Overview

This ground-breaking book explores the phenomenal growth of live literature in the digitalizing 21st century. Wiles asks why literary events appeal and matter to people, and how they can transform the ways in which fiction is received and valued. Readers are immersed in the experience of two contrasting events: a major literary festival and an intimate LGBTQ+ salon. Evocative scenes and observations are interwoven with sharp critical analysis and entertaining conversations with well-known author-performers, reader-audiences, producers, critics, and booksellers. Wiles’s experiential literary ethnography represents an innovative and vital contribution, not just to literary research, but to research into the value of cultural experience across art forms. This book probes intersections between readers and audiences, writers and performers, texts and events, bodies and memories, and curation and reception. It addresses key literary debates from cultural appropriation to diversity in publishing, the effects of social media, and the quest for authenticity. It will engage a broad audience, from academics and producers to writers and audiences.

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9783030503840

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Ellen Wiles is a writer, curator and academic. A Lecturer in Creative Writing at Exeter University, her interdisciplinary research practice combines literary anthropology with creative writing. She is the author of the novel The Invisible Crowd (2017) which was awarded the Victor Turner Prize in ethnographic writing and was a Guardian book of the year, and Saffron Shadows (2015), a book about literary culture in Myanmar. She previously worked as a human rights lawyer.

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