Despite the recent explosion of literary festivals, there is little extant research that explores these festivalsâ significance within the context of contemporary book culture. What do they offer and what do they mean to the people who attend them? How are they situated within local and digital literary ecologies? What impact might they have in these spaces, and what ethical questions does this raise for organisers and public- and private-sector sponsors?
These questions resonate with the interests of political, cultural, and commercial stakeholders, but their complexity, and indeed their significance to these important players within the still hierarchical and heavily contested literary field, mean that they demand rigorous, scholarly investigation beyond the scope of policy-based impact studies or market research. This book addresses these questions in a manner which is theoretically nuanced while still empirical; which is qualitative, supplementing existing quantitative studies of literary festival audiences; which is broad in scope, incorporating numerous case studies; and which, in addressing these questions, critically orients scholarly investigation of literary festivals with respect to the political, technological, and social forces that structure and influence the contemporary literary field.
Researching literary festivals was always going to be a profoundly personal experience for me. As a reader, I have relished the opportunity to spend several years thinking, talking, and writing about contemporary literary festivals. I have always enjoyed interacting with these spaces and with other readers, and to do so in a more critical and self-aware mode has been extremely rewarding. As a researcher influenced by cultural studies, I recognise the importance of my personal situation in guiding the construction of this projectâand I believe it is ethically and methodologically responsible to introduce this perspective at the outset.
In August 2013, shortly after beginning my research on literary festivals audiences, I attended the Melbourne Writers Festival . I went to sessions featuring a number of great speakers, including the political cartoonist Judy Horacek, the crime writer Kerry Greenwood, the writer and illustrator Shaun Tan, and many other local and international writers, thinkers, and illustrators.
The session from this particular festival which I remember most vividly was called âCan Writing Affect Political Change?â, chaired by Jeremy Harding .1 Amanda Lohreyâs keynote address, delivered in her absence by Alison Croggon , argued that novels have symbolic power as acts of resistance against repression, but that they cannot be active political interventions. They respond to events and perhaps even transform and prepare people, but do not directly reshape political geographies.
The other speaker at this event was the Dominican-American novelist Junot Diaz , who disagreed with Lohreyâs perspective on the basis that political agency and political activity occur across public, private, and personal spaces. He argued that the political is not necessarily visible, nor restricted to public actions, and that people cannot credibly say that art does not interface with peopleâs internal, private spaces in a political manner. The way this response was framed was nuanced. It acknowledged and gave primacy to the work that writing does in marginalised and subaltern spaces. It pointed to the generalisations, and the missing voices of women and people of colour, in the opinions quoted and foregrounded in the keynote (despite the fact that the keynote speaker was a woman), and it invited a response from the audience that was more complex and more responsible in acknowledging both the limitations and the potential of each individualâs subjectivity.
This session moved on to a lengthy question-and-answer session. Unsurprisingly, many members of the audience had points they wanted to contribute, and many of them spoke from personal experience. They spoke about the ways in which literature was empowering and enfranchising to individuals and to communities, the strength and political potential of representation, and the important work that art does in making possibilities, and histories, visible and well articulated. In Junot Diazâs words, âWhen we read, we open a space of deliberation where we encounter our human selves. And Iâm just looking to create spaces where people can be a little more human, and what that leads to, weâll see.â People spoke about the possible repressive nature of writing, particularly from a historical perspective, and the way in which it has been used as a means of propaganda and control. And people also voiced concerns about the value of the kind of conversation that they were having: whether it would be better to simply be going out and reading and engaging in politics, rather than sitting in a room discussing whether or not this was something that happened.
Attending this session was formative for the way in which I think and write about literary festivals. This session resonated strongly with much of the scholarly literature about contemporary print culture that I had been reading, and touched on many of the issues I explore and arguments I make in this volume. It emphasised the agency and the active engagement of the reader, and the huge significance that this kind of engagement can have for individuals. It spoke to the ability for writing, writers, and writing communities to support and facilitate that kind of engagement, but also to the difficulties that might be introduced by political and commercial interventions into literary spaces. It raised the perceived preoccupations with the impotence and the self-indulgent nature of public discourse that pervade many criticisms of literary festivals, and which proved to be subtly, often subversively, present in many of the interviews that I would go on to conduct with literary festival audience members.
I was also intrigued by the ways in which audience members framed their contributions and questions . Most were polite, respectful, and slightly hesitant, but some were more aggressive or more self-assured. One particularly memorable audience member spoke with ill-concealed xenophobia of the fact that he needed to âstand up for Amandaâ as âone of usâ, and of the fact that âyou peopleâ (Harding and Diaz), as âtwo people from outside Australiaâ, could not appreciate Amanda Lohreyâs perspective. Later, watching this part of the session on the recording, I was struck by how politely Croggan and Diaz responded and how quickly the conversation moved on. Sitting in the audience was a very different experience, as I was surrounded by appalled people whispering and trying to see the speaker. When, about 15 minutes later, another audience member expressed his disagreement with this earlier personâs perspective and denounced it as coming from âa generation thatâs not engaging with the reality of Australian society todayâ, I took part in a collective sigh of relief that someone had pointed out that the audience members did not all, just by virtue of being Australians, necessarily share in those exclusionary nationalistic sentiments.
Again, these experiences of the audienceâand my own personal experience, as an audience memberâinfluence the direction of this research. My experience affirmed the entity of the collective that, as an audience, I belonged to, but also emphasised the complexly different opinions and interpretations that different audience members would necessarily have. Attending this particular session also focused my attention on the emotional and the social dimensions of my experience, particularly as a member of a live audience. This formed an interesting contrast with my later experience of re-watching the recording of the same session.
These concepts are crucial to the way literary festivals operate within contemporary literary culture. Theorising and researching the experiences of individual audience members offers a better understanding of why and how people interact with these spaces. Analysing the interplay between online and onsite engagement with literary culture facilitates a better understanding of the importance of live engagement to contemporary readers and writers, and demands that scholars rethink the binary oppositions between print and digital, and between live and mediated, that too frequently constrain enquiry into these spaces. Situating discussion of literary festivals within contemporary political dialogues illuminates some of the more problematic, exclusionary aspects of contemporary literary culture, while simultaneously reaffirming the potential social, cultural, and economic value that it can offer to individuals, communities, towns, and political causes.
Contemporary Literary Festivals: Brief Context and History
Literary festivals proliferated over the last decades of the twentieth century. Cities, villages, libraries, community centres, bookshops, magazines, non-profit organisations, online communities, even Twitter, now organise their own festivals. Numbers vary, but there are demonstrably over 450 literary festivals held annually across the English-speaking world (Literary Festivals 2014).2
Barring one or two sporadic exceptions, the earliest and longest-running of the contemporary literary festivals is the Cheltenham Literary Festival , which began in 1949 (Cheltenham Festivals 2016). A small number of other literary festivals were established in the 1960s and 1970s, notably Adelaide Writersâ Week , which was founded along with the Adelaide Festival of Arts in 1960 (Adelaide Festival of Arts n.d.), but it was not until the 1980s and the 1990s that such festivals began to proliferate. The International Festival of Authors , based in Toronto, emerged in 1986 out of a series of readings that had been running since the mid-1970s (âInternational Festival of Authorsâ 2015); the Edinburgh International Book Festival has been running since 1983 (Edinburgh International Book Festival 2014); th...