The Structure of Literary Taste: Class, Gender and Reading in the UK

Abstract

In Distinction, Bourdieu indicated that literary taste was just as homologous with social class as tastes in music, food or art, even if it received comparatively little attention. Recent scholarship across various nations aiming to test, update and refine Bourdieu’s thesis has generally confirmed a relationship between cultural capital and reading habits, but neglect of Bourdieu’s multidimensional view of class, as well as reliance on rather undifferentiated genre categories, has tended to limit the conclusions. On top of that, gender is often flagged as far more important to the structuring of literary taste than Bourdieu ever supposed. This article seeks to overcome the limitations of extant research and clarify the relationship between class and gender in structuring literary taste, and thus symbolic domination, by exploring data relating to reading preferences in the 2012 British Cohort Study using a Bourdieusian class scheme.