The Growth of Reading Groups as a Feminine Leisure Pursuit: Cultural Democracy or Dumbing Down?

Abstract

According to Nicholas Clee, former editor of the Bookseller (the UK’s leading publishing trade magazine), ‘the rise of book clubs has coarsened literary debate’.1 Reflecting on how opinion makers in publishing are now largely dominated by television personalities, Clee’s article considers how book groups work and suggests that the empathy often evoked in readers of book club books is not always compatible with the experience of reading ‘great literature’. Despite his attempted deflection of anticipated criticism in the opening line of his New Statesman article — ‘to criticise book clubs and reading groups is an act of a snob’ — Clee’s subsequent musings evidence such a tendency. The piece functions as a reiteration of the type of ‘difficult’ critical reception that book groups/clubs, and in particular television book clubs, have garnered from the literary establishment (see references to literary critics McCrum and Cusk later in this chapter), with an inherent devaluation of such forms of gendered cultural consumption.KeywordsCultural CapitalFeminist TheoryReading GroupBook TradeBook ClubThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.