Memories of Fiction: An Oral History of Readers' Life Stories

This project aims to find out how reading shapes our lives. What do we remember about the books we have read (as a child, on the tube, on holiday), and why? Reading is often experienced as a private activity, which takes place in silence, on one's own. Yet reading groups have grown immensely in popularity over the past two decades, bringing reading experiences into the public domain. In what ways do we share our memories of reading?

This project is interested in both individual and collective memories of reading fiction. It will firstly set up an oral history archive of interviews with members of local reading groups, to explore memories as described in individual life stories. In doing so, the project will provide a new kind of resource - differing from the numerous interviews carried out with authors, from oral history interviews (for the 'Authors' Lives' archive at the British Library) to radio and other interviews by journalists, literary critics, fans and other readers. By turning to readers themselves, the project will make available new material enabling insights into memories of fiction and life stories. How are memories of books associated with particular experiences and emotions? How do readers make use of fiction in their life stories?

One thing that is interesting about reading groups is that they turn written text into group talk, turning back the clock from literacy to orality, from the act of the individual reading to talking, from the solitary experience to the social. Scholars of book history often note how reading became an increasingly private activity over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, due in part to the rise in literacy, but book groups interestingly highlight the social potential of reading. Thus the project is concerned not only with individual memories but also with how memories of fiction are exchanged with others. After working with individual interviewees, the project researchers will thus work in the reading groups. Having identified clusters of books recalled across a number of interviews, these books, and memories of them, will then be discussed in groups. We are interested in how these shared memories compare to individual recollections. In what ways can group talk change how we remember fiction?

The project will challenge assumptions that reading is merely a private, personal activity. It will consider how reading and storying the self may be related, establishing how individual memories can be shared and related to a wider social and historical context.

The project's findings will be of interest not only to individual academics but to reading groups themselves. We will disseminate the research through academic publications and also through public talks, a learning resource and website. As well as providing access to the interviews, the website will provide information and other material including the learning resource, which will outline our methodology for other reading groups to take up and develop, and a forum through which these groups can respond and feed back into the project. The project will thereby provide a hub of activity to foster wider discussions and ongoing reflection about how we remember fiction.

The project's activities will most immediately benefit members of local reading groups. By interviewing readers in the process of research the project involves these members in the project from the outset. Through this process we expect to stimulate interest in the project and to encourage readers to reflect in new ways on their reading experiences and memories. By then further encouraging reflection through the reading group discussions, and through the public talks in libraries, we expect to enhance social exchange and encourage book group members - and wider audiences - to reflect on their memories of reading and on its social potential.

The availability of the archive not only at the University of Roehampton but also Wandsworth library will allow participants to readily access their own materials while also being open to the wider public. To encourage wider interest in the project we plan to publicise it in local media and beyond. As well as the reading group discussions, and the library talks, the seminar series and parts of the conference will also be open to the public and podcasts made available. Publicity is not simply for the purpose of disseminating our research, however, but also to encourage participation. By providing a learning resource through the project website, to enable other reading groups to take up (and potentially develop) our methodology and to feed back into the website, we will both broaden out beyond the local district to reading groups nationally and internationally, and also further contribute to a two-way process of exchange between researchers and readers.

For library users and the wider community, we expect the project's activities to generate interest in reading groups, possibly increasing membership and stimulating new groups, but also to change their character by introducing the question of memory. The benefits of reading groups to many participants are increasingly well established. The Reading Agency claims, for example, that reading group membership supports learning, promotes cultural understanding, and equalizes access to cultural activity (see http://readingagency.org.uk/about/Programme_for_reading_groups.pdf).

Our research can also be of benefit to libraries, which are often key to the formation and support of reading groups, by enabling libraries to better understand their users and how they engage with reading in social as well as individual contexts. In particular, in the current climate of threat to public libraries, we want our work to highlight and valorize them as unique public/private spaces for affording social exchange and shared experiences (of memories, especially, but not exclusively, for our purposes). This aspect of the project will therefore be highlighted through the website and publicity, and our findings made available to libraries and related agencies for their own use in potentially supporting their case against cuts.

The current threats to libraries increase the urgency of this bid. We need to carry out this project now as these could be the dying moments of library-based reading groups. In the Wandsworth district alone, there is at least one group that can no longer meet in the library due to closures. Such groups may go on meeting, but in each others' houses. The social spaces of social exchange are changing, if not disappearing, and the affects need to be understood. The internet provides new channels for readers and groups or communities to form (eg. electronic book clubs and blogs). By inviting contributions back into the project (as mentioned above and in Pathways to Impact), the project website may help to understand and even to mitigate the loss of libraries for some, by providing an alternative space as a hub of activity for social exchange and discussion.