Reading Across Worlds ― Transnational Book Groups and the Reception of Difference

"Moving between the worlds of professional (academic) and lay readers (book groups), between metropolitan and non-metropolitan audiences, between the imagined worlds of fiction and the real worlds of reading, and between the locations of England, Scotland, Canada, the Caribbean, India and Africa, Reading Across Worlds draws otherwise distant readerships into conversation. Combining sustained empirical analysis of reading group conversations with four case studies of classic and contemporary novels: Things Fall Apart, White Teeth, Brick Lane and Small Island, the book pursues what can be gained through a comparative approach to reading and readerships. This is a book about how readers beyond the academy talk about, use and make sense of a literature that publishers and bookstores, the press and professional critics, have variously labelled 'multicultural', 'international', 'diasporic', 'cosmopolitan', 'global', 'postcolonial', 'Third World', or more recently, 'World'. "--