Binding: Paperback
Description: Ian Mc Ewan once said When women stop reading the novel will be dead. This book explains how precious fiction is to contemporary British women readers and how they draw on it to tell the stories of their lives. Female readers are key to the future of fiction and - - as parents teachers and librarians - - the glue for a literate society. Women treasure the chance to read alone but have also gregariously shared reading experiences and memories with mothers daughters grandchildren and female friends. For so many reading novels and short stories enables them to escape and to spread their wings intellectually and emotionally. This book written by an experienced teacher scholar of women's writing and literature festival director draws on over 500 interviews with and questionnaires from women readers and writers. It describes how where and when British women read fiction and examines why stories and writers influence the way female readers understand and shape their own life stories. Taylor explores why women are the main buyers and readers of fiction members of book clubs attendees at literary festivals and organisers of days out to fictional sites and writers homes. The book analyses the special appeal and changing readership of the genres of romance erotica and crime. It also illuminates the reasons for British women's abiding love of two favourite novels Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre. Taylor offers a cornucopia of witty and wise women's voices of both readers themselves and also writers such as Hilary Mantel Helen Dunmore Katie Fforde and Sarah Dunant. The book helps us understand why - - in Jackie Kay's words - - 'our lives are mapped by books.'
Title: Why Women Read Fiction The Stories Of Our Lives
Author(s): Taylor Helen (Emeritus Professor Of English Emeritus Professor Of English University Of Exeter)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Barcode: 9780198827696
Pages: 304 Pages, 30 Half Tone Illustrations
Publication Date: 4/27/2022
Category: Gender Studies: Women