformative Erotics”). Her starting point is the critique of
the narrow conceptualisations of literary reading as predominantly visual.
Widner proposes a carnal hermeneutics that amplifies and rescues the
“lower” senses of touch, smell and taste through an analysis of the sensory
tapestry and erotic resonances of Anäis Nin’s writing. The established
hierarchy of the senses is altered, she argues, when readers are compelled,
through techniques that create touch-effects, to feel Nin’s characters’
erotic encounters in their own flesh. Widner’s stance is very much in line
with key theoretical positions of the cultural sociology of reading: that
reading involves the fusion of the sensuous and communicative, and that
it is productive to seek to dissolve this dichotomy in the observation of
actual reading practices. The chapter shows how Nin’s narrative tech-
niques afford more immersive, possibly less suspicious or detached, forms
of reading than other, more visually oriented styles even when this as a
matter of degrees rather than of either/or. Arguably, print texts are visual
by definition, unless of course we think of listening to audiobooks as read-
ing or use the term reading as is done in cultural analysis more generally:
we read a film, we read society.
The iconic experience of textual objects based on their formal features
is also central to Jan Váňa’s project of a strong programme sociology of
literature. In Chap. 5, “The Sociological Truth of Fiction: The Aesthetic
Structure of a Novel and the Iconic Experience of Reading”, Váňa argues
that bringing literature and sociology, the fictional and the non-fictional,
into a symmetrical relationship can help sociologists produce a new kind
of knowledge, one that captures and makes explicit the surplus of social
meaning in works of literature. Through a critical engagement with the
iconic turn in cultural sociology (Alexander, Bartmanski, Binder) and
drawing on the structural aesthetics of Jan Mukařovský and the Prague
Linguistic Circle and his earlier empirical analysis of a Czech novel, Váňa
argues in favour of paying attention to the agency and formal properties of
texts as autonomous cultural entities and reading per se as an iconic
1 INTRODUCTION 5
experience with its specific affordances. The iconic experience of reading

involves literary texts technically directing the reader, engaging their
bodily perception and mediating the social-historical background of the
texts’ production and reception. Joining a venerable tradition of dialogue
between literature and sociology, Váňa proposes the literary as generative
of social theory. He suggests that sociologists reconsider how both literary
and social scientific texts (1) theorize, (2) represent and (3) explain social
life in order to mobilise literature for the production of social knowledge.
In his contribution Váňa writes that, by emphasising the reader’s agency
(Thumala Olave, Chap. 2 in this volume) and the affordances of the book
as a material object (Thumala Olave, Chap. 6 in this volume), I neglect the
autonomy and prescriptive capacities of the text itself. He is right that the
literary object constrains the reader through its formal and surface fea-
tures. I contend, however, that agency is not equally distributed, as Latour
or Hennion might say. As Childress has shown, readers are guided by the
text’s “general interpretive directions”, yet they are “free to make their
own meanings” (Childress 2017: 191) within those constraints. In other
words, taking the text’s affordances seriously does not in my view require
the adoption of the principle of symmetry. Although our projects differ in
the emphasis we place on text, reader and object, Váňa and I share in the
goal of capturing the simultaneous interplay between communication and
sensorial experience, their practical fusion in the acts of reading and inter-
acting with textual objects. In Chap. 6 (“Book Love. Attachment to
Reading and Books in the United Kingdom”) I advance this theoretical
objective by focusing on the material basis of the attachment to books
among readers in the United Kingdom. Based on the accounts of people
for whom reading and books are essential in their lives and the objects of
intense affection, I argue that books are loved because they are iconic. The
book is at the same time a type that condenses social values—such as self-
cultivation, imagination, knowledge and joy—and a token of subjective
aesthetic experiences whereby these very goods are generated. Book love,
or attachment to books, emerges from the practical fusion of communica-
tion, aesthetic pleasure and the pre-reflexive grasp of books as sacred goods.
The sacrality of textual objects springs from both their religious content
and their form and materiality in Chap. 7 by Annachiara Raia. In “Easy to
handle and travel with: Swahili Booklets and Transoceanic Reading
Experiences in the Indian Ocean Littoral”, Raia traces the circulation and
reception of printed booklets for Islamic instruction in the Indian Ocean
littoral during a period that included significant reforms in religious
education and the development of markets for affordable religious litera-

ture. Focusing on the design and portability of vernacular religious book-
lets in the Swahili language aimed at wider audiences than the
Arabic-speaking elites and distributed by charities attached to Mosques
and Koranic schools, Raia notes the links between the booklets as objects
and the worldviews and sensibilities they were designed to spread. Raia
contributes to the cultural sociology of reading and books by examining
the iconic experiences and aesthetic immersion afforded by these texts.
Adding a new layer to the empirical study of texts’ iconicity, the chapter
shows how the booklets were put to a combination of didactic, spiritual
and magical uses in processes of objectification (e.g. readers reciting
prayers as prescribed by the text) and subjectification (e.g. booklets carried
in between clothes or eaten for healing). Insofar as these experiences were
shared across space they helped to sustain a cosmopolitan transoceanic
Swahili-speaking Muslim public and their global imaginaries.
Part III is devoted to literary value, processes of valuation and the role
of cultural intermediaries. Cultural brokers are crucial because their read-
ing contributes to shape the normative and affective structures within
which others approach (or avoid) and experience texts.
In Chap. 8 entitled “Spatial Reading: Evaluative Frameworks and the
Making of Literary Authority”, Günter Leypoldt examines the basis on
which lay and professional readers in the Anglophone literary system eval-
uate texts. He traces the historical transformation in the authority of a
kind of reading he calls “spatial reading” and links this to Charles Taylor’s
(1989) modes of evaluation. One of Leypoldt’s arguments is that the
emergence of commercial markets for reading did not involve the replace-
ment of weak for strong modes of evaluation, flat for spatial modes of
reading. Instead, readers and authors shift between modes and weak-
valued leisure reading coexists with a peer-oriented consecration space
that he calls the laureate position in the artistic institutional system. This
position, defined by a high-professional ethos, is occupied by consecrated
authors (today’s prize winners). Using the case of the controversy around
the 2019 Nobel Prize of Literature awarded to Austrian author Peter
Handke, who infamously attended the funeral of the Serbian politician
Slobodan Milošević tried for war crimes in 2002, the chapter discusses the
tension between the civil sphere and the literary artistic field. The argu-
ment is that the former’s principles of decency, freedom and emancipation
clash with both the weak-valued readerly experience (some readers find
1 INTRODUCTION 7
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,
challenged existing aesthetic categories and was commercially successful.

Advancing his previous work on the topic, Santana–Acuña’s argument is
that amongst the reviewers’ individual strategies for sense-making, the
most effective one was that of resignifying the relatively unknown label of
magical realism. Reappropriating, or recycling as Santana–Acuña calls it,
an aesthetic category used only by regional critics and making it circulate
globally, reviewers had by the end of the 1960s both altered the meaning
of the label and set the basis for the normalisation and stabilisation of the
meaning and worth of the novel as innovative. The chapter discusses the
different strategies deployed by reviewers to make sense of the novel and
in the process consolidate the label that would become synonymous with
Latin American literature and culture more generally for many years to
come. One of the chapter’s contributions to the cultural sociology of read-
ing is the attention to the orchestration of different readings by critics
located transnationally and the impact on the consecration of the novel of
the resulting classifications and evaluations.
Daniel Allington’s chapter is entitled “Customer Reviews of ‘highbrow’
Literature: A Comparative Reception Study of The Inheritance of Loss and
The White Tiger” (Chap. 11). The chapter focuses on styles of evaluation
among lay readers and is based on the exploratory quantitative analysis of
English language amazon customer reviews of two novels. He finds that
the evaluative language of these reviews matches that of professional crit-
ics. The convergence could be seen as the success of cultural brokers and
intermediaries in shaping the cognitive schemas with which non-
professional readers evaluate books: the force of the ‘peer-oriented taste’
of a minority group with disproportionate influence discussed by
Leypoldt (see Chap. 8), or the orchestrated resignification performed by
the reviewers traced by Santana–Acuña (see Chap. 10). Yet, the readers’
enjoyment of the novels in Allington’s analysis appears identical to the
enjoyment of the activity of interpreting their formal qualities. The impli-
cations of this are significant for a cultural sociology of reading that pro-
poses we explore the imbrications of pleasure and understanding (see my
Chap. 2). Allington’s findings point to the presence among non-
professional readers of the critical style that prevails amongst professional
critics. This style has been described as detached and weary of pleasure
(Felski 2015). However, the fact that the language of critical distance is
bound in this chapter to notions of care highlights the importance of
attachment in reading. It brings home the point that our understanding of
1 INTRODUCTION 9
books’ allure remains partial, at best, if we assume a clash between analysis

and enjoyment.
In Chap. 12 entitled “A Self Enlarged by Fiction”, Christina Bruns
explores the value of reading fiction for individuals who have experienced
a diminished sense of self as a result of loss, loneliness or exclusion, and
who attribute their newfound strength or ability to overcome pain and
injustice to their encounters with fictional narratives. Bruns conceptualises
reading in an expanded sense that is cognisant of the interpenetration of
the various media that carry narratives today. In this chapter reading
includes interaction with narrative fiction in books but also in film, televi-
sion series and narrative-driven, world-building video games. These audio-
visual forms of reading are especially important amongst the students from
low-income households in New York whose accounts Bruns includes in
the chapter. Drawing on Rita Felski, Paul Ricoeur and the cultural sociol-
ogy of reading, Bruns reminds us of the centrality of actual readers’ experi-
ences for the advancement of literary theory and of the existential import
of narrative fiction (on the latter see also my Chap. 2). The encounter with
narrative is deeply memorable and worthwhile because of its unexpected
transformative effects. Through the emotional force of plots and charac-
ters’ ethos as well as the feelings of belonging in a readerly community
that, as Du Bois writes, shows “no scorn nor condescension” readers
reconceive themselves as more dignified and powerful and join in a more
capacious society.
Part IV is about the modern imaginaries and instantiations of the read-
ing self in two key institutional spaces seeking to shape it: libraries and
bookshops. In these spaces readers participate in and are influenced by the
interplay between official, commercial and popular culture.
In “Reading, Novels and the Ethics of Sociability: Taking Simmel to an
Independent English Bookshop” (Chap. 13), Daniel Smith brings
together Simmel’s ideas about the individual and society in modernity and
cultural sociology’s structural hermeneutics (Alexander and Smith 2003).
He does this in order to reconstruct the vision of sociability of the owners
of an English bookshop and their customers which is displayed in the
meanings they give to the bookshop itself and to novel reading and discus-
sion. Smith’s argument is that these English middle-class readers and
booksellers conceive of their reading lives in ways that match Simmel’s
conceptualisation of the modern self. They turn their experiences into
inner reactions and seek to resolve the tension Simmel saw in modern
societies between the individual’s uniqueness and their replaceability via
an ethics of reading and sociability. The bookshop itself, the interactions

within it and the reading of novels discussed by its customers involve being
with others and knowing others, all individuals in a sea of difference. Many
of the readers of this volume are likely to recognise themselves in the mod-
ernist aesthetic and sensibility shared by this group, at least those who
came of age before the digitalisation of social life and were formed in/with
printed texts. The chapter advances a cultural sociology of reading by
among other things, connecting subjective experiences of reading and
socialising around books to cultural codes that continue to shape commit-
ments to plurality, contingency, inter-dependence, self-fashioning and
efforts at understanding the world and being understood by others.
Chapter 14 is by Juan Poblete and is entitled “The Value of Books and
Reading as Social Practices in Nineteenth Century Chile: The Perspectives
of Government and Citizens”. Here sociability comes to the fore in the
context of nation-building and the development of reading cultures.
Poblete describes the interplay between the official culture promoted by
the state through the first public libraries set up to complement public
instruction in the formation of citizens (especially amongst the urban
poor) and the unofficial, ‘popular’ culture of the liras populares (akin to
penny leaflets), cheap printed sheets of poetry that drew from rural oral
traditions and covered urban themes such as crime or politics, and that
were read collectively and individually. Like in other countries that imple-
mented modernisation policies during the nineteenth century, the libraries
sought to moralise and ‘improve’ the population by changing sociability
practices and inculcating work, saving and education habits that suited the
state’s project for development. Unlike the libraries, which failed to draw
in workers or artisans, the liras populares were a strong feature of urban life
during the period. However, the story is not that of simple rejection of the
official, consecrated reading material available in libraries. As Jonathan
Rose (2001) has shown for the United Kingdom, workers rarely abide by
the prescriptions about genres or types of works they are ‘supposed’ to be
reading according to their social position, but make classical and other
‘difficult’ texts their own. The later expansion of reading publics and book
markets in Chile embraced all forms of culture and relied on the agency of
readers already visible during the nineteenth century.
Eve Lin’s contribution in Chap. 15, “Between Avant-Garde and Kitsch:
Intellectual Bookstores and post-Mao China’s Reading Culture”, exam-
ines how two bookshops in contemporary China, All-Sages in Beijing and
Librairie Avant-Garde in Nanjing, straddle the ideals of members of the
1 INTRODUCTION 11
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
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
apparatus. It is all too well for readers in democratic societies to embrace

the pleasures of non-literary texts that demand little from their readers
when this is part of a broader, much more complex cultural diet that does
not stifle independent thought or political dissent. Based on his survey of
the supply of reading material in Iran and the decline in reading rates of all
kinds, but especially of literature (the best-selling genres are middlebrow
novels, romance, text-books and self-help), Azadibougar argues that the
possibilities for the disruption of the regime’s hegemonic political dis-
course are at present severely diminished. Of course, this is not the only
possible outcome of a weak or manipulated reading market nor of a repres-
sive political system. For example, the accounts about dissident intellectual
life in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (e.g. Lungina 2014; von
Zitzewitz 2020), and the chapters about China in this book, including
those by Eddy U (Chap. 17) and Lena Henningsen (Chap. 19), show that
readers retain important degrees of autonomy, reflexivity and creativity in
such contexts. In this chapter there is no discussion of clandestine or
underground reading or of the impact of romance reading by women. Yet
Azidibougar’s critique of the affordances of the most popular texts in Iran
and of what he calls ‘literal reading’ as a reading modality that precludes
defamiliarization and interpretation is important. It gives a sense of
renewed urgency to the line that opens De Certau’s The practice of
Everyday Life: “To arrest the meanings of words, once and for all, that is
what Terror wants” (JF Lyotard Rudiments païens in Bennett 1995:157).
De Certau writes that “The use made of the book by privileged readers
constitutes it as a secret of which they are the ‘true’ interpreters. It inter-
poses a frontier between the text and its readers that can be crossed only if
one has a passport delivered by these official interpreters who transform
their own reading (which is also a legitimate one) into an orthodox ‘liter-
ality’ that makes other (equally legitimate) readings either heretical (not
‘in conformity’ with the meaning of the text) or ‘insignificant’ (to be for-
gotten)” (In Bennett 1995:157). The opposite of passivity is politicisa-
tion. De Certau’s attack is aimed at cultural elitism but can also be applied
to political elites seeking to forcefully impose literal readings.
Chapter 17 by Eddy U “Clandestine Reading Practice in the Chinese
Cultural Revolution” examines reading in contexts of repressive rule and
surveillance. On the basis of the memoirs of prosecuted writers of the time
of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), U asks why these writers risked
punishments such as interrogations, beatings, political re-education or
labour sentences by continuing to read forbidden texts, including fiction,
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
References
Alexander, J. and Smith, P. (2003) The strong program in cultural sociology: ele-
ments of a structural hermeneutics. In J. Alexander The Meanings of Social
Life: A Cultural Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 11–26.
Alexander, J. (2008) “Iconic experience in art and life: Surface/depth beginning
with Giacometti’s Standing Woman.” Theory, culture & society 25 (5): 1–19.
Bennett, A. (ed). (1995) Readers and Reading. London and New York: Longman.
Childress, C. (2017) Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception
of a Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Felski, R. (2015). The Limits of Critique. Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press.
Gomart, E., and A. Hennion. (1999) “A sociology of attachment: music amateurs,
drug users.” The sociological review 47(1): 220–247.
Jacobs, R.N. (2012) Entertainment media and the aesthetic public sphere. In
Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology, ed. J. Alexander, R. Jacobs, and
P. Smith, 318–342. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lungina, L. (2014) Word for Word: A Translator’s Memoir of Literature, Politics,
and Survival in Soviet Russia. ABRAMS.
Rose, J. (2001) The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. New Haven
and London: Yale University Press.
Taylor, C. (1989) Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thumala Olave, M. A. (2018) Reading Matters. Towards a Cultural Sociology of
Reading. American Journal of Cultural Sociology 63: 417–454.
Thumala Olave, M. A. (2020) Book Love. A Cultural Sociological Interpretation
of the Attachment to Books. Poetics 81: 1–11.
Thumala Olave, M.A. (2021) Exploring the sacrality of reading as a social practice.
Editorial Special Issue The Cultural Sociology of Reading. American Journal of
Cultural Sociology 9: 99–114.
Von Zitzewitz, J. (2020) The Culture of Samizdat: Literature and Underground
Networks in the Late Soviet Union. Bloomsbury Publishing.
PART I
The Project of a Cultural Sociology of

Reading
CHAPTER 2
Reading Matters: Toward a Cultural

Sociology of Reading
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
Originally published in the American Journal of Cultural Sociology 2018 (6):

417–454. Reproduced with permission from Springer Nature.
M. A. Thumala Olave (*)

School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
e-mail: Angelica.thumala@ed.ac.uk
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 19

Switzerland AG 2022
M. A. Thumala Olave (ed.), The Cultural Sociology of Reading,
Cultural Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13227-8_2
classic and contemporary fictional narratives. What these stories have in

common and what makes the practice of reading them so attractive is that
they produce experiences of intense self-loss or “enchantment.”
The kind of enchanted reading experiences and their subjective value,
which the data reveal, cannot be accommodated within the existing con-
ceptual apparatus used by the sociology of reading. A cultural sociology of
reading is needed in order to capture what is going on when women read
fiction in intensive ways and use their reading to orient and shape their lives.
The chapter makes two contributions. Empirically, it contributes to the
understanding of the experiences of reading fiction and the impact they
have upon the lives of intensive women readers and those who identify
strongly with the label of “reader.” While it is known that women read
more and read more fiction, the subjective significance and the existential
impact of this reading have yet to be explored within sociology.
Theoretically, the chapter begins to develop a cultural sociology of reading
that brings meaning to the fore and is sensitive to the affective attach-
ments, reflections, and valuations that occur when people engage with
imaginative stories. A cultural sociology of reading is necessary because
sociology has neglected meaning by studying reading mostly as a reflec-
tion of or an input to the social structure. The sociology of reading has
operated mostly as a sociology of culture rather than as a cultural sociology
(Alexander and Smith 2003). Concerns with the links between literacy
and social mobility or between tastes and social class—two main research
lines pursued by sociologists of reading—preclude attentive explorations
of the meanings and emotions attached to the subjective experiences of
the reader. A cultural sociology of reading involves placing the experience
and agency of readers at the center of the analysis. It also involves acknowl-
edging that reading is situated and framed but not determined. Social
actors, irrespective of their social position, can and do leave their situations
when they read and because they read. Through the pleasures offered by
fiction, readers can both orient and care for themselves as well as relate to
others. Reading fiction contributes to the search for the meaning of life
and to making life liveable through the meanings encountered in texts and
through the bodily practice of reading itself.
A cultural sociology of reading is located outside the binary oppositions
between escapism and confrontation, indoctrination and resistance, part
of the ideology critique influential both in sociology and in cultural stud-
ies. Reading is certainly used to “escape” to alternative, fictional scenarios,
as a means to relax and to have fun. However, it is also clear that
2 READING MATTERS: TOWARD A CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY OF READING 21
enchantment does not entail escapism, understood as alienation, false con-

sciousness, or disempowerment. What the data shows is that reading and
its pleasures help manage physical and emotional pain, understand the self
and others, and engage with the world. Rather than an escape from life,
reading fiction is a support to it.
Section 2 presents the scope of the research and describes the three
sources of data used. Section 3 consists of a review of existing sociological
research on reading that justifies the need for a cultural sociology of read-
ing. Section 4, the core of the chapter, begins to develop a cultural sociol-
ogy of reading. It offers conceptual propositions that emerge from and
help to interpret the findings. This section offers first a schematic discus-
sion of key findings from the combined analysis of the three data sets with
illustrations from the data and then a close look at three cases of intensive
readers. Section 5 offers concluding remarks.
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
Table 2.1 Data sources by number and sample of themes covered

Source of data Number Sample of themes covereda
Interviews 13 women Definitions of and identification with the

label of “reader”
Reasons for reading
Significance of reading as a practice and of
particular texts
Number of titles read per month/year
Preferred genres and authors
A typical reading session
Changes in reading practices over time
Material aspects of the book/e-book
Do books have emotional value?
Where books are obtained and stored
Group discussions 3 (2 women’s Same as for interviews with some adaptations
groups)
Mass observation 60 women Types of reading material at home
responses Book genres
Where books are obtained and stored
How they are organized
Ownership and use
Do books have emotional value?
A full list of questions and codes for analysis is available from the author
a
residence—following the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation—educa-

tion level, and employment.
The third set of data consists of 60 responses by women to Mass
Observation (M-O) questions about reading and books (corresponding to
the Spring of 1993 and the Winter of 2009).1 M-O is a project started in
1937 as a “people’s anthropology” of life in Great Britain (Calder and
Sheridan 1984). Volunteers, known as “M-O correspondents,” write in
response to sets of questions called “directives.” The two directives chosen
for analysis asked specifically about reading books and are part of the
newer material collected by the project since 1981.2 The responses were
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.
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).
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
Table 2.2 Characteristics of the readers

Age Education level Occupation
range
Interviewees 20s–50s 9/13 degree or Technical and professional

higher
2/13 secondary
school
2/13 primary
school
Members group 30s–40s 4/8 degree Professional, services
I 4/8 no degree
Members group 60s 3/10 degree Retired from professional and clerical
II 7/10 secondary work
school
Mass observers 20s–80s NA Work or retired from professional and
technical
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.
3 The Neglect of Subjective Experience

and Meaning-Making in the Sociology of Reading
Sociology has paid little attention to why reading matters to people. In

spite of the discipline’s core concern with the dynamics of change in mod-
ern societies, in particular the shifts away from traditional social attach-
ments, and the transformations in reflexivity, the practice of reading as a
subjective meaning-making device remains underexamined. The existing
sociological work on reading focuses primarily on the links between liter-
acy and social context, on the one hand, and between tastes and social
class, on the other. As a shorthand, the first is labeled the “social practice
approach” (following Griswold et al.’s 2005 classification) and the second
the “Bourdieusian approach.”5
3.1 The “social practice” Approach to Reading

As Griswold et al. (2005) report, during the 1990s the emphasis in the
study of reading shifted away from literacy, understood as a set of generic
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.
capacities linked to social development,6 toward reading understood as a

set of locally situated and varied practices. The new concern was with the
specific circumstances under which people read, once they have acquired
the capacity to do so, and the kinds of problems that reading helps to solve.
One of the best-known examples of the practice approach is Barton and
Hamilton’s (1998) rich study of everyday literacy practices (reading and
writing as well as numeracy) in Lancaster, England. Their ethnographic
work stresses the wide diversity of uses of literacy in the various domains
of people’s lives, including health, parenting, community organizing,
budgeting, and paying bills. The comprehensive account of the uses of
reading, of “what people do with literacy” (3), includes people making
sense of themselves and the world through their reading, for example, of
the press. However, these accounts are comparatively few and brief vis-à-
vis the many other uses of reading, writing, and numeracy that must be
highlighted in a complete study of one community. More importantly, the
aim of this and other work on local literacies, such as that of Brian Street
(1984, 1993), is to draw attention to the “vernacular” and “hidden” (as
opposed to “dominant”) literacies, sharing their critical outlook and
emancipatory purposes with cultural studies.
Against the perceived negative consequences of reading fiction, such as
political disengagement or manipulation (inspired by Horkheimer and
Adorno’s critique of the cultural industries), cultural studies emphasizes
the various forms of resistance displayed in popular culture and among
subcultures. In Radway’s (1991) influential psychoanalytic interpretation
of romance reading by women in the USA, romance reading is a response
to the dissatisfactions generated by heterosexual marriage. When appro-
priating the representations of ideal romance offered in the texts, women
are responding to the often-unconscious frustrations imposed by the insti-
tution of marriage. Although Radway provides a sophisticated analysis of
the motivations for and uses of reading, in the end she is careful to leave
unanswered the question of agency. Does reading romance reproduce
patriarchal power or does it allow for strength and independence?
Acknowledging the multiple potential interpretations of texts by readers,
Radway argues for the existence of regular patterns of meaning, which are
determined by women’s social and material situations. Also within a psy-
choanalytic approach, Felman (1993) offers a close reading of autobio-
graphical texts by women and various texts by men to propose an
6
See Graff (1979) for the classic critique of this idea and a revised version in Graff (2010).
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The Cultural Sociology of Reading: The

Meanings of Reading and Books

Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural

The Economics of Books and Reading Samuel Cameron

Reading Books and Prints as Cultural Objects 1st

The Psychology of Reading: Insights from Chinese

eTextbook 978-0073513591 The Art of Critical Reading

Reading Still Matters: What the Research Reveals about

The Fiery Test of Critique: A Reading of Kant's

The Hub: A Place for Reading and Writing

I am grateful to the editors of the American Journal of Cultural Sociology,

This edited volume is based on a special issue I guest-edited for the

“The Cultural Sociology of Reading presents compelling and often striking

“The eighteen methodologically rich essays in The Cultural Sociology of Reading

Part I The Project of a Cultural Sociology of Reading 17

Part II Reading, Books and Texts as Iconic Experience 63

Part III Literary Value and Cultural Intermediaries 209

Part IV Bookshops, Libraries, and the Interplay of “High”

Part V Modes of Reading, the State and the Public Sphere 451

Daniel Allington is Senior Lecturer in Social and Cultural Artificial

Günter Leypoldt is Professor of American Literature and Culture at

Annachiara Raia, PhD is Assistant Professor of African Literature at the

María Angélica Thumala Olave is Lecturer in Global Sociology at the

Title of excerpt: Dua ya kupata kheri nyingi katika maisha

Table 2.1 Data sources by number and sample of themes covered 22

María Angélica Thumala Olave

M. A. Thumala Olave (*)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

6 in this volume), zines do not simply signify these commitments. The

experience with its specific affordances. The iconic experience of reading

education and the development of markets for affordable religious litera-

challenged existing aesthetic categories and was commercially successful.

books’ allure remains partial, at best, if we assume a clash between analysis

an ethics of reading and sociability. The bookshop itself, the interactions

apparatus. It is all too well for readers in democratic societies to embrace

The Project of a Cultural Sociology of

Reading Matters: Toward a Cultural

María Angélica Thumala Olave

Originally published in the American Journal of Cultural Sociology 2018 (6):

M. A. Thumala Olave (*)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 19

classic and contemporary fictional narratives. What these stories have in

enchantment does not entail escapism, understood as alienation, false con-

Table 2.1 Data sources by number and sample of themes covered

Interviews 13 women Definitions of and identification with the

residence—following the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation—educa-

Table 2.2 Characteristics of the readers

Interviewees 20s–50s 9/13 degree or Technical and professional

3 The Neglect of Subjective Experience

Sociology has paid little attention to why reading matters to people. In

3.1 The “social practice” Approach to Reading

capacities linked to social development,6 toward reading understood as a

Section 2. Information about the Mission of

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Part I The Project of a Cultural Sociology of Reading 17

Part II Reading, Books and Texts as Iconic Experience 63

Part III Literary Value and Cultural Intermediaries 209

Part IV Bookshops, Libraries, and the Interplay of “High”

Part V Modes of Reading, the State and the Public Sphere 451

Table 2.1 Data sources by number and sample of themes covered 22