Expanding “Henry”: Fiction reading and its artifacts in a British literary society

Abstract

Members of the Henry Williamson Society talk of what fiction reading does for them. Their experience of literature is connected to their appreciation of the author Henry Williamson as a central and mythic figure. How “Henry” is composed determines the kind of actors readers can be and also explains the capacities assigned to the Williamson artifacts—books and land—that they identify. In this article, I explore a theory of reading as relationship and examine the role of literature as an instrument of social agency. I focus on the relationships that society members draw out around solitary acts of reading and literary society activities, including the way they assign causation within a matrix of relations. As well as examining their culture of owning, reading, and displaying books, I investigate society members' appreciation of geographical location. The article aims to contribute to the development of anthropological theories of literature.