Abstract
This article draws on evidence from a qualitative study of working-class readers in order to reflect on the ways in which readers can lay claim to, or can affirm a particular kind of meaningful relationship with, poetic texts. Drawing a lesson from the example of Bridget Fowler’s account of the reading of popular romances, it argues for the need to take seriously the question of the ‘uses’ of literary and cultural products. An account which construes the relationship between readers and literary texts only in terms of the accumulation of cultural capital within the context of a wider symbolic economy risks losing sight of the ways in which popular practices of using and sharing poems can be discordant with both the rationality of symbolic exchange and the wider rationalities which are characteristic of capitalism.
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