Overview
- Sociological approach fuses audience research with theoretical analysis of contemporary cultural policy initiatives
- Until now the behaviour and experiences of literary festival audiences have been a relatively under-researched aspect of these festivals’ constitution
- Demarcates the cultural and social potential of literary festivals, and the barriers to participation in these equitable spaces
Part of the book series: New Directions in Book History (NDBH)
Access this book
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Other ways to access
Table of contents (7 chapters)
-
Front Matter
-
Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
There has been a proliferation of literary festivals in recent decades, with more than 450 held annually in the UK and Australia alone. These festivals operate as tastemakers shaping cultural consumption; as educational and policy projects; as instantiations, representations, and celebrations of literary communities; and as cultural products in their own right. As such they strongly influence how literary culture is produced, circulates and is experienced by readers in the twenty-first century. This book explores how audiences engage with literary festivals, and analyses these festivals’ relationship to local and digital literary communities, to the creative industries focus of contemporary cultural policy, and to the broader literary field. The relationship between literary festivals and these configuring forces is illustrated with in-depth case studies of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Port Eliot Festival, the Melbourne Writers Festival, the Emerging Writers’Festival, and the Clunes Booktown Festival. Building on interviews with audiences and staff, contextualised by a large-scale online survey of literary festival audiences from around the world, this book investigates these festivals’ social, cultural, commercial, and political operation. In doing so, this book critically orients scholarly investigation of literary festivals with respect to the complex and contested terrain of contemporary book culture.
Reviews
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Millicent Weber is a Lecturer in English at the Australian National University, where she is part of the Reading at the Interface project team. Her work on literary festivals has been published by scholarly journals Continuum and Convergence and literary magazine Overland, and she co-edited the collection Publishing Means Business: Australian Perspectives (2017).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Literary Festivals and Contemporary Book Culture
Authors: Millicent Weber
Series Title: New Directions in Book History
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71510-0
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-71509-4Published: 18 April 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-10066-7Published: 26 January 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-71510-0Published: 09 April 2018
Series ISSN: 2634-6117
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6125
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 272
Number of Illustrations: 11 b/w illustrations
Topics: History of the Book, British and Irish Literature, Media Sociology