Issue Details: First known date: 2015... 2015 Conceptualizing Audience Experience at the Literary Festival
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'The literary festival has been variously claimed to perform communicative, educative and social functions: it engages the public in literary and political discussions, thereby encouraging participation in ‘the Arts’ and promoting associated civic benefits. The audience of the literary festival, however, is typically represented as a body of populist and popularizing consumers, uncritically engaging with the mass-culture produced and propagated in the festival setting. Researchers have begun to refute such claims, demonstrating that members of festival audiences exhibit a deep and critical engagement with literature; but beyond this demographic-based research, little work has been conducted capable of interrogating audience experience, or mapping the broader culture of festival attendance. The diversity of literary festivals' sizes, locations, histories and stated goals is complemented by the equally broad ranges of programmed events. These events – and the festivals more broadly – are at once literary, theatrical, political and contemporary. As such, conceptions of audience, reader and readership from book history, communication and media studies, and performance and theatre studies, can all contribute to an investigation of the experience of the literary festival audience. This research compares work from these areas of study with individuals' personal accounts of festival experiences extracted from online weblogs to begin to conceptualise the variety and complexity of audience experiences at the literary festival, and outline the rich potential for further study in this area.' (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Continuum : Journal of Media & Cultural Studies vol. 29 no. 1 2015 10903832 2015 periodical issue

    'The year 2014 was a very productive year for Continuum. Our academic community contributed to the journal in many ways, such as guest editorships and transnational collections that introduced, developed and/or expanded knowledge in the area of political landscapes, contemporary media, post-feminist inflections, media space and international perspectives on Australian films and television. The journal also published selected papers from the 2012 CSAA conference on ‘Materialities, Economics, Empiricism and Things’. Over the year we have published a diverse range of papers on a variety of topics, from pop culture and social media to commentary on the neoliberal agenda that is prevalent in our cultural climate. I envisage further debate on this will continue within Cultural Studies and I welcome continued discussion on this topic.' (Editorial introduction)

    2015
    pg. 84-96
Last amended 23 Mar 2017 10:39:20
84-96 Conceptualizing Audience Experience at the Literary Festivalsmall AustLit logo Continuum : Journal of Media & Cultural Studies
X