Literature and Agency in English Fiction Reading opens up an exciting new area for research at the intersection of literature and anthropology. The first ethnographic study of fiction reading by an anthropologist, it explores a unique literary society celebrating largely forgotten twentieth-century writer Henry Williamson (1895-1977).

Adam Reed explores topics including the extent to which readers' beliefs and practices affect their attitudes toward the material culture of reading and the ways in which books are imbued with greater significance than other objects found in...